This debunking of the book Dark Emu written by Bruce Pascoe in the new publication “Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers?” by Peter Sutton (one of Australia’s leading anthropologists) and Keryn Walshe (Senior Researcher and Field Archaeologist). Something desperately needed to correct so many facts, misguided opinion and pure fiction that has degraded and set back Aboriginal understanding in Australia for many years and like so many red herrings connected to this topic, possibly for generations to come.
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From: Witty Rejoinder
ID: 1750401
Subject: re: Chat June 21
This article broadly addresses my own criticisms of ‘Dark Emu’:
https://www.theage.com.au/national/debunking-dark-emu-did-the-publishing-phenomenon-get-it-wrong-20210507-p57pyl.html
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Peak Warming Man
It’s a hard to read article.
I don’t mind a bit of preamble and scene setting but I grow weary of it if the article hasn’t cut to the chase by mid way.
The conservative media have been jumping up and down about the willingness, the oh so willingness of ABC types to believe everything Pasco says and writes for ages.
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Witty Rejoinder
It’s important to remain objective but the conservative media are usually maintaining the same conceit as Pascoe that ‘settled agriculture’ is culturaly superior to a hunter-gatherer existance.
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buffy
I’m interested in the author’s use of the Old People term. In this district, the Old People are the ones who were here earlier, during the last Ice Age, not the ones who were here when the Europeans came (Djab wurrung and Jardwadjali). The post ice age language is estimated to be around 5,000 years old. I don’t know if this dichotomy exists in other areas of Australia. If so, this would make a difference to knowing what happened in aeons past, if you were only taking evidence from the inhabitants around in the late 1700/early 1800s.
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A few excerpts and comments from Sutton and Walshe.
>>Sutton and Walshe accuse Pascoe of a “lack of true scholarship”, ignoring Aboriginal voices, dragging respect for traditional Aboriginal culture back into the Eurocentric world of the colonial era, and “trimming” colonial observations to fit his argument. They write that while Dark Emu “purports to be factual” it is “littered with unsourced material, is poorly researched, distorts and exaggerates many points, selectively emphasises evidence to suit those opinions, and ignores large bodies of information that do not support the author’s opinions”.<<
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>>Nothing in Sutton’s 50 years of research with senior Aboriginal people suggested to him that Pascoe was right. He was “disturbed” that Pascoe’s descriptions of Aboriginal life were based on – and to his mind, took liberties with – “the journals of blow-through European explorers, men who were ignorant of the languages and cultures of those they met”, rather than Aboriginal people, whose knowledge has been recorded for the past hundred years at least.
He was “disappointed” that in attempting to describe Aboriginal land use, Pascoe ignored the importance of spiritual tradition and ritual. He was “stunned” that the book was “riddled with errors of fact, selective quotations, selective use of evidence, and exaggeration of weak evidence”, including the suggestion Aboriginal people have occupied Australia for 120,000 years. And he was “outraged” that school curricula were being changed to conform with the Dark Emu narrative, embracing Pascoe’s descriptions of an early agricultural society.
More than anything, he felt that Pascoe had done the Old People – as Sutton refers to them – a monumental disservice, resurrecting long-discredited ideas of social evolutionism that placed hunter-gatherers lower on the evolutionary scale than farmers. To Sutton, it was a rebirthing of the colonial philosophy used to justify Aboriginal dispossession in the first place: that people who lived lightly on the land had no claim to it, that farmers were more deserving of dignity and respect than hunter-gatherers.<<
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>>Sutton says, was to “set things back to a balanced truthfulness” and “restore the dignity of complex (never ‘mere’) hunter-gathering, and thus First Nations cultural history, that has been eroded due to Dark Emu”. For her part, Walshe says that when she first read Dark Emu, she was so frustrated by its lack of scholarship that she didn’t finish it.
Like Sutton, Walshe was also appalled that in attempting to present Aboriginal people as more “advanced” than was known, Pascoe had used pejorative terms, such as “primitive”, “simple” and “mere” to describe the brilliance and complexity of hunter-gatherer life. “I still struggle to believe that this has happened,” she tells Good Weekend.<<
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>>Over 300 pages, Sutton and Walshe pick apart Dark Emu. Where Pascoe writes that permanent housing was “a feature of the pre-contact Aboriginal economy and marked the movement towards agricultural reliance”, Sutton dismisses this absolutely. “The recurring pattern, all over Australia, was one of seasonal and other variation in lengths of stays in one place,” Sutton writes. “No group is ever described, at the moment of colonisation, as living year in, year out, in one single place.” Where Dark Emu featured the use of stone for housing, Sutton answers that it was “the rarest in the Aboriginal record”, a “last resort” in the stoniest of environments.<<
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>>Pondering why Dark Emu was so well received, Sutton and Walshe write that its success appears to indicate a profound lack of knowledge about Aboriginal people and history, “or an unconcern with facts and truth themselves, or a combination of these things”. Whichever, they say, “the situation is troubling”. Sutton tells Good Weekend he believes reading and accepting Dark Emu has become a search for “moral recovery” for some white Australians of goodwill. Walshe says it has become something like “a pilgrimage”. They also question why no one asked Aboriginal people still connected to traditional practices, or anthropologists, whether Pascoe was right.<<
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