Reviewing Pascoe’s essay collection Salt, in Inside Story, Professor Tom Griffiths said of Dark Emu:
Pascoe often over-reads the sources—and for what purpose? To prove that Aboriginal peoples were like Europeans? Dark Emu is too much in thrall to a discredited evolutionary view of economic stages …
There is concern that archaic evolutionary hierarchies should be revived just when we thought that such a northern-hemisphere mode of thinking had been transcended in Australia.1
It could be added: Dark Emu is in effect an argument against cultural relativism. It is in favour of the resurrection of the view that agricultural peoples who live in permanent housing in populous villages are more ‘advanced’ than semi-nomads whose traditional year cycled through seasonal phases of high and low mobility, and smaller and larger camps. Under this Eurocentric and now thoroughly discredited model, Aboriginal people would look like primitives unless they could be retrospectively remade into farmers. There are moments in Dark Emu where a medieval European peasant economy seems to be held up as the progressive target for Australians before conquest, or even claimed as its ‘achievement’.
This might leave the less discriminating among Pascoe’s readers with the very attitude he is anxious to get rid of: denigration of a people whose mobility (regionally variable) was central to their use of country; whose housing was in most cases temporarily occupied, seasonally variable, and regionally differing depending on how much people were sedentary; and whose frequent (and again regionally varying) light clothing, nakedness or near-nakedness was not a matter for embarrassment, as it seems it is for Pascoe. Nudity was not a matter for shame in the classical Aboriginal world.2
The anthropologist Lloyd Warner lived among Yolngu people in Arnhem Land in the 1920s. His admiration for the people is evident in the name of the book he published about them: A Black Civilization. He wrote:
The days in Arnhem Land are always warm. No clothes are needed for comfort. The occasional cold nights are made comfortable by windbreaks and small fires built to provide ample warmth … [The Aboriginal person’s] naked condition before the coming of the white man was far more appropriate to the country he lived in.3
The nakedness was not absolute. Among the various bodily adornments Warner listed were belts, bands, necklaces, and ‘men’s and women’s pubic covering’.4 This is generally the picture for most of the monsoon belt, although there were other instances where people wore more coverings than these, and less (see Chapter 7).
Yet under Pascoe’s model, the Gunditjmara of Victoria must have been ‘advanced’ people, and the Yolngu of Arnhem Land or the Pitjantjatjara of the Western Desert must have been ‘less advanced’ people, given the contrast in their degrees of nomadism, their use or non-use of clothing, and their interventions (or relative absence of them) in the world of natural resources.
Pascoe frequently uses the language of nineteenth-century social evolutionism, even though his concentration is not on social organisation but on subsistence and technology. He is not so close to his major source, Gerritsen, on this subject. Gerritsen made an explicit attack on social evolutionism.5 Pascoe offers an apparent rejection of social evolutionism (pages 12, 126, 154) but then proceeds to employ it. These are his own words on the subject:
These [explorers’] journals revealed a much more complicated Aboriginal economy than the primitive hunter-gatherer lifestyle we had been told was the simple lot of Australia’s First People.
Hunter-gatherer societies forage and hunt for food and do not employ agricultural methods or build permanent dwellings; they are nomadic. (pages 11–12)
Colonial Australia sought to forget the advanced nature of the Aboriginal society and economy … (page 17)
The idea of agriculture was so well advanced that seed was traded as a cultural item. (page 30)
The scholar Rupert Gerritsen assembled a large body of material about the progression of people worldwide towards sedentism and agriculture. One of the tests for this progress is the domestication of plants. (page 35)
It may be that not all Aboriginal peoples were involved in these practices but if the testament of explorers and first witnesses is to be believed most Aboriginal Australians were, at the very least, in the early stages of an agricultural society and, it could be argued, ahead of many other parts of the world. (page 47)
Permanent housing was a feature of the pre-contact Aboriginal economy and marked the movement towards agricultural reliance. (page 73)
Pottery is one of the tests applied by Western archaeologists to the developmental level reached by civilisations. Australian Aboriginals would, at first glance, appear to have failed this test … If the test of sophistication were whether or not all were fed regardless of rank or whether all contributed to the spiritual and cultural health of the civilisation, Aboriginal Australia might have a much higher rank than some of the nations considered the hallmark of human evolution. (page 105)
It would seem that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander civilisation was on a trajectory towards greater and more sophisticated use of pottery … (page 111)
China was probably the most advanced nation on earth until the eighteenth century … (page 111)
Near the end of Dark Emu, Pascoe poses a question to which he provides no clear answer: ‘Anyone reading this book and the books which form part of its research will wonder why the trajectory of development in Aboriginal Australia did not lead to a full blown scientific and agricultural advance’ (page 155).
He raises, as a possibility, the role played by population size as a causal factor in ‘innovation’. The implication is that a larger society may have been more ‘advanced’. But, he adds, ‘perhaps there is a philosophical, as well as evidentiary, reason for Aboriginal civilisation’(page 155). I strongly support this ‘philosophical’ emphasis, as is clear from Chapter 2, but it cannot be used to explain a putative low achievement on an imagined ‘trajectory of development’.
Talk of degrees of advancement and ‘early stages’ of agricultural development are the words of economic and technological evolutionism. Pascoe regards the possession of pottery, sewn clothing, agriculture, permanent settlements, and houses that employ stone rather than tree limbs, grass and bark as hallmarks of a more ‘advanced’ or more sophisticated society. He appears to regard nudity, residential mobility, economic reliance on hunting and gathering, and the use of minimalist shelters as signs of lack of ‘advancement’.
If Australian societies were, as Pascoe argues, on a ‘movement towards agricultural reliance’, was this same movement going on for over 50,000 years? If people devised these adaptations 50,000 years ago, have they been stuck in a time warp of ‘lack of advancement’ ever since? Why should we believe things would have necessarily gone any further along this ‘trajectory’ but for the fact that they were cataclysmically interrupted by European conquest in 1788 and later? If these shifts were ‘advancement’, as Pascoe says, does a failure to get any further over thousands of years mean that Aboriginal people were ‘less advanced’ than the rest of the world by 1788, perpetually treading water?
False assumptions and Eurocentric thinking underlie these questions. Unfortunately, they are directly encouraged by Pascoe’s evolutionary scheme. There are better questions: What is wrong with a stable economic system that maintains the integrity of the environment and people’s relationships with it, using minimal interference with natural cycles?6 Had people in fact achieved states of ‘equilibrium’ or settled relationships with the environment that enabled their stable continuation for extensive periods?7 Why should this be characterised as an unfinished project, as Pascoe suggests? Or was it in fact accomplished, bedded down for long eras, and adjusted to climatic and sea-level changes over centuries? Was not a minimal footprint in fact the key accomplishment?
Archaeologist Heather Builth prefers the latter understanding of the Lake Condah fish traps of Victoria’s Western District: ‘Indigenous people occupying the landscape of the Mount Eccles lava flow at the time of European contact had already achieved sustainable development by adapting appropriate extractive technology to an enhanced local ecological systems [sic].’8
Tom Griffiths again:
I think it’s a mistake to treat the concept of agriculture as a timeless, stable, universal and preordained template, to apply a European hierarchical metaphor, an imperial measure of civilisation, to societies that defy imported classifications. One of the great insights delivered by that half-century of scholarship is that Aboriginal societies produced a civilisation quite unlike any other, one uniquely adapted to Australian elements and ecosystems.9
Pascoe’s approach appears to resemble the old Eurocentric view held by the British conquerors of Aboriginal society. Those were the people who organised mass theft of Aboriginal country and many of whom justified the killing of people who resisted them, really out of greed and indifference, but often under an ideological flag of social evolutionism. They assumed they had a right to profit from the ‘survival of the fittest’ and were the ‘superior race’. The ‘less advanced’ had to make way for the ‘more advanced’. Pascoe risks taking us back to that fatal shore by resurrecting the interpretation of differing levels of complexity and differing extents of intervention in the environment as degrees of advancement and evolution and cleverness and sophistication.
Pascoe’s book is an essay in admiration of creativity and invention. Readers are encouraged to feel rushes of wonder for ingenious devices, for ‘achievements’. This is dangerously close to a Western notion of culture focused on constant innovation, competition, progress and, in its lighter moments, gadgetry, gimmickry, smartness, novelty.
Classical Aboriginal societies were not so enamoured of the idea of human creativity and invention and were completely averse to the shallow glamour of novelty. In fact, they were hyper-conservative: change was generally frowned on very seriously, and new ways usually had to be sanctioned by developments in Dreaming mythology, or by introduced sacred ceremonies, or by having been ‘found’ (not created) in dreams and then sanctioned by elders. The fish traps of Brewarrina and eastern Cape York were not claimed as the ingenious works of human beings, but were regarded as having been put there in the Dreaming, by Dreamings. The Brewarrina traps are the creation of culture hero Baiame.10 There are many similar examples of ancient creations being attributed to non-human Dreamings, from the great shell mounds of Cape York Peninsula,11 to the ancient pecked engravings at Helen Springs, Northern Territory (my own fieldwork).
Yir-Yoront people of CYP, many still living in the bush in the 1930s, made no watercraft. Given that their location was in the wetlands of the Mitchell River system and on the coast, this example stands out as evidence for the role of spiritual traditions in the adoption of technology:
Among the bush Yir Yoront the only means of water transport is a light wood log to which they cling in their constant swimming of rivers, salt creeks, and tidal inlets. These natives know that tribes forty-five miles [72 km] further north have a bark canoe. They know that these northern tribes can thus fish from mid-stream or out at sea, instead of clinging to the river banks and beaches, that they can cross coastal waters infested with crocodiles …
For them, the adoption of the canoe would not be simply a matter of learning a number of new behavioral skills for its manufacture and use. The adoption would require a much more difficult procedure; the acceptance by the entire society of a myth, either locally developed or borrowed, to explain the presence of the canoe, to associate it with some one or more of the several hundred mythical ancestors … and thus establish it as an accepted totem of one of the clans ready to be used by the whole community. The Yir Yoront have not made this adjustment, and in this case we can only say that for the time being at least, ideas have won out over very real pressures for technological change.12
Archaeologist Harry Allen was sceptical about the proposition that ‘the Aboriginal totemic philosophy maintained the economic [foraging] status quo by providing ritual substitutes for practical action and by morally discouraging technological innovation’.13 His basis for doubt was the archaeological history of innovations in lithics, religion and social organisation in the Darling Basin. But these all seem to me minor variations on a theme, not revolutions in economic or social structure, such as from foraging to shifting horticulture, from foraging to settled agriculture, or from nomadic pastoralism to hunting and gathering. Donald Thomson made this broad generalisation:
The Australian aborigines are extremely conservative, and before absorbing any important element of culture, social or material, they generally give it a place in their myth pattern and bring it within the totemic scheme. This provides a background in tradition and so gives a charter for its use.14
Technological changes that occurred elsewhere may well also have been legitimised through spiritual pathways, but surviving evidence of this is usually lacking. One of Pascoe’s focal subjects, the milling of seeds into flour for the making of seedcakes, is a relevant case. Use of millstones for grinding seeds was adopted through much of arid-zone Australia and nearby beginning somewhere around 4000 years ago.15 This was a significant shift in technology and subsistence practices that occurred after about 46,000 years of occupation of the continent. Grindstone mythology is rich in certain regions, such as the Flinders Ranges– Simpson Desert area. There, in the Simpson Desert version given by Mick McLean Irinyili, the Grinding Stone Men travel from Pirlaka (Beelaka Well) to Marrinha (Marree) and on to Mount Termination west of the Flinders Ranges, for ceremonies.16 The economic practice of seed grinding certainly had mythic and ritual accreditation by the nineteenth century in that region.
Dark Emu bypasses the widely based evidence for the introduction of seed grinding around 4000 years ago and instead uses the isolated Cuddie Springs site case as evidence that Australians had begun grinding seeds, and were the world’s ‘first bakers’, around 30,000 years ago (in the Pleistocene period), 15,000 years before the Egyptians (page 30). Dark Emu recycles that material from an unpublished manuscript by a non-archaeologist, Eric Rolls.17 Professor Mike Smith, senior archaeologist at the National Museum of Australia (NMA), after a detailed discussion of the evidence, concluded instead: ‘In this context, claims for late Pleistocene seed-grinding implements at Cuddie Springs … are tenuous.’18
Pascoe’s Young Dark Emu does not mention the common seed-grinding evidence of the last 4000 years but picks out the tenuous Cuddie Springs case as the first port of call and almost the only one.19 It is exceptional in more than one way, and quite unrepresentative of the picture. And instead of being 30,000 years old, in Young Dark Emu it suddenly becomes more than twice as ancient—65,000 years old:
She swept her hand through the grass heads at Cuddie Springs … She glanced around, selected two stones, and ground the seeds into a powder …
That was 65,000 years ago. The next people to try to bake bread were the Egyptians 13,000 years later. That woman came up with an idea far more important to humanity than the moon landing. That’s genius isn’t it?20
If the Dark Emu figure of Egyptian baking starting around 17,000 BP is correct (page 30), which it is not (it’s about 8000 BP),21 then Cuddie Springs grindstones would be allegedly not 13,000 years earlier but 46,000 years earlier. There is some confusion here.
In any case, there is no scientific consensus on an Aboriginal arrival date in what is now Australia any earlier than about 55,000 years ago (see Appendix 1). More recently Pascoe has been quoted as saying that Aboriginal people ‘cultivated land’ over a period of 120,000 years.22 There is no evidence whatsoever for this assertion.
This is just one example of Pascoe’s repeated focus on large numbers—oldest dates, largest dwellings, highest population densities, and biggest villages. But is bigger better? The idea is an expression of Western progressivism. It is a Texan view of quality.