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A review by octavia_cade
Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe
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!