DARK EMU - Bruce Pascoe interview with Fran Kelley (with comment)

'Dark Emu' challenges modern re-tellings of early Aboriginal history

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Wednesday 2 April 2014 8:41AM (view full episode)

The centuries-old notion that pre-European Aboriginal people were hunter-gatherers who did not farm the land they occupied is under further challenge. A new book by award winning indigenous author Bruce Pascoe draws on the diaries of early explorers to provide evidence that Aboriginal people across the continent were sowing, harvesting, irrigating and storing. He argues that systems of food production and land management have been blatantly understated in modern re-tellings of early Aboriginal history.

[My transcript...mb]

Fran Kelley:  At school, the little that a lot of us did learn about the First Australians is that they were hunter-gatherers, nomads, people who moved around the landscape. But that centuries-old notion that the First Australians didn’t farm the land they occupied is now being challenged by a growing body of work from historians [It has actually been challenged in academia since at least 1995, with Robert  Lawlor’s  Voices of the First Day, more recently in Steven Strong’s essay: The First Race: Out-of-Australia, Not Africa!  but definitely now needs to be included in Australian schools’ curricula]. The latest is a new book from award-winning Indigenous author Bruce Pascoe; he draws on the diaries of early explorers to provide evidence that Aboriginal people across the continent were sowing, harvesting, irrigating and storing.  In the book called “Dark Emu” Bruce argues that systems of food production and land management have been blatantly understated in modern re-telling of early Aboriginal history. Bruce Pascoe joins us from East Gippsland this morning – Bruce, welcome to RN Breakfast.

Bruce Pascoe:  Thank you very much.

FK:  Bruce, let’s start with what our history books do teach us about the Aboriginal population that were here before white man came – does it only really suggest the hunter-gatherer lifestyle?

BP:  I haven’t read any books that suggest that it wasn’t a hunter-gatherer society, so I was surprised about six years ago when I read a book by Rupert Gerritsen which was talking in terms of agriculture as being conducted by Aboriginal people and I’m very indebted to the book that he wrote, which had to be published in England incidentally, because he opened up a whole new area. I was googling for ‘Aboriginal agriculture’ when I found the book because Id kept on finding references to large villages which were there to take advantage of grain fields that had been sown and irrigated, and I thought, that doesn’t sound like hunter-gathering to me.

FK:  …large villages. So tell us what you have unearthed, what kind of agriculture and land management practices you have found through your research were being undertaken by Aboriginal Australians.

BP:  Well, when I’d finished writing my previous book Convincing Ground, I was surprised to have this extra body of material that I’d been gathering about agriculture so I thought, this is going to be a surprise to a lot of Australian people, so how am I going to explain this, and the best explanation of all was through the words of the Australian explorers [Indeed – first-hand accounts throughout history are the most viscerally compelling and accurate window into the past we have],because everyone loves a good explorer and they’re revered in Australian history, so all I did was read the explorers’ diaries, and if you read those diaries with an expectation that you’re going to find something about Aboriginal land use, you’ll find it.

FK:  And what did you find, what did they describe?

BP:  Well Charles Sturt was nearly dead in what later became known as ‘Sturt’s Stony Desert’, and he climbed over one last sand hill … his horses could only walk in a straight line, they all stumbled down this sand hill and were greeted by 400 Aboriginal people who offered them roast duck and cake and well water. [What a great scene that would be in the epic movie that should be made!]

FK:  Cake! [Not fluffy sponge cake type cake Fran – more like dense, nutrient-rich grain biscuit] 

BP:  Cake made from the grain that those people had been harvesting in the ephemeral water-bed of the Warburton. It was an extraordinary occasion – Sturt talks at great length about the resources of the people and how they were manipulating the land to grow this grain.

FK:  So there you have evidence that Indigenous Australians were growing grain, they were making flour, they were processing food, presumably they were storing that food, you made reference already to large villages…as you say, flying in the face of the hunter-gatherer tag. But I noticed something you said there; you said if you read these diaries ‘with an expectation’ of this kind of land use. So your thesis in the book, I think, is that the hunter-gatherer tag was, to quote you, a ‘convenient lie promulgated by colonisers who ignored the possibility of prior Indigenous possession of the land ’.  So what your point is, your saying that it suited us to think of them and categorise them as hunter-gatherers because that meant they weren’t putting down roots of this land that the European colonisers were going to take. Is that your point?

BP:  It is exactly that, that the Europeans were usurping those agricultural lands for their cattle and sheep. In Victoria, the sheep came off the boats from Tasmania and walked straight to the yam paddocks and ate them out, and then they would go to another yam paddock and eat it out …that destroyed the Aboriginal economy in a matter of months – yam doesn’t recover from the way sheep eat it because they crop it very close to the ground. So that just disappeared. I was a far greater problem for Aboriginal people than smallpox or war or any of the things that impacted on them… simply the loss of food.

FK:  But what evidence do you have, Bruce, to support this notion that it was a deliberate lie, if you like, promulgated by the colonisers, rather than a failure of observation?

BP:  Look I don’t know if it was a deliberate lie, but people like Sturt and Mitchell were very well-meaning people but they had it in their mind that the Aboriginal people were going to be displaced by the Europeans. Sturt was buying up land in his newly discovered journeys, his brother was doing the same – Mitchell was a town planner at heart and was dreaming up all these wonderful towns that were going to be built for Europeans on the lands of Aboriginal people. Even though they had real affection for some of the aspects for Aboriginal life, and real admiration of their building skills and agricultural skills, they had it in their mind that this was going to have to fall aside in the path of European people; so they may not have been deliberately misleading the public as determined that the European way of life would win.

FK:  There is also proof of a nomadic lifestyle within Indigenous Australians – we know that existed, we know that because of the sacred sites and some of the ceremonies meant tracking through, across country, through to sacred sites for different ceremonies – we know that because of things like Songlines …so we know there was that lifestyle as well.

BP: Yeah, it was a complicated lifestyle -  it wasn’t easy to classify. People were moving around the country – not all people were sedentary; Lake Condah may have been, Brewarrina may have been, but in other parts of the country, people would have had at least two residences to take advantage of seasonal crops and also to visit country. And that is still going on in Australia, even down in southern NSW where I live, the sacred sites are still being visited, still being respected [Does Bruce know about Bulahdelah, central NSW? Contact with info] So there was movement going on in Australia then as it is now, but at the same time, agricultural practice was common.

FK:  Bruce, it’s clear from your book and the work you’ve done in Dark Emu, you think the curriculum, really, we need to change what we’re teaching about Aboriginal Australians and about the way they were living in this country before European colonisation. And you also question why the world flocks to see something like the Stonehenge structures in England but there’s little interest in what is considered to be the oldest human constructions on Earth, the 40,000 year old stone fish traps at Brewarrina in NSW. Why do you think there’s no great appreciation of Australia’s ancient heritage? […that has led to the mass destruction of much priceless heritage…]

BP:  Well I would hate to think that it is a deliberate refusal to engage with Aboriginal Australia or to engage with Aboriginal achievement, but I’m really at a loss to explain why something as remarkable as the Brewarrina fish trap has never received much attention in the country. As you said, Stonehenge is everyone’s favourite, people go to Angkor Watt in SE Asia, almost like a religious ritual, and yet we have these things in Australia, and there are many of them, and they are unvisited. If it was in Texas you’d have a Greyhound bus going there every quarter of an hour… I don’t know what it is but we need to have a different conversation with Aboriginal Australia in this country and we have to start in the schools. [Great - I will draw up a suggestion for a plan to augmented curriculum forthwith and submit it for the consideration of whomever it may concern]

And don’t read one book… you know, please read Dark Emu, but don’t read it alone. Read across a range of writers and make up your own mind, because I believe the evidence is there.

FK: Alright Bruce, thanks very much for joining us. 

BP:  Good onya – thank you very much Fran.

FK:  Bruce Pascoe is an Indigenous author, his latest book Dark Emu is published by Magabala Books, and if you happen to live in Melbourne and you want to hear more from Bruce, he’ll be a Readings Bookshop in Carlton on the 22^nd April.

[There would have been fish traps all along the Burnett River! Evidence was inundated by 30 or more dams, but after the de-commissioning of the Paradise Dam, some may be still there. Find Pictures of fish-trap looking rocks in rocky river beds and 1930’s Picture of a few Aboriginal children with dozens of lungfish displayed in front of them – how did they catch so many if not in a fish trap?]