Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the birth of agriculture [Paperback]

History has portrayed Australias First Peoples, the Aboriginals, as hunter-gatherers who lived on an empty, uncultivated land. History is wrong.

In this seminal book, Bruce Pascoe uncovers evidence that long before the arrival of white men, Aboriginal people across the continent were building dams and wells; planting, irrigating, and harvesting seeds, and then preserving the surplus and storing it in houses, sheds, or secure vessels; and creating elaborate cemeteries and manipulating the landscape. All of these behaviors were inconsistent with the hunter-gatherer tag, which turns out have been a convenient lie that worked to justify dispossession.

Using compelling evidence from the records and diaries of early Australian explorers and colonists, he reveals that Aboriginal systems of food production and land management have been blatantly understated in modern retellings of early Aboriginal history, and that a new look at Australias past is required  for the benefit of all Australians.

Dark Emu, a bestseller in Australia, won both the Book of the Year Award and the Indigenous Writers Prize in the 2016 New South Wales Premiers Literary Awards.

Contradicts the conventional wisdom that native peoples were primitive hunter-gatherers

• The first Australians werent simply naked hunters and gatherers, opportunistically roaming the songlines, but sophisticated land managers who, in some areas, also kept sedentary lifestyles.
• Illuminates how history is subversively rewritten; how values different from the mainstream narrative are ignored.

Unputdownable.
Darina Allen,Irish Examiner

[A] brisk and lucidly written account&This is an important and deeply researched reinterpretation of Australian history and a stark warning about the danger of accepting received wisdom at face value.
Publishers Weekly

The truth-telling must go on.