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norimee's review against another edition
5.0
Please read this book.
I have no connection to Australia and came by this coincidentally looking for an audiobook for Indigenous Heritage Month and found a pot of gold.
This is so incredible fascinating and eye opening. The author paints a believable and vivid picture on what really happened when first explorers and colonisers took over resources that were not theirs, using mostly their own words from diaries and early records. Introducing an intricate society who did not know war and had next to none use for weaponry, very far from the primitive and nomadic peoples white peoples history books want to tell us.
It should be mandatory reading, especially for all Australians, but also for all Europeans who still think colonisation was a good thing and brought poor, savage places the gift of civilisation.
I have no connection to Australia and came by this coincidentally looking for an audiobook for Indigenous Heritage Month and found a pot of gold.
This is so incredible fascinating and eye opening. The author paints a believable and vivid picture on what really happened when first explorers and colonisers took over resources that were not theirs, using mostly their own words from diaries and early records. Introducing an intricate society who did not know war and had next to none use for weaponry, very far from the primitive and nomadic peoples white peoples history books want to tell us.
It should be mandatory reading, especially for all Australians, but also for all Europeans who still think colonisation was a good thing and brought poor, savage places the gift of civilisation.
sare131's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
medium-paced
4.5
This is a brilliant book and I highly recommend it. It's fascinating and so well written. I learned so much about Indigenous culture, people, customs and land. Devestating at times but hopeful. I highly recommend.
grislygateau's review against another edition
5.0
If, like me, you were taught in Primary School that Australia’s First Peoples were simple hunter-gathers who ate witchity grubs and told dream time stories this excellent book will disabuse you of that notion. Bruce Pascoe uses various European colonisers own observations as well as artefacts to refute this commonly held belief. I now have a clearer understanding of how intimate the relationship between the First Peoples and the Australian was/is/should continue to be. I highly recommend this book.
octavia_cade's review against another edition
challenging
informative
medium-paced
5.0
This is absolutely fascinating!
I have to admit: I know very little about the history of Aboriginal Australia. I know very little about the history of Australia full stop, but had I been asked, I would have said, dredging from the vague corners of memory, that the Aborigines were a hunter-gatherer people. Where had I heard this? I don't know. It arrived in my brain by osmosis, I guess, and I never really thought to question it because I never really thought about it at all.
Well. Wasn't that a mistake. It turns out that the hunter-gatherer label, in this instance, is bullshit promulgated by the European colonists of Australia, because believing this themselves - often against the evidence of their own eyes! - made it easy for them to excuse stealing land and being generally awful people. Pascoe presents here the archeological and historical evidence for settled farming and food production in Aboriginal communities, actual townships, and more.
What really shocked me, and I suppose it shouldn't have, was all the evidence culled from settler records. I don't know how anyone with the tiniest iota of moral or intellectual honesty can stay in Aboriginal stone houses and claim that Indigenous Australians only had lean-to huts, or observe long-term farming practices and conclude that the land got that way naturally, or to actually eat stored supplies of someone else's grain and assert that no storage ever took place, because the people who stored the grain they were eating were nomads, and so it didn't really exist. I just... it's unbearably, insidiously vicious, is what it is.
I'm so glad I read this. What an excellent book. Everyone should read it!
I have to admit: I know very little about the history of Aboriginal Australia. I know very little about the history of Australia full stop, but had I been asked, I would have said, dredging from the vague corners of memory, that the Aborigines were a hunter-gatherer people. Where had I heard this? I don't know. It arrived in my brain by osmosis, I guess, and I never really thought to question it because I never really thought about it at all.
Well. Wasn't that a mistake. It turns out that the hunter-gatherer label, in this instance, is bullshit promulgated by the European colonists of Australia, because believing this themselves - often against the evidence of their own eyes! - made it easy for them to excuse stealing land and being generally awful people. Pascoe presents here the archeological and historical evidence for settled farming and food production in Aboriginal communities, actual townships, and more.
What really shocked me, and I suppose it shouldn't have, was all the evidence culled from settler records. I don't know how anyone with the tiniest iota of moral or intellectual honesty can stay in Aboriginal stone houses and claim that Indigenous Australians only had lean-to huts, or observe long-term farming practices and conclude that the land got that way naturally, or to actually eat stored supplies of someone else's grain and assert that no storage ever took place, because the people who stored the grain they were eating were nomads, and so it didn't really exist. I just... it's unbearably, insidiously vicious, is what it is.
I'm so glad I read this. What an excellent book. Everyone should read it!
jordanish's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
5.0