How I accidentally ended up in the Dark Emu debate:

When I first picked up Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?, I was captivated by the ideas it put forward around the suggestion that many First Nations Australians engaged in agricultural practices. Like any good reader, I couldn’t wait to share it with my fellow students & On Dit audience.

I started writing this article after reading Dark Emu, taking the book at face value. Poor form by a science student, I know! The next few paragraphs I wrote before doing my background research…

It’s pretty well known that our education institutions don’t do the best job of teaching First Nations Australian perspectives, let alone their lives before invasion by the Western world.

Knowing this, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised when I picked up a book on Aboriginal Australian agricultural practices. This book of diary extracts from explorers and papers from researchers details that many First Nations communities were resourceful agriculturalists, suggesting that they were involved in selecting productive seeds, sowing, and irrigating for reliable food production as opposed to hunting & gathering with minimal intervention of the land.

Does that come as a surprise to you too? It makes sense that our oldest surviving culture developed agricultural practices well before colonisation. They had to keep themselves fed and surely had time to try out different systems, from gathering to more sedentary agriculture. What doesn’t make sense is that, despite being in my final year of a Bachelor of Science in Plant Biology (basically an agricultural science degree by proxy) and attending almost every class over the past two years, I had never encountered this information before.

At this point, my research branched out:

When a Sky News YouTube clip denounced my original source, I was prepared to blow it off but gave it a listen in the background whilst I skimmed over the Wikipedia page. When I came across the lengthy ‘Debate and Criticism’ section, plus the fact that this book had spawned a counter-book analysing each fact and source, I knew that I had to reconsider.

Written by Bruce Pascoe, an Aboriginal Australian writer & historian, Dark Emu won Book of the Year and the Indigenous Writers’ Prize at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and was diligent in its citations.

However, many critics and even researchers whose work was used by Pascoe in forming the basis of his argument for Dark Emu claim that the book exaggerates and ‘sometimes romanticises pre-contact Indigenous society’, with some critics labelling the book ‘misleading and offensive to Aboriginal people and culture’. There was even an attempt by MP Mark Latham with Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party to have the book banned from use as a source of discussion by teachers in NSW schools (although it could be suggested that any book that angers the One Nation Party & its supporters is considered a success).

Writer and historian James Boyce highlights that Pascoe uses predominantly white explorers’ journals, lacks First Nations Australian sources, and generalises from local examples.