If non-Aboriginal Australians become enamoured of works like Dark Emu in a search for forgiveness, or reconciliation, or the undoing of the colonial crimes of their forebears, this is understandable. In the case of the crimes, most of them cannot now be undone, although recognition of native title has been and will continue to be a welcome reversal of at least some of the dispossession the Old People suffered during colonisation.
But the stains of blood are permanent. No number of apologies—valuable, just and cathartic as they have been—can change what happened, yet they have been imperative nonetheless. There remains the need for the future to be better than the past, both practically and symbolically. Constitutional recognition of Australia’s First People is one important pathway of unfinished business.
Another outstanding issue is Australia Day. Australians are divided over changing the date to something other than that of the beginning of the British invasion of New South Wales in 1788 (26 January), or keeping it. A prime alternative is the day when the colonies united for the first time to form the nation-state of Australia, Federation Day. Federation occurred on 1 January 1901. Shifting the date to 1 January would be a useful move away from effectively celebrating the beginning of the destruction of much of Aboriginal society to a date that settler descendants, and Australians generally, might recognise as the beginning of their nation-state.
Australian governments at several different levels (local, state, federal) have apologised formally for the wrongs of the past, but the government that remains missing in action, and that should have been the very first to say something in apology, is that of Great Britain. Whitehall has not yet moved. The British Government, under the Crown, was the key engine on whose watch a mob of prisoners, accompanied by civilians, armed redcoats and bureaucrats, marched uninvited into New South Wales in the low thousands in 1788 and kick-started the land theft, conquest, physical attrition and emotional trauma of the original Australians generally, and the widespread degradation of the environment—all of which is now our indelible legacy, together.
The settling of land claims over large sections of the Australian map has been a partial but positive turning-back of some of the crimes of history. This is a massive if patchy process that has been going on since the 1970s. Perhaps the most reckless assertion in Dark Emu, one easily falsifiable by anyone with a library card or a computer, is this:
Every Land Rights application hinges on the idea that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people did nothing more than collect available resources and therefore had no managed interaction with the land; that is, the Indigenous population did not own or use the land. [page 129]
I have a slight vested interest here, having acted as an expert anthropologist in various roles for some eighty-seven Aboriginal land claims during a period of over forty years (1979–2021), and having published numerous articles and two books on the subject, with a third on the way.1 I have never held a permanent university job and have spent most of my working life at the coalface of applied anthropology, with land claims research, heritage surveys and expert court witness work being the lion’s share of that history.
Pascoe here has the facts completely inverted. Australian land claim applications are based on evidence of traditional land tenure systems and managed resource use systems and their modern descendants. These were and are systems of considerable complexity, and constitute one of the main pillars of Aboriginal Law. Native title and other land rights regimes are an attempt to respect that Law, albeit too late for some applicants to have their wishes met. Native title is a pre-existing title, continuous since before effective British sovereignty in each region— not a grant of title.
Pascoe shows no respect for this process. He also claims that categorising Aboriginal people as ‘hunter-gatherers’ ‘is prejudicial to the rights of Aboriginal people to land’ (page 103). It certainly was in the colonial era, but in present-day Australia this claim is simply obsolete and untrue, because Aboriginal land tenure, and the primary requirements for proof of it under legislation, was not and is not based on economic use of the country: it is founded on a perpetual spiritual belonging to country that is based, usually, on descent from preceding landowners, plus some other factors, depending on the legal jurisdiction.2 The classifying of Aboriginal people as wandering hunting-and-gathering people who did not use the land the way Europeans did, and were therefore not owners of it, is a colonial-era fiction long expunged from Australian law, with the Northern Territory Aboriginal Land Rights Act of 1976, the Queensland Aboriginal Land Act of 1991, the Mabo High Court decision of 1992, and the Native Title Act of 1993. It has been expunged for much longer than that from the minds of all those with an active grasp of the subject.
There is no better condition for relationships than truthfulness. We have tried here to set part of the record straighter than it has become through the popularised mythology of history of the kind found in Dark Emu. We have done so in a positive spirit, but also a corrective one. The Old People—the First Australians—and all of us deserve better than a history that does not respect or do justice to the societies whose economic and spiritual adjustment to their environment lasted so well and so vigorously until the advent of the colonies and the subsequent degradation of much of that environment through land clearing, pastoral stocking, and the spread of feral animals and plants.
Pascoe, by consistently gilding a lily that needs no gilding, suggests that he sees a foraging way of life as inferior. Its own practitioners saw it as the Law, sanctioned by the ancients. Unlike agricultural farmers, they worked with the biota rather than overweening it and subjugating it to the god of surplus material production. They left a far better Australian environment than we have now, given that so many native species are now extinct, so many feral introduced species are creating havoc, and huge regions have been domesticated under monoculture cropping and thereby degraded in ecological richness.
In this book we have grappled with Dark Emu’s mixture of positive factual information and its tendency to trim the evidence to fit the author’s model, its lack of true scholarship, its ignoring of Aboriginal elders’ knowledge, its disturbing social evolutionist philosophy, and its overwhelming attention to the material aspects of Aboriginal food production to the exclusion of the rich spiritual propagation philosophy of the Old People’s culture.
People keep telling us, even those who are aware of Dark Emu’s many flaws, that at least it has got people thinking about an important subject. We hope their interest continues, and that the tens of thousands who have read the book go beyond it and keep learning more from other sources. So long as Dark Emu is not the agent of their entrenchment in a dogmatic view, that is good. So long as we remain open to debate and a respectful exchange of views, in a shared space and not from behind walls, it is more than good. It is in that spirit that we offer this book to the reader.