He states, 'The belief that Aboriginal people were ‘mere’ hunter-gatherers has been used as a political tool to justify dispossession.' In Dark Emu Pascoe draws on the writings of early British settlers and recent decades of scholarship to argue that traditional Aboriginal society was characterised by agriculture, aquaculture, elaborate engineering, villages of permanent structures, and other features which are incompatible with the view that Aboriginal Australians were only hunter-gatherers. The 2019 version was shortlisted for the 2020 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature in the Children's Literature Award section. Ī second edition, entitled Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture was published in June 2018, and a version of the book for younger readers, entitled Young Dark Emu: A Truer History, was published in 2019. The title refers to what is known as the Emu in the sky constellation in Aboriginal astronomy, known as Gugurmin, or 'dark emu' to the Wiradjuri people.

The first edition, entitled Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?, was published by Magabala Books in 2014. It has, however, been welcomed as a contribution to further investigations into Indigenous history. The accuracy of Dark Emu has been debated in the Australian media and political spheres, and some academics have criticised Pascoe's thesis that Indigenous Australian society was based to such a large extent on sedentary agriculture rather than hunting and gathering. Its strengths have been said to lie in the storytelling style, making it more accessible to the general reader than the more scholarly examinations of Aboriginal history in the past.

The book has also proved very popular with the Australian public, selling 250,000 copies by mid-2021. A second edition, published under the title Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture was published in mid-2018, and a version of the book for younger readers, entitled Young Dark Emu: A Truer History, was published in 2019.īoth the first and the children's editions were shortlisted for major awards, and the former won two awards in the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards. It reexamines colonial accounts of Aboriginal people in Australia, and cites evidence of pre-colonial agriculture, engineering and building construction by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? is a 2014 non-fiction book by Bruce Pascoe.

Dark emu by bruce pascoe