Dark Emu

History has portrayed Australia's 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 behaviours were inconsistent with the hunter-gatherer tag, which turns out to 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 Australia's past is required - for the benefit of us all.Dark Emu, a bestseller in Australia, won both the Book of the Year Award and the Indigenous Writer's Prize in the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards.

'Dark Emu ... is revolutionary, the most important book published in Australia by any writer in this or any other century.'

Auteur

Bruce Pascoe lives in Australia and has a Bunurong, Tasmanian, and Yuin heritage. Dark Emu won both the Book of the Year Award and the Indigenous Writer's Prize in the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards.

Bruce is currently working on two films for ABC TV and a novel.

Texte du rabat

Trade paperback. The pre-settler agricultural practices of Aboriginal people across the Australian landmass are explored by prominent Aboriginal writer Bruce Pascoe, arguing that the myth of indigenous Australians as strictly hunter-gatherers was a ploy to justify dispossession.