1. The pre-colonial past

Most controversial is what Dark Emu says about the pre-colonial past: that Australia was inhabited for thousands of years by people who lived by techniques that included agriculture, leading a semi-sedentary life that included constructing villages. Sutton (anthropologist) and Walshe (archaeologist) have published a book-length critique of this bundle of claims.Footnote ⁵ Drawing on a large body of research, including their own, they make several arguments (here brutally condensed). Perhaps the most important is that Pascoe’s understanding of Aboriginal civilisation is too materialist, deploying an ontology that occludes Aboriginal understanding of the world as imbued with spiritual entities, including plant and animal species. In addition, Sutton and Walshe argue that Aboriginal languages lack words referring to the practices of agriculture; that while in some regions Aboriginal people conserved plant species, they did not “garden”; that Dark Emu generalises region-specific practices (such as wearing sewn animal skins, constructing dwellings, and fishing from watercraft) to the whole continent; that Dark Emu lacks evidence that constructed shelters were continuously occupied; that Pascoe is careless in his use of explorers’ observations as evidence; that Pascoe does not provide evidence that certain objects (“cylcons” and “Bogan picks”) were used as agricultural tools; and that Pascoe has not handled carefully the evidence of social complexity in Western Victoria.

Sutton and Walshe have convinced many that the “Aboriginal agriculture” thesis presented by Pascoe in Dark Emu is—at best—overstated.Footnote ⁶ As well, Sutton and Walshe take aim at two claims that Pascoe makes when he presents Dark Emu as a salutary corrective to widespread public ignorance and colonial mystification. First, they argue that to inflate the novelty of Dark Emu, Pascoe understates the availability of reliable information about the pre-colonial human societies of Australia. Second, they question Pascoe’s revival of a “social evolutionist” approach to human diversity in which “agricultural” societies are more worthy of our respect than “hunting and gathering” societies.

While the critical points made in Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? are persuasive, in my view, Sutton and Walshe have exaggerated, in one respect, the void between themselves and Pascoe. Sutton and Walshe suggest “semi-sedentary” as the most accurate description of the ways that Aboriginal people used their territory: people were neither settled in one place (in villages) nor ceaselessly on the move. “‘Semi-sedentary’ is not mentioned in Dark Emu,” Sutton and Walshe claim.Footnote ⁷ They have not noticed that Pascoe has also labelled pre-colonial Aboriginal society as “semi-sedentary.”Footnote ⁸

At the time of writing, I am not aware of Pascoe or anyone else refuting the critical observations of Sutton and Walshe. However, their critique has not diminished the public esteem for Pascoe and his book, and I doubt that it ever will. Thoughtful Australians have welcomed Pascoe’s new perspective on their nation’s past. The publicity of Adelaide Writers Week in March 2022—after the release of Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers?—gives an example of the terms in which praise for Pascoe has continued. A session called “History, Story-Telling and the Collective Imagination” billed Pascoe in this way:

An eye-witness to this festival session described Pascoe’s approach to the occasion as “preaching style, working up the two-thousand-strong crowd in call-and-response mode. This made it difficult for Griffiths to persist with a critical stance.” Pascoe replied to Griffiths “by appealing to the urgency of the politics.”Footnote ¹⁰ Pascoe has engaged his readers not only as solitary readers but as audiences. Some books that do well in Australia are part of a publishing “eco-system” that includes repeated live encounters of the author with readers en masse. Festivals are vital parts of this ecosystem.

2. A colonial heritage: denigration and despoliation

What “politics” are readers and live audiences engaged by? If they are aware of the critique of his account of pre-colonial Aboriginal society, they do not treat it as important, and some may see criticism of the “Aboriginal agriculture” thesis as continuing the colonial denigration of Aboriginal achievement.Footnote ¹¹ To understand the inclination to accept Dark Emu as an unchallenged, revelatory truth, it is important to bring to light the other two historical claims that Pascoe makes. They are claims about the colonists, not about the Aboriginal societies that were colonised.

One claim is that Australians have been denied knowledge that Aboriginal people were skilled practitioners of agriculture. According to Pascoe, Aboriginal people who were ignorant of agriculture became the colonists’ self-serving intellectual orthodoxy. To see Aboriginal people as ignorant, opportunistic wanderers made it ideologically easier for the colonists to occupy and assume ownership over their lands. Now that Australians have conceded Indigenous land and native title rights, it is time to reject this pejorative characterisation. Pascoe thus presents Dark Emu as his readers’ way out of a settler colonial heritage of ignorance and prejudice that has militated against settlers’ acceptance of the Indigenous claim to sovereignty. Fully embracing the idea that Aboriginal people are the original owners of Australia, we can and should free ourselves of one of the principal colonial misconceptions that contributed to their dispossession. Pascoe offers readers this post-colonial subject position in such passages as follows:

And:

The second claim that Dark Emu makes about the colonists is that although they supposed their own use of natural resources to be superior to Indigenous Australians’, the colonists’ exploitation of nature since 1788 has been ruinous. Now that contemporary Australians are learning that their uses of the land may despoil it and render it less productive, their hard-won ecological insight distances them from the over-confident colonists whose

Pascoe offers the reader a subject position that is informed by knowledge of Australia’s ecological history and which is disposed now to admit that “the fertility [the colonists] extolled on first entering the country was the result of careful management [by Aboriginal people].”Footnote ¹⁵ By describing the agricultural land management that colonisation displaced, Pascoe invites us to recognise Indigenous knowledge as the source of the revised land use practices that Australians now should embrace.

These two political claims are based on ideas that are widely accepted among progressive Australians. The first aligns with the High Court’s 1992 revision of Australian law in the Mabo case: the overthrow of the legal doctrine terra nullius. Just as that doctrine had ignored the law and government of the colonised, so the orthodox perception of the Aboriginal economy had ignored that it was agriculture not hunter-gatherer. The other claim aligns with Australians’ increasing awareness of the severe damage that industrial civilisation has done to the planet’s natural systems. Our growing understanding of how much we endanger these systems may enable us (through de-carbonisation and other reforms) to mitigate climate change and ocean acidification. Any reader of Dark Emu who holds these progressive ideas will be susceptible to its appeal: absorbing Dark Emu gives a reader some of the knowledge required to change the trajectory of the nation and of all humanity. The appeal of Dark Emu is partly that readers are empowered by assenting to its primary thesis—pre-colonial Aboriginal agriculture. Dark Emu enables readers—relieved of their ignorance of what Aboriginal societies were and inspired by Aboriginal practices of land and sea care—to act as self-conscious agents of a different and better history.

These two theses about how we, now, can distinguish ourselves from the colonists buttress the “Aboriginal agriculture” thesis. That the three theses are mutually entailing is what makes Dark Emu so appealing to many Australians who support Indigenous land rights, self-determination, and the Indigenous demand for Australian institutions “to include and emphasise Indigenous communities, and their cultures and values as an essential part of wider Australian society.”Footnote ¹⁶ While the “Aboriginal agriculture” thesis has been persuasively questioned by critics such as Sutton and Walshe, Dark Emu has continued to appeal to the public. That appeal is based on the book’s consistency with larger critiques of Australia’s colonial and ecologically irresponsible past. Dark Emu offers readers ways of thinking that break from those pasts. In suggesting that the appeal of Dark Emu is, in part, the appeal of self-redemption, I intend no criticism of the book or its admirers.

Ideologically attractive and immensely popular, Dark Emu thus presents teachers of Australian Studies and Indigenous Studies with a dilemma. How do we include a book as intellectually flawed as Dark Emu in our school and university curricula when it speaks so persuasively to many Australian readers? To ignore Dark Emu would be to ignore its harmony with three popular progressive themes that I would like to see flourish in our schools and universities:

1. 1. That Aboriginal people who were more sophisticated than colonists burdened by racist thoughts have been able to admit.

2. 2. That non-Indigenous Australians have misappropriated, misunderstood, and misused the land that the Aboriginal people had looked after for thousands of years.

3. 3. That Australians can rethink and improve their ways of living with each other and with the Earth’s non-human species and physical resources.

Dark Emu will continue to be an important item of popular culture, an extremely influential (and forward-looking) guide to Australia’s past. Those who design the Humanities and Social Science curriculum in secondary and tertiary education must not ignore this, for their students’ knowledge of Australia is shaped (if not totally determined) by texts such as Dark Emu, which are widely read and even loved. As Indigenous Studies makes its claim for space within secondary school and university curricula, the question I am posing becomes even more urgent. How are teachers to engage—both respectfully and critically—with Dark Emu?

To ignore Dark Emu—that is, not include it on any Indigenous Studies reading lists and not mention it in lectures and tutorials—is no answer. That response risks being represented as an intellectual elite’s censorship, thus furthering Dark Emu’s reputation as the vehicle of truths unwelcomed by colonising intellectual authorities who are unable and unwilling to acknowledge their epistemic privilege. The populist appeal of such excluded knowledge should not be underestimated. The exclusionary practices of elites would again be illustrated if teachers ignored a book that is widely read and admired.

So let us consider an alternative approach: positioning Dark Emu as “myth.” I do not equate “myth” with error or falsehood. Within the Humanities and Social Sciences, there is a more respectful meaning of “myth.” Introducing Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe, Ian Watt made it clear that he was not equating “myth” with falsehood. He quoted the definition of “myth” in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences:

The late Frances Peters-Little deployed “myth” in this sense when introducing her discussion of some histories that many Aboriginal people (and non-Aboriginal Australians, I suggest) believe to be true.

In the remainder of this paper, I will explore what it could mean to treat Dark Emu as a new Australian “myth.” I will introduce two authors: Cohen and Nakata. Neither has written on Dark Emu, but what makes each author useful is their sense that a true/false binary does not enable a political understanding of the contention of beliefs and knowledges.

3. Cohen: myth and history

In 1997, Cohen published History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience and Myth. Footnote ¹⁹ The book is not only a study of an outbreak of violence (the “Boxer Rebellion”) against foreigners in China at the end of the nineteenth century but also an extended essay about how we can know the past. Cohen’s account is in three parts (or “keys”). First, he narrates a sequence of events known as the Boxer Rebellion. Second, he describes some of the subjective experiences of those who were involved in these events. Third, he shows us the different ways that the Boxer Rebellion has been retold in histories of China written over the course of the twentieth century. He refers to the third “key”—this series of historians’ retellings—as the “myths” of the Boxer Rebellion. Like Watt and Peters-Little, Cohen refuses to equate “myth” with untruth. His book is about the proximity of historical knowledge to myth.

Mythologisation, Cohen writes, is one of the ways that we know the past. It can be distinguished from academically attested historical knowledge, but this distinction is not clear-cut. Cohen does not condemn mythologising. Rather he accepts it as one of the ways that we know the past. To give an example of mythologising that is not simply error or untruth, Cohen presents autobiographical mythologising. We all have a strong urge to remember the events of our own lives in the form of a “psychologically tolerable” narrative.Footnote ²⁰ It is not only in autobiographical memory or writing that we mythologise. Much of what circulates publicly as a narrative of the past is myth.

Mythologising is defined partly by the fact that a myth has emotional appeal.

Mythologising starts with accounts of the past that are understood to be true, but mythologising then goes further—NOT “to enlarge upon or deepen this understanding” BUT to “draw on it to serve the political, ideological, rhetorical, and/or emotional needs of the present.”Footnote ²² “To live on as myth…an event or person must embody characteristics or themes that seem especially pertinent to the concerns of people and/or governments in later times.”Footnote ²³ Myths are “sources of energy in the present, making it possible for present and past to affirm and validate one another….”Footnote ²⁴

In contrast with mythologisers, historians aspire “to construct, on the basis of evidence available, as accurate and truthful an understanding of the past as possible.”Footnote ²⁵ This may result in narratives that are complex, incomplete, ambiguous, puzzling, and confronting—not emotionally satisfying. When historians apply tests (of evidence and logic) to truth claims about the past, they demand much more than a narrative that is psychologically tolerable.

Cohen acknowledges that the distinction between mythologising and historicising is not clear-cut. He quotes Eric Hobsbawm as saying that all historians are engaged in the invention of tradition, so that historians who challenge “one mythologised past, inevitably fashion others.”Footnote ²⁶ As I understand Cohen, there are two reasons why the distinction between History and myth cannot be sharp:

1. 1. Historical knowledge, like myths, is the product of intellectual operations to select, simplify, and essentialise.

2. 2. Myths have more purchase if they correspond—to some extent—to widely acknowledged and scholarly attested truth.

Cohen says that early in his career, he thought that History was in every way more “valid” than myth. By the time he wrote History in Three Keys, however, he was prepared to concede that myth had value. This is because he thinks that there are different kinds of values: “moral, intellectual, emotional, aesthetic—an assertion about the past that ranks high in respect to one of them may not rank very high in respect to the others.”Footnote ²⁷ For example, autobiographical myth-making “helps to preserve a sense of psychological coherence and personal integrity over time.”Footnote ²⁸

However, Cohen does not want to give myth a free pass. He is not advocating that myth should go unchecked by historical research. He wants to continue to distinguish the activity of producing History from the activity of myth-making. By giving History a licence to challenge myths, Cohen honours the role of the historian. Historians must not disavow their critical distance. They should continue to presume a social licence for their scrutiny. They should enter willingly into a relationship of tension with mythologising. To be a historian is to be—in this sense—outside the object of study. To be outside is both a problem and an asset, Cohen argues. The problem arises from the fact that the historian may “misconstrue and distort” what they are outside.Footnote ²⁹ The benefit of being outside is that the historian is a mediator or translator who makes the past available to the present.

Aligning myself with Cohen, I want to appreciate that however flawed Dark Emu is as an account of the past, it is meaningful and powerful as myth because of the way that it addresses contemporary readers as inheritors of a colonial past with which they would like to break by committing to Dark Emu. But what is the place of myth in formal education? In particular, what is the place of Dark Emu in courses that create representations of the past for students—so conscious of their colonial inheritance—to consider?Footnote ³⁰

4. Nakata: Dark Emu in Indigenous Studies

Addressing the question of how Indigenous Studies is to flourish in universities, the Torres Strait Islander academic Nakata has distinguished between three kinds of knowledge:

• • Indigenous community positions that inform and arise from the daily striving for self-determination. In his words: “grassroots analysis that is borne out of experience and out of community interaction with the analytical frames used for understanding that experience.”Footnote ³¹

• • Indigenous intellectual positions (what academics—increasingly Indigenous-identified—produce and teach as Indigenous Studies).

• • The knowledge produced by and taught in the wider academy.

The three kinds of knowledge interact in relationships that he describes as “translation back and forth.”Footnote ³²

Nakata is worried that Indigenous intellectuals—including, but not restricted to, those with academic appointments—“have been reluctant to question or do battle with the limits of entrenched community analysis and discourse.”Footnote ³³ (By “community,” he means the Australian Indigenous community.) He adds that “we often promote and conform to the reductive simplicities of community discourse in efforts to prove our connectedness and relevance to it.”Footnote ³⁴ These efforts have the unfortunate result that “Indigenous intellectualism is predominantly orthodox and predictable in its engagement with Western knowledge and theory, its forms of analysis, and its production of new knowledge for use in Indigenous contexts.”Footnote ³⁵ I believe that these words apply to the ways that Dark Emu has been admired as (a) reclaiming Indigenous land management knowledge and (b) rejecting the colonial intellectual orthodoxy (what Nakata refers to as “Western knowledge”).

Nakata invites us to consider critically what he sees as a common Indigenous orientation to participating in Higher Education. He asks: “What happens when anti-colonial analysis becomes completely pre-occupied with resistance to, and rejection of, Western knowledge, theory, and practice?”Footnote ³⁶ This preoccupation with rejecting Western knowledge is damaging, he suggests. He is worried that students within Indigenous Studies courses are drawn to a “very superficial, limited, and selective engagement with Western knowledge and theory in ways that misunderstand and misrepresent it.”Footnote ³⁷ As well, he advises Indigenous scholars to approach with caution the project that he describes as “restorations of Indigenous language, concepts, and knowledge.”Footnote ³⁸

Let us apply Nakata’s cautions to Dark Emu and Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? Before doing so, I will try to substantiate that binaries such as Indigenous Knowledge/Western Knowledge to which Nakata refers do have wide currency in the discussion of the environment in which Indigenous Studies is taught. Two examples will suffice. Taking aim at “biased Eurocentric epistemologies,” Bodkin-Andrews and Carlson write:

The same authors refer to “Indigenous ways of being and knowing” that are not only different from “the lens of Western ways of knowing” but also have been marginalised by knowledge-producing institutions—“epistemological racism.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Tracey Bunda et al., drawing on “standpoint theory,” point to the way that non-Indigenous ways of knowing are institutionally embedded. Indigenous perspectives will not flourish at universities unless they make “spaces” for them:

One way of appreciating Dark Emu would be to read it as an assertion of Indigenous Knowledge against Colonial/Western Knowledge—correcting, in particular, the colonists’ learned but mistaken and self-interested classification of pre-colonial Indigenous Australia as a hunter-gatherer. In this approach, all critiques of Dark Emu are under suspicion—not least if they come from academically accredited writers. Sutton and Walshe can be evoked as embodying the epistemic privilege of Western Knowledge. In this perspective, the critique offered in Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? can be parried or dismissed by characterising it as Western Knowledge fighting back against Pascoe’s challenge and effectively restoring the orthodoxy (that pre-colonial human society in Australia was a hunter-gatherer economy) demolished by Dark Emu. We should resist this way of distinguishing the two books. In at least three ways, Dark Emu is not a rejection of Western Knowledge but a critical reconfiguration of materials drawn from it.

First, Pascoe cites in support of his thesis much Archaeological research, including authors who have themselves drawn on and synthesised Archaeological research.Footnote ⁴² Second, Pascoe’s philosophy of history resembles the social evolutionist schema of human progress: that is, he appears to believe that agricultural civilisation is more advanced than hunter-gatherer civilisation. Third, as pointed out by Sutton and Walshe, Pascoe attributes to pre-colonial Aboriginal people a materialist ontology that is belied by much of the ethnography on which Farmers and Hunter-Gatherers? draws. One chapter in that book presents a synthesis of ethnographies by non-Indigenous researchers (not least Sutton himself) of the “widely practised, complex and highly valued ceremonies and speech acts that constituted spiritual species maintenance.”Footnote ⁴³ That is, non-Indigenous Sutton and Walshe claim to have a better understanding of Indigenous cosmology than that presented by Pascoe. Their confidence in ethnography is based on the conventional (in the academic world) esteem for a research method based on talking to Indigenous knowledge-holders, living with them for long periods and observing their interactions with non-human plants and animals (as Sutton did with the Wik people). Sutton and Walshe contrast this worldview with the one Pascoe deploys: a decidedly secular, modern, and materialist conception of what makes Nature fruitful. They make a strong case that Pascoe’s ontology of human/non-human interactions is more “Western” than he cares to acknowledge.

Thus to valorise Dark Emu as Indigenous Knowledge’s riposte to Western Knowledge is to overlook much that is arguably non-Indigenous in Dark Emu. The binary Indigenous Knowledge/Western Knowledge cannot be applied in any simple way to a comparison of Dark Emu with Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? Each book is a hybrid of Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledge. Here, it will be apparent to the reader that I am giving much weight to Sutton’s ethnographic challenge to Dark Emu. Readers who hold all ethnography of non-Western peoples under suspicion—as the intellectual tool/product of colonisation—may not be willing to concede that ethnographies are one reliable source of Indigenous knowledge.

Nakata made it clear in his 2007 monograph Disciplining the Savages—Savaging the Disciplines that he understands his own Torres Strait heritage partly through a critical reading of ethnographies such as the data collected by A. C. Haddon’s 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition.Footnote ⁴⁴ Nakata’s writing about the position of Indigenous Studies is consistent with this openness to finding in the Haddon publications “a valuable source of data on Islander beliefs and traditions and, by definition of Islander people.”Footnote ⁴⁵ When he refers to “the middle ground where Indigenous and Western meanings converge” and to “the mutual constitution of both Indigenous and Western meaning,” I understand him to include Indigenous practices of making what they will of the ethnographic record.Footnote ⁴⁶ Both Dark Emu and Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? seem to me to be (very different) examples of what he refers to as the “middle ground” where Western and Indigenous knowledges can engage each other. Nakata writes: “More time spent in that middle ground will likely reveal just how intricate and open to interpretation our scholarly dance around worldviews, knowledge, and practice is.”Footnote ⁴⁷

In a later paper “Rethinking Majors in Australian Indigenous Studies,” Nakata et al. give further guidance to educators who wish to build up this “middle ground.”Footnote ⁴⁸ They contrast two goals for Indigenous Studies.

One—less favoured by Nakata et al.—is to transmit “Indigenous interpretations and cultural perspectives and practice as a way to uphold Indigenous interests, and to pave the way for university students to overcome the biases, misrepresentations and omissions in disciplinary knowledge or content.” Success, when this is the goal, takes the form of “compliance to a particular view of the world.”Footnote ⁴⁹

The other possible goal for Indigenous Studies (and the one that Nakata et al. clearly favour) is to understand the variety of representations of “Indigenous people’s knowledge, cultures and experiences.” That is, the goal of Indigenous Studies should be to objectify what are labelled Indigenous perspectives to examine their construction, policy pertinence, and historical effects. Success, according to this alternative goal, takes the form of the student acquiring awareness that the “Indigenous perspective” is multiple and evolving, so that the student has the confidence to understand the indigenous perspective as an object of “scholarly thought and productive engagements.”Footnote ⁵⁰

5. Conclusion: how to teach Dark Emu?

I offer Cohen and Nakata as two possible ways to teach Dark Emu by respectfully historicising it. Following Cohen, let us teach Dark Emu as myth. This would mean more than considering (with the help of such critics as Sutton and Walshe) the evidence for and against each of the books’ specific claims. We would also study the way that the book exerts its appeal by resonating with two progressive ideologies of our times: one that is disposed to question any idea identified as a colonial inheritance and the other aligned with ecologically informed history.

Following Nakata, we could also teach Dark Emu as an instance of Indigenous appropriation of Western knowledge—appropriation that many readers welcome as an assertion of the Indigenous standpoint. I have pointed to three ways that Dark Emu draws on ideas that we can identify as Western: the idea that as societies evolve from hunter-gatherer to agriculture, they advance in civilisational complexity and thus merit more respect; the heritage of Archaeological research; and the materialist ontology underpinning scientific knowledge of productive, sustainable natural resource use. That is, in teaching Dark Emu, we can appreciate not only its myths but also its (what Nakata calls) “convergence” of knowledge from different traditions. When Nakata describes Indigenous Studies as a “knowledge field,” I understand him to say that it consists of “both Indigenous and non-Indigenous accounts of Indigenous reality and the deep entanglements of methods of knowledge production, of vantage points and analytical standpoints, and the contests and debates that occur in response to them.”Footnote ⁵¹

Finally, teaching Dark Emu as myth does not require us to treat Farmer or Hunter-Gatherers? as truth. That critique too must be relativised, by conveying the limitations of ethnographies and archaeological studies in general and of Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? in particular. The reviews of that book will be helpful. The primary hazard facing any attempt to teach Dark Emu as myth is the common equation of “myth” with error and falsehood. One of the continuing tasks of Humanities education is to introduce students to a better epistemology than the one that assumes that all propositions are either true or false. The success of Dark Emu reminds us of the inescapable necessity of myths to our political being.