I started school at a place called Batchelor near a uranium mine called Rum Jungle in the Northern Territory of Australia. I went off to school each morning with an Aboriginal boy called Johnny who had feet that were so wide they didn’t fit into shoes.
And maybe he didn’t wear shoes because he wanted to feel the ground that he walked upon.
There is a book by Richard Trudgen Why Warriors Lie Down and Die that explains a lot about the people of East Arnhem land, not far from where I grew-up. It also explains, repeatedly through the book, that these Yolngu people have trouble understanding our world. They feel there is something they don’t quite understand. For them it is as though we (Balanda/whitefellas) are keeping something from them – not telling them everything.
That is how I often feel about the world. That when it comes to how our society is organised, and how decisions are made, a lot is opaque. So much doesn’t make any sense.
I often write things out, to try and understand.
I was never considered much good at English when I was at school, but I’ve persisted with the writing, and guess it is what I have become: a writer. I really value the people who read my articles, and especially those who subscribe at my blog for my monthly e-news updates.
I had a good number ‘unsubscribe’ after my last e-newsletter. The offending comment – from me – seems to have been:
I always think it good to keep an open mind about history. To understand context and all the available evidence before making a judgement. I am often dismayed by my countrymen. The vitriol with which Conservatives lampooned Bruce Pascoe’s book Dark Emu: so disappointing.
Some just hit the unsubscribe button at the end of the email. But others sent me comments. The comments tended to be along the lines:
Stick to your science please.
Though there is a recent comment at an unrelated blog post:
I love that you’re spreading your scientific wings Jennifer to provide us with information that is critical to our understanding of the global unrest and change.
When I pressed the point in my reply-emails to those who where ‘Gobsmacked’ at my comment; when I asked their specific objection to ‘Dark Emu’, it seemed to always come back to the authority of Andrew Bolt and questions of Bruce Pascoe’s aboriginality – which is arguably as much about history and culture as genetics, that is a science.
I’ve never done one of those ancestry DNA tests, but I’m guessing I have a Viking lineage.
Culturally though, I would arguably, be closer to the Australian Aboriginal. They say the first seven years of a person’s life are important in terms of their perspective and values.
The first seven years of my life were spent living in a mud-brick house in the hot and humid Northern Territory of Australia just up the hill from a billabong that is part of Coomalie Creek – just to the west of Kakadu National Park. Aborigines lived in a camp on the property and us kids swam in that one billabong, together. Me as white as a Norwegian and them as black as an Australian Aboriginal. We were stuck in the same place. That was the first seven years of my life. That was my reality. It was another thirty years before I saw snow.
I did not grow up with any of the experiences of people who lived in northern Europe, though that is probably my ancestry in terms of DNA. I don’t believe I could write anything useful about life where my ancestor came from – the cold northern latitudes – but because of my childhood experience, and then my academic studies and my later research – I do know something about the tropics, especially northern Australia.
My father went north, leaving Melbourne in the 1950s. He first had a job with CSIRO, in rice research at the Ord River in Western Australia. Then he worked for the Northern Territory government, running an experimental farm again growing rice. He employed an Aborigine as a tractor driver. As the story goes, he told the man that he would be paid properly for his work. But when the first pay day came around, he wasn’t. When my father enquired, he was told by the administration: because the tractor driver was a blackfella – he wasn’t entitled to full pay. He wasn’t entitled to be paid the same as the other tractor drivers. It didn’t matter that the blackfella worked harder or did a better job.
My late father fought the bureaucracy back then – for fairness for people who worked hard, irrespective of their colour. Then he left the government, and with my mother, took out two leases on land that was to be developed as a farm. He then fought the bureaucracy all over again. This time to be able to not clear the land of all its trees and sink unnecessary bores – while the bureaucrats insisted as part of the lease he ‘develop the water resource’. There were rules back then: if you had a lease you had to improve the land according to a set of instructions – it didn’t matter whether the instructions made sense financially or environmentally.
Eventually, on the day of my seventh birthday, my family left that property. We all piled into a Holden stationwagon and Dad drove south away from the rules governing the development of land in the Northern Territory. I remember the exact green colour of the car and how the billabong looked as we drove away; the water always so black from the tannins in the Melaleuca trees upstream. I remember that I had the top right bunk bed in the caravan we towed. My sleeping bag that was also green had a hood and a red tartan lining. My mother let me choose it from a mail order catalogue. It was incredibly exciting for me at the time, looking through that catalogue and deciding on which sleeping bag. Most everything else was left behind but I do remember taking, without permission, a poetry book and hiding it under the foam mattress on that top bunk. I still have that book with all the poems by C.J. Dennis. I would later take Readers Digests left lying around in the caravan parks we stayed at and hide them under that same mattress; back then the Readers Digest published poems and often they were by Clive James.
We left everything else, when we drove away. I did have a collection of pressed wildflowers in one of Dad’s technical books. They were left behind.
Wildflowers came up on the property after the burn-offs. The red earth would would be left with black charring, but from it would emerge the most delicate little flowers that were not there before. Dad would take me to inspect the areas that had been burnt, and I would keep an eye out for flowers.
And I’ve no idea where Johnny is now.
It is a fact that until very recently, having an Aboriginal ancestry was a major handicap. It you were ‘coloured’, it was something best hidden. Your aboriginally was best denied or hidden if you wanted to be treated with any dignity and to be paid a wage.
Women got the right to vote in Australia in 1902, it was another sixty years, not until 1962, that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders had the opportunity to vote in federal elections.
Apparently, the year before Bruce Pascoe published his book ‘Dark Emu’ he tried to establish his Aboriginality. But so far, he has been unsuccessful. I understand that being accepted often has less to do with your DNA or where you grew-up, but whether you are recognised by the group who now control such things.
I have never meet Bruce Pascoe. I enjoyed reading his book ‘Dark Emu’. I thought it an easy to read, touching on important topics and from an alternative perspective. I liked that he asked questions of the reader, provided some evidence, and covered a range of issues all on topics of great interest to me.
I have been meaning to ‘fact check’ some of his claims; but so far I have not put the time aside to do that. Many of Bruce Pascoe’s case studies were new to me, some I had previously read about in Bill Gammage’s much more technical tome, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. His general thesis accords with what I know from my research at the South Australian Museum back a decade ago into the Yaraldi of the lower Murray River, information in Richard Trudgen’s book, and others. There were communities, pre-European settlement, that actively managed the Australian landscape in ways that ensured protection from bushfires and so that different species of plant and animal had suitable habitat. These Aboriginal communities stored food, and passed on important knowledge across generations through songs and stories. This was a culture that cared deeply about land and water, which are the things that I have always cared most about. Bruce Pascoe captured some of this in a popular way in this book Dark Emu; that is my opinion. As regards his heritage and his Aboriginally, I find it hard to get too excited about this topic. It is of less interest to me than Prince Harry’s paternity. But I now realise it is of great interest to some of my readers.
According to an article in The Guardian from two years ago:
Pascoe identifies as of Tasmanian descent and Yuin by cultural law. Cashman, a member of the government’s senior advisory group on the co-design of an Indigenous voice to government, has previously questioned Pascoe’s Yuin ancestry on social media. She declined a request for an interview on Saturday but confirmed she had written to [Peter] Dutton.
The minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt, rejected her call for an investigation into Pascoe. Through a spokesman, Wyatt said a member of the advisory committee should not have made a formal complaint about the writer’s Aboriginality.
“The minister does not believe this is appropriate,” a spokesman said.
Wyatt has previously said he does not support a register to assess Aboriginality. Last year, he defended Pascoe in an interview on Sky News, saying: “If Bruce tells me he’s Indigenous, then I know that he’s Indigenous.”
Pascoe has been fighting bushfires in east Gippsland and could not be reached on Saturday. His son, Jack Pascoe, said the fires had been burning on his father’s property, that many of the writer’s friends had lost their homes and one had been killed.
“Given the stress of the situation, our family is surprised by the timing of these allegations coming around again,” Jack Pascoe said.
“We stand by the identity of our family. The insinuation that my father has fabricated his heritage is hard to take because for him it’s an issue that has been part of the public discourse for 40 years.”
Jack Pascoe, who is the conservation and research manager at the Conservation Ecology Centre in Cape Otway, said the complaint seemed to be driven by the push by Cashman and others for registry of Aboriginality.
“I’d prefer to be talking about how our traditional ecological knowledge could help mitigate damage from bushfires and reduce risk to communities rather than be talking about these distractions,” he said.
Indigenous academic Marcia Langton, the co-chair of the advisory group, last year said on Twitter that Pascoe was collateral damage in a fight against the facts of Aboriginal history.
What I’m most interested in is Australia’s natural history and how it has been shaped through Aboriginal land management. But I’m also interested in which bits Bruce Pascoe got wrong in his book Dark Emu. I’m also interested to know what specifically he has got wrong about his identify and how this should be defined.
Bruce Pascoe has a new book out entitled Country – First Knowledges, written with Bill Gammage. I’m planning to review it in a future blog post, I haven’t finished reading it yet.
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The image at the very top of this blogpost is an emu looking at the town of Denham in Shark bay Western Australia. I wonder what he/she sees. Shutterstock Item ID: 1551229643
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Jen, you need to update your research on Pascoe. Even Geoffrey Blainey, has all but called him a charlatan. To claim aborigines were advanced agriculturalists pre white settlement, is ludicrous and fanciful.
His exaggerations and lies have been well documented. His educational qualifications that enable him to gain an Enterprise Professorship at Melbourne Uni are fraudulent. His claim that aborigines invented democracy is just plain stupid.
There has never been any evidence unearthed to verify his claims of being an ordered society, living in houses in towns of a thousand people or more and tilling, sowing, tending, and harvesting grains are more suited to a children’s story book, than an historical book.
Furthermore, he changes his story because to be a good liar, one must have a good memory. And although many have offered to pay for a DNA test he has refused. His ancestry is all white, in spite of his claims to belong to this tribe and then that tribe. Dark Emu is a joke and Pascoe, while a good writer, is a charlatan.
Hi Jennifer,
Thanks for your comments about Bruce Pascoe.
Much appreciated.
I have read “Dark Emu” and have looked through various authors and their criticisms of Pascoe’s ideas.
I plan to get hold of “Bitter Harvest” by Peter O’Brien.
I really appreciate reading your Blog, and am always interested in your research.
All the best for your future endeavours.
There’s a couple of things Jennifer.
People talk about their heritage as if its a ticket to something, no matter how silly it looks. Oh to see ourselves as others see us!
Someone growing up in a certain location can have an affiliation as strong as any aborigine. Such people can be swept aside depending on the politics.
You’ll no doubt be familiar with the quote attributed to George Orwell: “he who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future”
Kris,
Can you please give me a quote from Bruce Pascoe, preferably from his book ‘Dark Emu’ and with a page number, that you consider ludicrous. It is difficult to argue when you paraphrase and are so general in your criticism.
I would like to better understand exactly what you consider fanciful etc.
Most of my research concerns the Yaraldi, who lived on the eastern side of the lower Murray River. First hand accounts from the earliest anthropologists would suggest they lived in large communities with sophisticated systems of rules including for management of the estuary’s fishery. They certainly stored food, and their myth and stories explain the big floods and the storms and how the Murray River’s mouth used to close over.
In Bill Gamamage’s book ‘The Biggest Estate on Earth’ there is some description of how beautiful that country around Lake Alexandrina was, before European settlement.
Hi Jen,
It seems you may have found a new subject of controversy, lol.
As Mike Burston says, ties to places are sometimes quite strong among any of us. Someone famous in history once said words like, “Give me the child his first six summers and the man will be mine”.
I spent my early years around Southland NZ – places there can bring tears to my eyes and it isn’t sadness.
There have been waves of settlement in Australia, by different races and a lot has been written on that subject. A subject which, like much in this world, seems to have also been affected by Rockefeller money .
Yes, “he who controls the past controls the future”. How much of our history has been fabricated?
North American Indians helped found Harvard, because something (said to be disease to which they had no immunity), took out all their older people and they LOST so much knowledge that they didn’t ever want such to happen again.
Imagine if , by some design or coincidence, such happened to us. Coupled with an electronic crash.
What nonsense would the kids at school carry forward ?
Alex S. Gaddes related to me the story of how his father broke a leg while living and working as a cedar-getter at the head of the Nambucca River in the mid-north coast hinterland of NSW in the early 1900’s. The local aboriginal doctor was called for – and the patient was placed into ‘traction’ in the fork of a tree. The aboriginal ‘neighbours’ then looked after him for weeks until the leg healed, (albeit shorter than the other one.)
Alex retained a deep appreciation of the aboriginal culture – and the ‘dreamtime’ stories
they used to explain their world – even though he set about establishing the Ratios Principle and the overreaching Solar-induced Orbital Dry Cycle Hierarchy that contradicted these fantasies, along with the climate change, social and religious fantasies of white society.
Aboriginal society contains similar shortcomings and foibles as those that plague ‘white’ society. Many of these belief systems were forcibly ‘inflicted’ on the aboriginals by ‘holier than thou’ white colonisation – but the basic aboriginal appreciation of the land was never diminished.
The exact nature of the terrestrial footprint of the Dry Cycle Hierarchy shows that no-one
has ‘God on their side’ – and every sentence must end in a question mark.
Hi Jen
I have enjoyed your articles on climate change as they present a considered alternative argument on the issue with a good scientific basis. I don’t agree with everything you say but I think they make a worthwhile and thoughtful contribution to the debate – more people should read the articles, especially those in the media. For my part (as an environmental and soil scientist), I think the recent book by Steven Koonin ‘Unsettled’ provides a thorough summary of the situation we are in.
However, your article on Dark Emu and Bruce Pascoe left me cold and doubtful about your commitment to sound scientific debate. Like others, I seriously considered leaving your blog.
I have read Dark Emu and found it fanciful and completely bereft of scientific evidence. I could go on for many pages why it’s fundamentally wrong on so may aspects, however the book by Peter Sutton and Kerryn Walsh ‘Farmers or Hunter Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate’ (which I’m sure you’ve read) provides a thorough analysis and debunk of Pascoe’s book. I have no interest on whether he has Aboriginal ancestry or not – that is quite irrelevant to the material he has presented. Some I have spoken to about Dark Emu have said to me that it is good to read ‘Dark Emu’ and hear an alternative view to the ‘traditional’ understanding of Indigenous community prior to European settlement. To me, that’s like suggesting all parents should read Pete Evans’ cookbook on paleo diets for babies ie. it’s fundamentally flawed!
Hi David H.
Rather than the general, it would be good if you provided a specific example from ‘Dark Emu’ of what you most object to.
I have not read Sutton and Walsh. By analogy: If someone wants to understand and object to my analyses of the climate data, I think it best they check the evidence, rather than read Graham Readfern in The Guardian.
There is so much online about me that is plain wrong both in terms of what I have written, what my analyses of datasets claim, and who funds me.
Well Jen, there are now two excellent books that refute Pascoes’s Drivel. One by Peter O’Brien that goes through Dark Emu piece by piece and demonstrates conclusively that Pascoe has taken historical sources out of context, selectively edited sources and fabricated claims to justify his fake history. The book is titled “Bitter Harvest: The illusion of Aboriginal agriculture in Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu” and is available via quadrant.
The second book “Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate”, by anthropologist Peter Sutton and archaeologist Keryn Walshe shows Pascoe’s work is “littered with unsourced material”, uses selective quotations and exaggerates “weak evidence”, including the suggestion Aboriginal people have occupied Australia for 120,000 years.
Suggest you read both before you dig yourself a deeper hole supporting a charlatan.
As to Pascoe’s claims of aboriginal ancestry the available evidence clearly shows he has English ancestry. https://australianhistory972829073.wordpress.com/2019/10/23/bruce-pascoe-how-aboriginal-is-he/
Hi Jen
What I object to is the almost absolute lack of scientific assessment. There are just so many faults in Dark Emu it’s almost a joke, having worked in a professional capacity in agriculture and land management in Northern Australia for over 40 years. I strongly suggest anyone who has an interest in the debate read the Sutton and Walshe book. I haven’t read the Peter O’Brien book as noted by Marc Hendrickx but intend to asap.
I am friends with a number of associates who have worked with Aboriginal community leaders and they are vehemently at odds with the Dark Emu story. Indeed, a major criticism of Pascoe’s work is that he had very little communication with Aboriginal elders in writing the book.
Still no one wanting to provide one or more of Pascoe’s many case studies, then we can look see what we disagree about? What about one example from his book. Something you can easily prove him to be wrong about.
The criticisms of Pascoe contained in O’Brien and the work by Sutton and Welsh are so numerous and devastating to his contention that Australian Aboriginals were farmers rather than Hunter-Gatherers prior to European settlement, that it is almost ridiculous to list one example.
Jen, you really need to catch up with both these works to understand why people are reacting the way they are. It seems you have had your head in the sand on this one!
You might also put this journal article on your reading list…. ‘Foragers or Farmers: Dark Emu and the Controversy over Aboriginal Agriculture’ published in Anthropological Forum, ANU academic Dr Ian Keen. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00664677.2020.1861538?journalCode=canf20 One example from Ian Keen…
From Keen:
The most egregious claim for large settlement in Dark Emu is the case of supposed towns in the Western District of Victoria, supposedly based on aquaculture. Pascoe draws on a study by Heather Builth (2000, 2002) according to whom the extensive fish and eel canals found in the Western District were built by Aboriginal people for aquaculture. There is in fact no evidence that the structures were used for breeding fish or eels. Rather the structures channelled waters along the natural drainage lines and so guided the migration of aquatic species, and provided the infrastructure for the insertion and use of woven fish traps. The stone work has been dated at up to 7–6000 years old.
Pascoe also uncritically accepts Builth’s proposal that a hierarchical society with a very high population density and large villages and towns was based on the large scale smoking and storage of eels and fish taken from the canals and traps. The inference of large settlements was based on interpreting the majority of stone circles found in the region as the bases of dwellings, leading, together with assumptions about household size, to an estimate of a population of some 10,000 people. The problem is that stone circles in the region frequently occur naturally, formed by large stones being clustered around the bases of large trees, and left after a tree has burnt and rotted away. Builth claimed to have eliminated such cases through statistical analysis of the distribution of stone in the circles, but Sutton and Walshe cast doubt on the adequacy of her methodology. Annie Clarke (1994) has commented that the sites of Lake Condah and surrounding properties have become mythologised in the archaeological literature and in the realm of public knowledge.
A few examples from one of Peter O’Brien’s numerous Quadrant articles, based on his book Bitter Harvest: Very aptly titled… The Bogus Aboriginal World of Bruce Pascoe https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/12/the-bogus-aboriginal-world-of-bruce-pascoe/
Dark Emu is has won considerable popular and critical acclaim. It has won Premiers’ awards for literature in New South Wales and Victoria. It is buttressed by an impressive bibliography of some 295 titles, suggesting a work of great authority.
However, almost two thirds of the titles are not actually cited in explanatory notes, making them the silicone implants of the academic world. Of the 264 notes that Pascoe provides, eighty-two of them are to the works of Rupert Gerritsen (twenty-two), Bill Gammage (fifteen), Charles Sturt (fifteen) and Thomas Mitchell (thirty). Gerritsen and Gammage are not primary sources. They are modern authors who support the idea of an agrarian Aboriginal society—indeed Pascoe concedes that “Rupert [Gerritsen] should have got all the credit for Dark Emu”, a sentiment that gets ready agreement from Gerritsen’s brother Rolf, a professor of economic and indigenous policy studies at Charles Darwin University. “Ninety per cent of Bruce’s book is taken from my brother’s research,” Rolf Gerritsen says with a chuckle, adding that this is not to belittle Pascoe’s considerable achievement in popularising complex issues and shifting the national conversation about indigenous history.
It seemed to me that Dark Emu was worth a closer look. Little did I know what I was starting. The result of my research was a book, Bitter Harvest: The Illusion of Aboriginal Agriculture in Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu. In it, I attempt to determine whether Dark Emu validates Pascoe’s claims.
The nineteenth-century explorers Charles Sturt and Thomas Mitchell are the two main authors that Pascoe draws upon for first-hand observation and they are the authorities he most often quotes when talking about the book. For his theory to hold up, it must hold up strongly in Sturt and Mitchell.
The piece in the Australian commences with one of Pascoe’s “yarns”, which tells the story of how he first stumbled across the evidence for his thesis. It seems he was summoned to a meeting with some unnamed academics in Canberra, who politely requested that he refrain from propagating his ideas about indigenous agriculture. As he tells it: “when I left that meeting, I got in my old beaten-up ute, and I was furious”. He says he drove straight to a second-hand bookstore and plonked down $8 for a copy of the journals of Sir Thomas Mitchell, which he opened while sitting in the driver’s seat. There his eyes fell on Mitchell’s eyewitness account of Aboriginal villages in Queensland housing more than a thousand people, and “haycocks” of harvested seed-grass stretching for miles, drying in the sun to make flour for native bread. It was then he knew he had his next book.
This must rank as divine intervention on a scale unheard of since the appearance of Our Lady of Fatima. The second-hand bookstore that he drove straight to just happened to have a copy of Mitchell’s journals. He just happened to open it at the page that described an Aboriginal village in Queensland, housing more than a thousand people, and “haycocks” of harvested seeds—information that, as luck would have it, went right to the heart of his thesis.
Thomas Mitchell made one expedition to Queensland—his fourth. His journal of that expedition comprises ten chapters of densely worded prose in which references to indigenous “agricultural” activities or dwellings number less than ten, spread across all chapters. I have read Mitchell’s journal of his fourth expedition several times and can find no reference to even one village housing more than a thousand people.
Pascoe sets great store by the idea of large permanently occupied villages of over one thousand people. He claims:
On the Darling River, explorers saw similar towns to those seen by Sturt and Mitchell, and estimated the population of each to be no less than a thousand. Peter Dargin estimated the population of the region as 3000 but the journals of Sturt, Mitchell and others reveal that they passed many such populous villages.
He is attempting to paint a picture of a sedentary lifestyle that debunks the accepted view of pre-colonial Aborigines as nomadic hunter-gatherers.
Pascoe doesn’t name the other explorers who saw these villages so we have to rely on Sturt and Mitchell. The most egregious deception Pascoe commits on this topic occurs very early in Dark Emu:
Mitchell also recorded his astonishment at the size of the villages. He noticed:
“some huts … being large, circular; and made of straight rods meeting at an upright pole at the centre; the outside had first been covered with bark and grass, and the entirety coated over with clay; the fire appeared to have been made nearly in the centre; and a hole at the top had been left as a chimney”.
He counts the houses and estimates a population of over one thousand. He’s disappointed that nobody’s home; it’s obvious they have only just left, and the evidence is everywhere that they have used the place for a very long time. [my emphasis]
In the complete extract from his journal, Mitchell does not “count the houses and estimate a population of over one thousand”. This is a fabrication. In fact, Mitchell recorded only: “we had noticed, this day, some of their huts”. In fact, having read them, I can assert that nowhere in the journals of Sturt’s three expeditions or Mitchell’s four expeditions is there any reference whatsoever to villages of “no less than a thousand”.
Peter Dargin, writing in the 1970s, did indeed estimate the population of the region around the Brewarrina fish traps at 3000 but he also noted that this population was dispersed: “The population of a camp could be 10 to 30 although larger communities were common along the main river frontage.”
The region Dargin was talking about, as detailed in his book, extends from Tilpa (north-east of Wilcannia) to Mungindi (north-east of Moree) a distance of over 500 kilometres, allowing for a linear population density of six persons per kilometre.
The idea of large, permanently occupied villages is a major, one might even say essential, plank of the theory that Aborigines were agriculturalists who tilled the soil, planted seed and tended the resultant crop rather than simply harvesting a naturally occurring food source. And, as I show in Bitter Harvest, it is just not true.
But that is not the only flaw in this very flimsy edifice. Almost every significant claim that Pascoe makes that is sourced, turns out to be either false or misrepresented. For example, at one point, as part of a narrative that Aborigines exercised a form of peaceable uniform government over the entire continent, he states that Charles Sturt had noted: “We seldom, if ever, saw weapons in the hands of the natives.” Sturt did say that, but Pascoe failed to complete the quote: “We seldom, if ever, saw weapons in the hands of the natives of the interior.” Dark Emu is littered with such failures.
Most of Dark Emu is devoted to amassing evidence of agricultural practice and most of that evidence is either speculation or mischaracterisation. Instances of explorers or colonists observing Aborigines actually tilling soil or sowing seed amount to no more than three. A whole chapter is devoted to what Pascoe describes as “aquaculture” but is actually nothing more than a description of various fishing techniques—some of them quite sophisticated—but which denote nothing more than hunting or gathering, whichever term you want to use. There is no evidence of breeding stock.
In a section titled “Irrigation”, Pascoe extols the impressive engineering credentials of Aborigines in building dams. He claims these were for irrigation but provides virtually no evidence that they were for anything other than water storage. One example he quotes is of a dam capable of holding 700,000 litres, which sounds impressive. Evidently, however, he is relying on the credulous reader not to realise that this is less than one third the capacity of an Olympic swimming pool. If they did, they’d be even less impressed with the next dam he highlights, Godfrey’s Tank in the Great Western Desert, which was estimated to have held over 151,000 litres.
Using the same technique, in another section he compares Aboriginal “houses” with Irish croft houses.
In my opinion, the true purpose of Dark Emu is not really to “set the record straight” as to the capabilities of pre-colonial Aborigines, in order that we Australians might advance together, but to promote the idea that the colonisation of Australia was illegal because it was imposed upon an advanced sedentary agricultural economy. This notion would be a useful fillip to any campaign to entrench a form of Aboriginal sovereignty.
The other string to that bow—a system of Aboriginal pan-continental government—emerges in the latter half of Dark Emu. Pascoe claims, inter alia, that:
It’s difficult to look at the decision-making processes involved in the creation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander government and not think of the word “democracy”.
He also claims:
Of all the systems humans have devised to manage their lives on earth, Aboriginal government looks most like the democratic model.
Pascoe cites examples whereby various clans co-operated or traded with each other, to discredit the fact that Aboriginal occupation of Australia was essentially a collage of disparate nomadic clans—speaking over 250 different languages—sometimes fighting, sometimes co-operating and sometimes ignoring each other
This is important to his case, since the colonisation of Australia was based, according to international law of the time, on the fact that Aborigines were nomadic hunter-gatherer clans that had not coalesced into a self-governing nation with a uniform legal code.
The essential premise of Dark Emu is to overturn both those realities.
Towards the end of the book, Pascoe develops a rich ragout of grievance, exemplified in the following passage:
It seems improbable that a country can continue to hide from the actuality of its history in order to validate the fact that having said sorry, we refuse to say thanks. Should we ever decide to say thanks, the next step on a moral nation’s agenda is to ensure that every Australian acknowledges the history and insists that, as we are all Australians, we should have the opportunity to share the education, health and employment of that country on equal terms. Many will say that equality is insufficient to account for the loss of land, but in our current predicament it is not a bad place to start.
The underlined words (my emphasis) bell the cat.
The modern nation of Australia is a fait accompli. It cannot be undone by any agency other than ourselves. And the purpose of Dark Emu is to shame us into doing just that. A house divided against itself cannot stand and if we allow ourselves to be divided, or encourage one group of citizens to see themselves as separate—or more than equal, as Pascoe suggests—we will fail as a nation.
The easy acceptance and unquestioning acclaim that Dark Emu has won does not bode well. Here are some comments from historians that appeared in the Australian article:
Even some of the historians who contest the details of Dark Emu doff their hat to its author’s breakaway success. “It’s a positive message that a lot of people want to hear, and Bruce is an Aboriginal man telling it,” says Ian McNiven, professor of indigenous archaeology at Monash University. “He’s an extraordinary looking man, he’s a great orator and a great writer … if you can turn a book like this into a bestseller in airport bookshops, more power to you.”
Many academic historians admire Pascoe’s achievement, among them Professor Lynette Russell of Monash University, the co-author of a new book of revisionist indigenous history, Australia’s First Naturalists. “What Bruce has done is trawl the records and found fantastically rich and useful material,” Russell says. “I’m a big fan of the book because it’s had such a huge impact.”
Many academic experts also believe Dark Emu romanticises pre-contact indigenous society as an Eden of harmony and pacifism, when in fact it was often a brutally tough survivalist way of life. It’s a criticism most are reluctant to air publicly, given the sensitivity of contradicting a popular indigenous historian.
For archaeologists such as Ian McNiven and Harry Lourandos, however, any criticism of Pascoe is tempered by their delight at seeing a book detailing the complexities of indigenous culture riding high in the bestseller lists. Lourandos—now an adjunct professor at James Cook University—agrees with Pascoe that much of Dark Emu’s content is little known to the broader reading public, and he’s heartened to see an indigenous author filling that gap. “He’s appealing to that younger generation and he’s got the persona of a guru, and once you get that, you are celestialised,” Lourandos notes wryly. “In this age of political unrest, there’s a hankering for that.”
If the above quotes do not set your alarm bells ringing, you are tone deaf. As an example of post-truth academia in action, it may be unparalleled. It would be an intellectual failure of conservatism to let Dark Emu go unchallenged.
And this list of 10 Howlers from Sutton and Walshe as listed by Mark Powell in his quadrant piece… https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/bennelong-papers/2021/06/bruce-pascoes-top-ten-howlers/
What follows is a ten-point summary as to the most salient criticisms of Dark Emu that Sutton and Walshe make and hence, why their scholarly judgment should be heeded by all government educational departments.
First, the resurrection of social evolutionism. For those on the Left—such as Sutton and Walshe—this is probably the most stinging criticism of them all since it is essentially racist. While Pascoe himself rejects that he does this, the language which he goes on to use betrays what he really believes. As Sutton and Walshe write:
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’.
Second, the absence of Aboriginal words for farming. Sutton rightly observes that, “Culture is to a very significant degree reflected in language”. Hence, if Aboriginal peoples had been engaged in farming practices then there would be evidence in their language for it. But as Sutton says:
I have consulted dictionaries of around forty Aboriginal languages looking for words glossed as ‘farm’, ‘farmer’, ‘to farm’, ‘garden,’ to sow’, ‘hoe’, ‘crop’, ‘to plant’, ‘weed’, and ‘to plough’. Almost invariably there are no such terms.
As if that were not as conclusive enough, Sutton exposes Pascoe’s linguistic ignorance in the following paragraph. The criticism is devastating:
Almost the only venture into language in Dark Emu is this: ‘It seems even the name of Lake Killapaninna [sic: Killalpaninna] has within it a word for the harvest grass variously spelt pannana or parrara. The evidence, while now difficult to find on the surface of the land, is still embedded in the language (page 47). Killalpaninna (more accurately Kirlawirlpanhinha) actually translates from the original Diyari not as ‘harvest grass’ but as ‘In the Vagina’, a name arising from the site’s sacred mythology according to the highly trained linguist Peter Austin, who wrote a study of the language of the Diyari people whose country includes Lake Killalpaninna. Pascoe describes his own etymology here as ‘evidence’. The actual and contrary facts, however, appeared in a published paper by Austin twenty-eight years before Pascoe’s appeared.
Third, extremely poor research methods. While Dark Emu has received a plethora of awards, including being incorporated into school curricula, Sutton and Walshe argue that it is basically untrustworthy. Indeed, the authors eviscerate Pascoe’s work as follows:
…it is littered with unsourced material. It is poorly researched. It distorts and exaggerates many old sources. It selects evidence to suit the author’s opinions, and it ignores large bodies of information that do not support the author’s opinions. It contains a large number of factual errors, a range of which we analyse here. Others we could not include for want of space.
Fourth, Pascoe completely misunderstands the current legal practice as how land rights are granted. As Sutton explains:
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 applications 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]
…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 incredible 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.
Fifth, an over-reliance on the reports European explorers. One of the most damning criticisms Sutton and Walshe make is that,
Pascoe has concentrated more on historical sources, especially explorer’s journals, than on the evidence of Aboriginal people who have traditional knowledge. In fact, there is almost no evidence in Dark Emu that he has asked Indigenous elders about their Old People’s economic practices.
What’s more, they go on to say,
Nor does Dark Emu draw significantly on works by specialist scholars who have studied Aboriginal traditional economics and material culture under senior Indigenous expert mentoring, often through a lifetime.
Sutton and Walshe proceed to explain why relying on the journals of European explorers is so problematic:
…Pascoe’s heavy reliance on explorers journals is reliance on the evidence of those who encountered classical Aboriginal Australia only transiently at each location, and typically without any language in common with those they met. They were also the vanguard field agents of Aboriginal dispossession during the predatory expansion of the agrarian society of the British. They were men who were anxious to be able to map and report valuable future pastoral and agricultural environments back to Sydney and London. They were the forward scouts for the army of land-hungry farmers who would come in their wake. Waving fields of grass and stacks of seed-bearing stems, real as they were, could be easily read from a European standpoint as meadows in waiting, full of promise for the coming wave of agricultural usurpers.
Regarding the category of ‘specialist scholars’, Sutton and Walshe refer to the work of Dr Ian Keen of the Australian National University, ‘whose 2004 book is a thoroughly researched study of multiple regional Aboriginal economics on the threshold of conquest by the British Empire. He describes a rich array of cultural and economic practices, but does not find that mainland Indigenous Australians practiced agriculture or gardening’. By the way, an excellent scholarly critique of Dark Emu by Dr Keen can be read here.
Sixth, Pascoe often misrepresents the academic sources he does quote from. For example, Sutton and Walshe state:
Pascoe links gardening and cropping to the settled life—that is, to what is sometimes called sedentism. Given the extent to which Dark Emu owes a debt to the work of Bill Gammage, it is unfortunate that Pascoe effectively rejects him on the question of sedentism. Gammage said:
Neither in Australia’s richest nor poorest parts, by European standards, were people tempted to settle. Instead they quite their villages and eels, their crops and stores and templates, to walk their country.
They were mobile. No livestock, no beast of burden anchored them. They did not stay in their houses or by their crops.
At this point, Sutton overlooks Peter O’Brien’s invaluable contribution, Bitter Harvest (Quadrant, 2019), dismissing it is ‘a pugnacious polemical assessment of Dark Emu’ which consults ‘extremely few anthropologists or archaeologists’ (page 220, footnote 47). What’s more, this curt assessment is somewhat unfair to the author in question, since O’Brien has never claimed to be an ‘expert’ on Aboriginal culture, but rather an ‘auditor’ of the sources Pascoe himself claimed proved his case. As O’Brien wrote in The Spectator Australia:
…I have repeatedly stated that, in writing Bitter Harvest, I did not set out to prove Aborigines were hunter/gatherers, nor to prove that they were not agriculturalists, nor to position Aboriginal society in any particular way in between. I set out to demonstrate that Pascoe had failed to prove his own thesis. In doing so, I, of course, relied principally on the sources that Pascoe cited. Pascoe’s shtick was that his theory was buttressed by the journals of the early explorers and settlers and so my modus operandi was to check those same references. As I have also said, I saw my role simply as an auditor. And my audit came to the same conclusion as Drs Sutton and Walshe, albeit 18 months earlier than they did — that Dark Emu is a complete fraud.
Seventh, rejection of testimony from European castaways. Following on from the previous point, Pascoe not only relies on—a misrepresentation—of the journals of early European explorers but shows ‘little or no reliance on the evidence of those who lived on the Aboriginal side of the frontier for months on end, learning from the traditional owners of the lands they lived in and learning local languages’. What’s more,
There is also almost no reliance in Dark Emu on those early castaways who lived inside Australian Indigenous societies and operated in local languages, for years on end, as in the case of William Buckley (32 years), James Morrill (17 years), James Davis (13 years), John Sterry Baker (14 years) and Barbara Thomson (5 years). Sutton and Walshe also include a valuable appendix documentary all of Buckley’s movements while he lived with the Aborigines.
In short, Pascoe is what Sutton and Walshe dismiss as ‘an armchair theorist’ — a criticism all the more damning when they quote the famous anthropologist W.E.H. ‘Bill’ Stanner:
‘The damage to our appreciation of Aboriginal life really came from the men of the armchair, who write from afar under a kind of enchantment’.
Eighth, Australian aborigines were hunter-gathers and did not engage in agriculture. This point lies at the very heart of the debate. Sutton and Walshe persuasively argue that the Old People—as Sutton prefers to label Aboriginal peoples—that they were neither mere hunter-gathers but neither did they engage in agriculture per se. Sutton and Walshe pose and then answer the following question:
If ‘agriculture’ was the way of life of the Old People, why did they not segue smoothly into the domestic gardening—and the broad-field ploughing, sowing and cropping—of the British settles? The latter tediously and repeatedly claimed that many of the people they encountered were averse to horticulture and agriculture both. They were great horseback musterers and game trackers, but averse to hoeing, weeding and planting. Knowing—as the Old People did full well—that plants grew from seeds and tubers, ignorance played no role in this rejection of farming. It was cultural resistance, and loyalty to their own ways.
…A minority harvested grass seeds and ground them into a paste that could be cooked or eaten raw. They had not, however, become farmers who created and tended fields, sowed crops and lived in permanent villages. Nor had they become horticulturalists (gardeners). They had their own way. This way should be cherished.
Ninth, nor did they engage in ‘aquaculture’ or ‘permanent dwellings’. Following on from the previous point, neither did Aborigines engage in this kind of activity. As Sutton and Walshe explain:
Most people’s understanding of ‘aquaculture’ would define it as the protective breeding, rearing and harvesting of aquatic animals. Raising fingerlings in captivity, where they are protected from predators, is usually integral to aquaculture enterprises. That is, there is domestication of the reproductive beginnings of the relevant fish population. While the Old People did this through ritual and through communicating with aquatic spirits, there is no evidence they did so using physical technology.
Similarly, Aboriginal peoples did not construct permanent dwellings. Some of the examples of Pascoe’s errors here are quite frankly, embarrassing. For instance, Pascoe claims that the people of Cape York and Arnhem Land had two types of housing to suit the wet and dry seasons. However, as Sutton rightly explains, ‘His assessment here is one of many elementary errors that a proper peer review process would have corrected. A two-season northern year is a non-Aboriginal idea’. Instead, they had a six-season calendar. And as such, ‘That monsoon-belt people used a range of forms of housing and shelter—not two, as announced by Pascoe—has been on the public record for many years’.
Tenth, Pascoe’s secularisation of Aboriginal culture. Sutton and Walshe believe that the disconnect between the spiritual and the physical is not Dark Emu’s ‘biggest gap’. As Sutton states, ‘A secularised notion of Aboriginal cultivation, devoid of spiritual dimensions, did not exist in Australia before conquest’. This means that Pascoe ‘mythologises’ Aboriginal history and culture by ironically, ‘ignoring the spiritual propagation culture of the Old People. As such, ‘He [Pascoe] is in this way as much a myth-maker as a myth-breaker’. Sutton states:
The Australian people of the pre-conquest era did not avoid agriculture because they didn’t know how plants grow. The proposition would be absurd, given they were acute observers of the plants around them and the plants’ life cycles. Instead, they regarded the fertility and the reproductive spark that maintained plant populations via seeds to be spiritual, not a matter of secular human technology.
On Pascoe’s claims of Aboriginal heritage the following is a list of his known Ancestry compiled with meticulous care and with documentation by Jan Holland. All his ancestors are English. He has not challenged this or produced evidence to contradict any of this excellent genealogical work.
https://australianhistory972829073.wordpress.com/2019/10/23/bruce-pascoe-how-aboriginal-is-he/
This then, is the complete list of Bruce Pascoe’s ancestors, as far as we can determine, and where they came from. Once we come to the ancestor from England, we no longer follow that line as we have exhausted the possibility of Aboriginal heritage there.
Bruce Pascoe. Born 11 October, 1947, Richmond Victoria.
PARENTS
Alfred Francis Pascoe 1916 – 1989. Victoria
Una Gloria Cowland Smith 1919 – 2004. Victoria
GRANDPARENTS
Joseph Harold Pascoe 1891 – 1933. Victoria
Claudina Alice Palmer 1883 – 1967. Victoria
John Smith 1864 – 1952. Leicestershire, England
Cecil Gertrude Cowland 1875 – 1963. Victoria
GREAT-GRANDPARENTS
Francis Pascoe 1859 – 1935. Victoria
Elizabeth Jane Hall 1868 – 1952. Victoria
Alfred William Palmer 1870 – 1938. Tasmania
Rebecca Arnold 1870 – 1944. Tasmania
William Unwin Cowland 1824 – 1900. Essex, England
Sarah Matthews 1847 – 1879. Staffordshire / Worcester, England
GREAT-GREAT-GRANDPARENTS
Francis Pascoe 1814 – 1864. Cornwall, England
Jane Hampton 1827 – 1875. Cornwall, England
John Hall 1832 – 1881. Northumberland, England
Elizabeth Law b. abt. 1841 Durham, England
Thomas Edward Palmer 1830 – 1906. Devon, England
*Alice Berry 1837 – 1861. Tasmania
William Arnold 1834 – 1914. Dorset, England
*Emily Maria Berry 1846 – 1919 Tasmania
GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GRANDPARENTS
Joseph Berry 1811 – 1880. Lancashire, England
Sarah Wright 1819 – 1875. Suffolk, England
*Alice Berry and Emily Maria Berry are sisters – hence the same parents.
So where does the Aboriginal blood come from?
Marc, so much cut and pasted. But none from the book in question? Don’t you have a copy of it. One example from the book, snd please give the page number.
Seems like we are going in circles. Plenty of examples there if you bother to read them. Read the books and articles listed and you will understand why your audience is switching off.
cheers
Marc
Hey Marc,
Your issue has been with the book ‘Dark Emu’, but it seems you haven’t actually read it.
Can you please quote from that book, and give the page number.
I can see you have read everything except the book you so object to.
That’s a bit like the ABC when it comes to me. They have never actually read my work, first hand. They can’t bring themselves to.
Pity.
Gee Jen,
You call for examples and when given them in all their glory choose to ignore them.
Whose playing ABC games?
Jennifer,
I am a great admirer of your work and congratulate you on your courage and persistence in exposing to us the misinformation propagated by CAGW activists and the BoM.
I feel a kindred spirit with you because I am also the author of Bitter Harvest. In your post you state:
“I’m also interested in which bits Bruce Pascoe got wrong in his book Dark Emu.”
And you have urged commenters to check Pascoe’s sources before they criticize him.
Well that is what I did in Bitter Harvest.
As to the first point, Marc Hendrickx has given you a number of examples, both from me, from Dr Ian Keen and from Drs Sutton and Walshe. I also know you have received from another source an extract from Chapter One of my book that specifically details just one example of Pascoe’s misuse of his sources. That extract includes citations to both Pascoe’s work and the journal of Thomas Mitchell.
Over the last two years I have written numerous articles in both Quadrant and Spectator that detail other examples from my book if you care to look at them.
Like you, I don’t believe Pascoe’s Aboriginality or lack of it has anything to do with the substance of his book, but I do believe that if Pascoe is lying about his Aboriginality then that would raise questions over his general trustworthiness.
There are still a few copies of Bitter Harvest available at Quadrant Online if you would like more convincing.
Jennifer you are a fool and you seem to live in a delusional , fantasy world. The examples listed above should make you wake up to yourself but alas you don’t seem to understand proper history and research.
Pascoe is a run of the mill con merchant and I thank the genuine historians like Prof Blainey , Peter O’Brien, Sutton and Walshe etc ( both of the left ) for pulling apart the Pascoe fantasies.
Thank goodness Andrew Bolt checked the stories and found them laughable, but poor kids in school have this nonsense fed to them and we can only hope that a percentage of them eventually start to understand these are fantasy tales and pure fiction.
And Andrew Bolt asked Pascoe to come onto his show a number of times, but he refused. Bolt interviewed Blainey , O’Brien, Sutton , Warren Mundine etc and they were very critical of Pascoe and his silly stories.
Anyway Jennifer that’s the finish for me and I don’t want to receive emails from you anymore.
Neville,
Have you actually read the book, or just the criticisms?
Nothing that Marc posted is actually from the book.
I’m keen for someone to post something here that is a direct quote from the book, that you disagree with.
Hi Peter
I was sent something from Alex about the Yam harvest from your book. I thought it most extraordinary that Alex/you took one example from many presented in Pascoe’s book and then drew so many conclusions.
If you want to present that one example here, I will have the opportunity, as I did in my reply to Alex, to place it in some context.
I read your most recent piece in the Spectator Online. You gave not one example from ‘Dark Emu’ of what you disagree with. More usually someone will present an argument and give an example to back it up, you gave none. Then Alex sent me something quite out of context for someone who has actually read the book.
All of Marc’s examples above are so removed from the context of the book I find it quite bizarre.
Clearly neither Marc nor Neville have read the book.
Pascoe, like Gammage before him, is quite specific in the conclusions that he draws from the evidence he presents.
Jen,
suggest you take 5 and do some further research before the hole you are digging for yourself caves in on you.
Might also respect those who take the time to post here and actually read what they have written. You might learn something.
On the plus side I see a red pill moment coming as Pascoe is one of the worst literary frauds in recent history and as you will discover as you read the references provided his work is utter fiction.
I have read the book by the way, quite some time ago, late 2019, but I returned the copy to the library and it’s not at hand. But lucky for you the authors of the works listed above have done the hard yards, so balls in your court. Here’s another sound bite for you. ANU interview with Sutton and Walshe. Suggest you listen to it and do that extra credit reading before you write part 2.
Listen to In conversation with Peter Sutton And Keryn Walshe by Experience ANU on #SoundCloud
https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/8hzLg
Marc,
I suggest you take 5, and have Bruce Pascoe’s book at hand if you want to hog this thread.
Go get the book from the library, and then come back here and post something/a quote from that book so I can see it in context.
While you are at the library you might want to get a copy of his most recent book with Bill Gammage, it covers bushfires and more. It provides practical advice on how we can avoid the ferocious bushfires of two summers ago. It also explains why we shouldn’t blame the fires on climate change.
The new book, with Bill Gammage, more than Dark Emu, is an attempt to explain the importance of context.
I think you are all lacking context and perspective in your rush to condemn.
Clear some people don’t take time to read what’s been posted and can’t take good advice. Good luck with it Jen.
Let us know when the light comes back on.
M
Marc,
You’ve made your point: you think I should discuss what others have written about Bruce Pascoe’s book.
Surely you know me well enough to know that I always prefer the original/raw data not the homogenised version.
To use an analogy from my temperature work that you are familiar with: I can see that the criticisms you are pointing me to are something like ACORN-SAT, quite removed from the real thing.
That’s quite amusing because you see it’s Pascoe’s book that is the “homogenised” version that takes the original sources of Mitchell and Stuart and turns them into something they are not. Your analogy to BOM is perfect for Pascoe. He has misrepresented, truncated and made up data in the same way BoM have. If you want the original/raw version then start with the original explorer journals like Peter O’Brien did.
Jennifer,
you say “I thought it most extraordinary that Alex/you took one example from many presented in Pascoe’s book and then drew so many conclusions.”
You asked for examples. That is one. It was not intended to deny the fact that Aborigines harvested yams, (which they did). It was to demonstrate how Pascoe misuses his sources, in this case conflating two quite different incidents to give a false impression. I have provided page numbers and references.
How many more examples will it take to convince you that Pascoe at least has a case to answer?
My book is replete with them but you would have to read it to appreciate the full extent of Pascoe’s deception. So before you write off my research, perhaps you should do just that, as you have advised other commenters to do in relation to Dark Emu.
Hi Peter
Thanks for your comment. If you could sketch out/explain this example with the yams here and how Pascoe has got it wrong, then I will comment on it.
This avoids me trying to explain your position and/or cut and paste from your book.
Better you provide the example.
Also, if you use the same name and email address when you comment at this blog, the comment will go straight through, I won’t have to approve it.
Jennifer, here is the extract.
One of Pascoe’s techniques is to conflate harvesting of grain or tubers with cultivation thereof. This is because he has scant evidence of tilling soil or sowing seed. And he almost always exaggerates the scale of the operation. Here, very early in Dark Emu, (page 20) is one example:
“When Mitchell arrived at the Victorian Grampians in 1836, he saw ‘a vast extent of open downs … quite yellow with Murnong’, and ‘natives spread over the field digging for roots’.”
I can’t speak for anyone else but what this passage conveyed to me is a multitude of natives industriously working a huge field. That is the master illusionist at work again, as I will reveal.
If we read Mitchell’s journal, as I have, we find that on 14 September, Mitchell records:
“Several extensive lakes appeared in the lowest parts adjacent; but what interested me most after I had intersected the various summits was the appearance of the country to the eastward, through which we were to find our way home. There I saw a vast extent of open downs and could trace their undulations to where they joined a range of mountains which, judging by their outlines, appeared to be of easy access. Our straightest way homewards passed just under a bluff head about fifty miles distant, and so far I could easily perceive a most favourable line of route by avoiding several large reedy lakes. Between that open country and these lakes on one side and the coast on the other, a low woody ridge extended eastward; and by first gaining that I hoped we should reach the open ground in a direction which should enable us to leave all the lakes on our left.” (Mitchell, Three Expeditions, p259)
Unfortunately, we have to wait until 23 September before we encounter the ‘natives spread over the ground digging for roots’:
“This morning a thick fog hung over us; but having well reconnoitred the country beyond I knew that I might travel in a straight line over open ground for several miles. When the fog arose some finely wooded hills appeared on our right; but after advancing seven miles on good firm earth we again came upon very soft ground which obliged us to turn and wind and pick our way wherever the surface seemed most likely to bear us.
The fog was succeeded by a fine warm day, and as we proceeded we saw two gins and their children at work separately on a swampy meadow; and, quick as the sight of these natives is, we had travelled long within view before they observed us. They were spread over the field much in the manner in which emus and kangaroos feed on plains, and we observed them digging in the ground for roots. All carried bags and when Piper went towards them they ran with great speed across the vast open plains to the southward.” (Mitchell, Three Expeditions, p 273)
So just two women and their children in a swampy meadow. Not a multitude harvesting a crop in a vast extent of open downs after all. And I never did find any reference to yellow murnong. They appear to be a fabrication.
As an example of the way in which Pascoe misuses his sources, I think that is I think that is self-explanatory.
Here’s another example. It refers to one of Pascoe’s ABC Education videos but it also appears on pages 98 to 100 of Dark Emu. This extract is from a complaint I lodged with the ABC:
“In this his episode, titled ‘Charles Sturt’s Encounter in 1846’ describes an incident when explorer Charles Sturt and his party encountered an Aboriginal encampment in central Australia in 1849. Pascoe says Sturt and his men had been traversing a wide expanse of sand dunes for weeks. He says they all had scurvy and were dying. Their horses were so weak they couldn’t be ridden anymore. They climbed to the top of one last dune and beheld rescue in the form of 400 odd natives. He says Sturt and his party staggered down the slope and quotes Sturt as saying that Sturt they could not have stopped themselves because the momentum was so great.
He then describes how the natives fed and watered them and their horses, even giving them roasted duck and cake and offering them a new hut to sleep in. This part of the story is true and Pascoe quotes Sturt correctly in being amazed at the equanimity of the natives towards the horses.
But the first part of this story is a fabrication. Sturt climbed that final sand dune on 25 October and spent over an hour there deciding whether or not to continue his quest to find the inland sea. In the end wiser counsels prevailed and he decided to withdraw. This incident, which occurred at 25 deg 54 min south and 139 deg 25 minutes east, is described on pages 49-50 of his journal Narrative of an Expedition into Central Australia Vol 2.
Although they were far from well, they were not dying and they were still able to ride their horses. During that southern retreat he passed through a number of watered and vegetated areas. On the 30 October, Sturt observed two natives diving for mussels in a water hole—‘they seemed to be very expert (and) were not long in procuring a breakfast’.
On 1 November, Sturt observed that he ‘was exceedingly surprised that we had not seen more natives, and momentarily expected to come on some large tribe, but did not.’ By this stage, Sturt was quite confident of surviving.
The incident at the encampment took place, near Cooper’s Creek, on 3 November, 140 miles south of the point at which Sturt abandoned his quest. Sturt and his party did not stumble down the hill unable to stop. In Sturt’s words: ‘I checked my horse for a short time on the top of the sandhill and gazed on the agitated assemblage of agitated figures below me, covering so small a space that I could have enclosed the whole under a casting net, and then quietly rode down into the flat, followed by Mr Stuart and my men to one of whom I gave my horse when I dismounted and then walked to the natives’. See Pages 75-76 of the journal. So they did not stumble uncontrollably down a sand dune.
Pascoe talks about the duck, the cake and the new house, but fails to mention that Sturt declined the offer of sleeping accommodation to set up his own camp nearby. This is just a cheap shot, designed to highlight that the Aborigines were at home in the Australian landscape in ways that the white man was not. But no-one ever doubted this.
The way Pascoe tells it, Sturt and his party were saved by the natives, whereas in reality it was a civilised encounter between two parties, hitherto unknown to each other.”
Needless to say, the ABC ignored this correction.
This extract refers to the earlier story about Sturt’s encounter with an Aboriginal encampment near Cooper’s Creek.
“Peter Gebhardt, poet, and Michael Perry, engineer, volunteered to read the journals with a view to examining the roast duck and cake story. Part of the test was to sort out Sturt’s longitudes and latitudes because he didn’t record them every day. We are confident, however, that the incident described above occurred on 3-4 November 1845 just north-east of today’s Innamincka at a latitude of 127 degrees 47 minutes south and a longitude of 141 degrees 51 minutes east.” (Dark Emu pp 100-101)
Setting aside the incongruity of the author delegating someone else to read one of his primary sources, the analytical skills of his recruits must be quite exceptional for them to be able to pin-point Sturt’s location to within a minute of latitude and longitude. Unfortunately, the confidence of Pascoe et al regarding the location of this incident is misplaced, since a latitude of 127 south would put Sturt considerably south of the South Pole, were that possible. This is obviously a typo – and one that we can excuse – but not, I think, the deliberate deception that Pascoe is perpetrating here. A more careful reading of Sturt’s journal might have avoided this mistake since, on 2 November, Sturt himself notes, ‘Our latitude here, by an altitude of Jupiter, was 27 degrees 47 minutes S.; our longitude by account 141 degrees 51 minutes E.’ His journal also records that the incident took place on the 3-4 November. As anyone who had read the journals would know. Put another way, there is no way that Pascoe’s ‘researchers’ could not have stumbled upon the fact that Sturt had done their putative work for them. This is pure fabrication. Why Pascoe would include this deception eludes me, other than perhaps to portray an impression of exceptional research. What it actually portrays is a breathtaking arrogance and an insouciant attitude towards lying.
End of extract.
After publication of Bitter Harvest, Pascoe corrected the error in the latitude but made no other changes.
Hello,
I have , (so far) not read the book either, but I have noticed endless commentary here involving third party opinions.
Can nobody do the simple research required, by actually studying the subject at hand. The bloody book ?
From what I have taken in, it appears Pascoe does seem to recognise one truth, the aboriginal population was very diverse, as befits multiple migrations.
You don’t find 602 different languages in one people.
Don’t know about his conclusions, re agriculture, I haven’t read them.
Jennifer you would probably like an example related to the actual idea of agriculture. Pascoe provides ample evidence that Aborigines harvested grains and tubers.
But that would be equally true of hunter-gatherer societies. What would be distinguish them would be sowing of seed. Pascoe provides only three examples of people actually observing the sowing of seed. Here is the first of them as covered in my book:
Pascoe finally provides some evidence of sowing of seed on page 29 of Dark Emu:
‘RG Kimber, a contemporary researcher and ethnographer, compiled an enormous body of evidence from people who observed Central Australian Aboriginals engaged in seed propagation, irrigation, harvest, storage and the trade of seeds across the region. One of Kimber’s informants was the bush worker and cameleer, Walter Smith
Smith, who was proud of his Welsh and Arabana heritage, told Kimber how seed was broadcast by hand, covered lightly with soil, and irrigated:
“They chuck a bit there [at a favourable locality]. Not much, you know, wouldn’t be a handful. [They] chuck a little bit, spread it [broadcasting fashion] you see – one seed there, one seed there … [of] course they chuck a little bit of dirt on, not too much though. And as soon first rain comes … it will grow then.”
Smith is describing the method of taking seed into other areas where it didn’t occur naturally, and trading it for other goods or giving it as simple gifts of reciprocity.
The idea of agriculture was so well advanced that seed was traded as a cultural item. Several explorers and commentators witnessed grain in small sealed parcels being traded to distant relatives. This selection of trade and seed over such a wide area and such a long period gradually changed the morphology of the grains and other Aboriginal food sources – and produced the qualities that agriculturalists recognise as being the result of domestication.’
If that ‘body of evidence from people who observed Aboriginals engaged in seed propagation’ etc is contained in ‘Resource and Use Management’, which is the only Kimber reference Pascoe cites in Dark Emu, it’s not that enormous, I have to say. Virtually all of the people he quotes in his section on cultivation are researchers from the latter half of the twentieth century. The only observer quoted by Kimber who claims to have seen seed propagation was Walter Smith, an old Aborigine who was born in 1893. He described a method of broadcasting seed by hand. The evidence for cultivation that Kimber compiles is in two sections: a) record of a discussion with Walter Smith, whose observations were confined to the twentieth century and b) references from ethnographic literature. The latter commences:
“In 1901 Howitt published a major study in which he quoted Siebert’s accounts of Dieri legends and totems. These indicate a belief in mythological ancestors who were associated with the distribution of five plant species but do not indicate examples of cultivation in a clear way. However, they ‘point the way’ and, although Horne and Aiston (1924) argue against cultivation by the Dieri, the recent publication (1981) of Rev PA Scherer’s translation of JG Reuther’s The Diari, recorded in the 1890s-1900s provides the following details.”
The details Kimber then goes on to provide recount the activities of mythical heroes Pillatapara, who dis-covered the role of seeds in the production of nardoo, and Markanjankula, who sowed nardoo seed in various places and broadcast it in others. There is also reference to Jelkabalubaluna, another mythological hero, who was associated with the distribution of the jelka bulbs.
That’s it. That completes Kimber’s evidence for cultivation. His conclusion is:
“It seems reasonable to conclude that Aborigines of Central Australia practised a limited form of cultivation of certain important plant species on some occasions. They did so by both the use of fire and, in particular by the broadcasting of seed.”
I have covered Kimber in some detail because, although his conclusion is not a ringing endorsement of Pascoe’s theory that Australian Aborigines were an essentially a sedentary agricultural civilisation, it is the strongest evidence Pascoe is able to present that they did, at least in this part of the world, engage in a limited form of cultivation. But why was it limited to ‘some occasions’ as Kimber notes? It seems to me that they probably regarded the legends of Pillatapara, Markanjankula and Jelkabalubaluna less as instruction manuals than as an explanation of the bounty that came their way on a regular basis, albeit that they found it sometimes necessary to augment the efforts of Markanjankula et al.
end of extract
If you read chapter One of Dark Emu you will find only two examples of sowing
One on page 30 describes what is essentially a ceremonial practice. And one on page 49 refers to the work of Dix and Lofgren in 1974. But you need to look at the reference. If you are interested I will post my treatment of this as well.
Hi Peter
I’m commenting here in between other commitments, and in Brisbane at the moment. I will be back in Noosa on Sunday with time to respond in more detail at least to some of the information you have just posted here. You give examples with page numbers from the book, and draw conclusions. THANK YOU. This gives us a place from which to begin a proper discussion. I really appreciate that.
If I take from what you have just written above, and if I could seek a couple of points of clarification before I respond in detail:
1. You write “His conclusion is:
‘It seems reasonable to conclude that Aborigines of Central Australia practised a limited form of cultivation of certain important plant species on some occasions. They did so by both the use of fire and, in particular by the broadcasting of seed.’
Is this a Bruce Pascoe conclusion or RG Kimber conclusion?
2. You write: “I have covered Kimber in some detail because, although his conclusion is not a ringing endorsement of Pascoe’s theory that Australian Aborigines were an essentially a sedentary agricultural civilisation, it is the strongest evidence Pascoe is able to present that they did, at least in this part of the world, engage in a limited form of cultivation.
Where does Bruce Pascoe write that ‘Australian Aborigines were an essentially sedentary agricultural civilisation’? If you could give me the quote and page number?
So much thanks for the discussion, that I feel is just beginning.
If you have not read Dark Emu and then gone to check his sources then you should not be touting the book.
You can find all of the information on the website Dark Emu Exposed although people have posted a lot of that material here and you still seem to be wriggling around the reality that Pascoe is a fiction writer who has misquoted, misrepresented, misinterpreted, exaggerated and fictionalised history.
https://www.dark-emu-exposed.org/
Me thinks Jennifer is playing games here.
Seems she wants to see how others review Pascoe’s fabrications so she does not have to lift a finger and do so herself.
Perhaps she will then find she has enough info to make her own critique of Dark Emu, sort of?
Roslyn,
I’ve read the book, and I’m in the process of re-reading it.
I can’t find many of the things people claim are in it, in it. Maybe I haven’t read it carefully enough?
Do you know where it says: ‘Australian Aborigines were an essentially sedentary agricultural civilisation’?
Peter O’Brien,
I understand that you have written a book rebutting Bruce Pascoe’s ‘Dark Emu’, and were recently published in The Spectator on this topic etc. . I read your most recent article in The Spectator.
I appreciate that you have made comment here, explaining to me with reference to the book, what you most object to.
You comment, in the above thread that :
‘I have covered Kimber in some detail because, although his conclusion is not a ringing endorsement of Pascoe’s theory that Australian Aborigines were an essentially a sedentary agricultural civilisation.’
This comment/direct quote seems to encapsulate much of the objection to ‘Dark Emu’ that I have read in the last couple of days, particularly at Facebook.
Yet Bruce Pascoe claims NO such thing in his book!
I have been asking for page numbers and direct quotes from you and others because there is very little if any correlation between what is actually written in ‘Dark Emu’ and what you, and many others, claim is written in that same book.
I could be surprised and outraged, but it seems to be the way of the world at the moment: a reliance on third hand sources that misrepresent the original text.
The first chapter is the only chapter on ‘Agriculture’ in Dark Emu.
Bruce Pascoe begins this chapter stating very clearly that he has written it to refute the notion that ‘Aboriginal people were only hunter-gatherers.’
He provides example after example of their harvesting yam, and example after example of them harvesting grain.
He provides some evidence that they had hoes/picks to till the soil. Nowhere does he suggest it was more sophisticated than this.
He does include a whole section on the ‘domestication of food plants’ and concludes that ‘Australian grains became dependent on the intervention of Aboriginal peoples, and the wide grasslands, monocultures of grains, were the result of this deliberate manipulation’.
He goes on to discuss the propagation of other bush tuckers.
He clearly states on page 58, that ‘It may be that not all Aboriginal people were involved in these [agricultural] practices.’
The chapter concludes with the suggestions that it would be better to farm plants and animals native to this continent, particularly kangaroo, and native grains. He explains that they are adapted to the climate and geography and less damaging to the soil, etc..
I’m always looking for solution and Bruce Pascoe is providing some in this easy to read first chapter.
Like Bruce Pascoe I am dismayed that every time there are propositions for legislative support for kangaroo farming etc. they are pilloried by the mainstream media. He mentions this on page 53 in respect of the government-commissioned report by Ross Garnaut.
I plan to write my next instalment ‘The Emu’s Perspective – Part 3’ drawing particularly on his evidence for grain domestication.
I can’t find any evidence in the book, or that it is stated in the book/Dark Emu, that this necessitated an essentially sedentary lifestyle or a primarily agrarian one.
I can only conclude that your own prejudices limit any real understanding of what Bruce Pascoe has actually written.
He does write on page 36, ‘Alter your perspective by a few degrees, and the view is different’.
Jennifer,
My strong impression on reading Dark Emu was that Pascoe was claiming that Aborigines were essentially farmers. Sutton and Walshe also got that impression. As did many, if not most, of his readers. Keith Potger, of Seekers fame, got that impression telling a journalist on the ABC ‘the Mallee has been stripped bare by dust storms, where they didn’t exist in those days because of the agriculture and the careful tilling of the ground by the indigenous folks’.
The ABC says: In 2014, Bruce Pascoe wrote a book called Dark Emu that challenged the belief that the First Australians were hunter-gatherers. In researching his book, Bruce examined the journals of the early explorers and found evidence of a complex civilisation that was using sophisticated technologies to live, farm and manage the land.
In 2018 Pascoe said “In 2014 I wrote a book, Dark Emu, which exploded the myth that Aboriginal people were mere hunters and gatherers and did nothing with the land. I wrote the book because I found it hard to convince Australians that Aboriginal people were farming. Using colonial journals, the sources Australians hold to be true, I was able to form a radically different view of Australian history. Aboriginal people were farming. There’s no other conclusion to draw.”
In the quote you provide above ‘It may be that not all Aboriginal people were involved in these [agricultural] practices’, Pascoe is clearly implying that most did.
If the label hunter-gatherer was inappropriate, as Pascoe has definitely claimed, then what other label did he propose or, at least imply, other than farmer. Sutton and Walshe apply the label ‘hunter-gatherer plus’ but Pascoe does not make this distinction.
If I and all these others have misinterpreted what Pascoe hints at (he provides very little solid evidence) that is probably more a reflection on his writing than on our obtuseness.
Notwithstanding this, Dark Emu is riddled with misquotations, misrepresentations and speculative claims of which, at your request, I have provided four examples citing page numbers and references. Here’s one more:
As you note, Dark Emu covers agriculture in one chapter. Included in this chapter is a discussion of dams which Pascoe heads ‘Irrigation’ (clearly a farming practice). He extolls how large and complex they were. For example.
[begin extract]
The third dam in Pascoe’s trilogy (page 47) was this one:
‘An extraordinary construction was found by early explorer S.G. Hubbe when he was looking for a stock route into Western Australia. A clay and granite wall of 1.8 metres was built at the base of a granite outcrop. As the soil at the base of the dam was friable, it had been faced with granite slabs. Steps had been cut into the dam wall, and the catchment was so good that even the slightest shower would result in a substantial collection of clean water.’
Again this sounds very impressive but the effect diminishes considerably when you remove Pascoe’s trademark exaggerations and manipulations. Pascoe sources these details to the essay by Eric Rolls, ‘A Song of Water’. What Rolls actually says is:
‘… they had picked up all the stones on an area of 1.2 hectares and built three banks of mixed earth and gravel on a rock base to divert water into cut channels leading into an irregularly-shaped tank 1.8 metres deep and averaging 1.5 metres long by 1.5 metres wide … Although the tank held little more than 4000 litres, Hubbe noted that “the slightest shower on so good a catchment will add to its contents”‘.
You will note that while Pascoe mentions the height of the dam wall, he omits the rather more significant dimensions that reveal that this dam is no bigger than a small backyard water tank – 4000 litres as Rolls notes. And Hubbe does not refer to ‘a substantial collection of clean water’ but simply ‘adding to its contents’
[end extract]
As I say Dark Emu is riddled with this kind of deception.
Jennifer
I have always admired your perspective on GBR matters and your support of Peter Ridd in the battle against the mire of AIMS/JCU/ Hughes et al. This is why I have been following your blog.
However in this Dark Emu case, it is getting quite embarrassing. I have read Dark Emu plus the Peter Sutton/ Kerryn Walshe rebuttal ( I recognise that I do need to read other published commentary such as that by Peter O’Brien etc). I always recognised that Dark Emu was a misrepresentation of the facts (note that I have worked in soil science/ land management for over 40 years and, as an example, recently completed an agricultural assessment for Gulf Indigenous communities). I could draw many examples of faults in Dark Emu from the agricultural perspective but Peter O’Brien has provided some. I also discarded my hardcopy of Dark Emu and am waiting on a digital version from my library but it is taking a while to come. However, in retrospect, I really don’t seem why I should waste my time.
Given the extensive criticism that the book has received from suitably qualified and highly experienced anthropologists/ archaeologists, my final comment to you is to repeat the comment that one of my uni lecturers advised me over 40 years ago: ” Stick to your knitting”.
Peter O’Brien
The book/Dark Emu is necessarily subversive. I have a love of the subversive. I am a subversive.
I disagree completely that Bruce Pascoe is deceptive, though he has written a polemic and unashamedly so.
The problem is with your current mindset. I can see you are trying to understand. Keep going.
This is such an important topic, Bruce Pascoe’s new book with Bill Gammage such an important new work. They are our only real hope for better understanding of the need for a completely different approach to management of national parks and other ‘wilderness’ areas.
Jennifer,
you commenced this thread with a dig at conservatives who had rubbished Dark Emu. You asked for examples (as you have also done in your Part Two) and you were inundated with them. You then asked for page numbers and references. I have provided you with five examples fully referenced and you have totally ignored them, as you have my response to your last question.
You would make a good Wikipedia editor. And by the way, please don’t patronize me.
If my wife found out how much time I have wasted on this increasingly pointless discussion, I would be out in the garden weeding before you could say ‘Bruce Pascoe is a fraud’, so it’s hasta la vista from me.
Oy vey! You ask, “I would like to better understand exactly what you consider fanciful etc.”
OK, towns with 1000 residents, stone houses, domesticated animals, the invention of bread and deomcracy ….
Jen, it’s all very well and good being subversive. But not being eagerly gullible is a better option.
Peter O’Brien
I’ve looked through the examples, you provided, and acknowledged the Yam example. Also, it is acknowledged elsewhere that they inserted the heads of yams to be sure of a future crop, but does this constitute farming?
More seriously you seem to have acknowledged here that your interpretation of Bruce Pascoe’s thesis is that ‘Aborigine were an essentially sedentary agricultural civilisation’ (your words above) when Pascoe writes nothing of the sort.
In this, and the other examples that you provide, you seem intent on misrepresenting him.
Anyone else can go through the examples as you have laid them out and decide that Bruce was perhaps exaggerating while you are perhaps belittling.
Bunyip,
There are no better options.
We only have one Australia and Bruce Pascoe has done it a great service through his book ‘Dark Emu’. He has explained and placed in context the complexity of Aboriginal history and made a plea for better land management particularly of national parks of ‘wilderness’ areas.
He has managed to cut through with the ABC and the mainstream more generally where others have failed, importantly on the issue of the need for more controlled burning.
Ian Thompson
I’ve read the three links that you provided. These might be in the thread after Part 2; bout the multiple colonisations of Australia by ethnically very different people. Thank you.
The suggestion is that the Australian Aborigines of current ethnicity settled here in the last 9,000 or so years. That is still a long time.
Supporting hazard reduction, a la Indigenous ‘Greatest Estate’ burning, is one thing. It’s good policy and to be applauded.
But misquoting explorers’ journals and making stuff up, including your own ‘heritage’, is wicked.
I’m disappointed in you, Jen. In future, will have to put everything you write under the microscope, as someone so eager to be gulled by a charlatan is apt to fall for other scams too.
I’m off now to stand on one leg and gaze into the distance for half an hour. After that, I’ll be as Aboriginal as Pascoe and you’ll have to take my future nonsense seriously too.
Wait until you hear about Indigene brain surgery. I intend to beat Pascoe to that one.
Your insistence that only those who have read the book (Dark Emu) are privy to the truth is reminiscent of religious zealots and cultists.
Those self righteous individuals who claim a certainty of knowledge through understanding the message of their chosen guru.
Claiming that the onus of proof lies not with the prophet but with those who would deny his infallible doctrine.
Can you provide any supporting example outside of Bruce Pascoes writing ??
Perhaps a direct quote from a primary source.
Early journals diaries or reports.
Mitchell, Sturt or any of thousands of other eyewitness accounts ??
Any single statement that mentions aboriginal “farming” or “villages”.
Better yet an example of pre contact indigenous art that depicts villages, planted fields and grain silos.
Painted on the cliffs and caves amongst the thousands of scenes of hunting and gathering.
Drawn by contemporary aboriginal artists who had no political objective.
If you can not produce supporting evidence this will conclusively prove that Bruce has spun his yarn from nothing but his own preconceived assumptions.
And sold them on the preconceived assumptions of his audience.
Warwick, You misrepresent me completely.
Only those who have read the book ‘Dark Emu’ are entitled, as I see the world, to have an opinion about the book, and it’s content. I’m not interested in people writing down here what someone else has written about the book.
You are most welcome to your beliefs about everything else, including about the nature of Australia before European settlement. You can write all of that down here if you want to.
But don’t tell me what is in the book ‘Dark Emu’ if you have not yet read it! That is fraud.
Though it is the case that so many want to have an opinion about the book even though they have absolutely no first hand knowledge of it. Shame.
They want to have an opinion based on someone else’s opinion.
Is the situation with you, tell me: have you read this book ‘Dark Emu’ or do you just want to have an opinion about it?
I haven’t read “Chariots of the Gods” either.
Knowing that the premise is ridiculous and the conclusions not based in reality is enough to warn me off.
I have asked you to give me some example of supporting evidence.
Some kind of reality based confirmation that would entice me to investigate further.
You will note that my argument is not dependant on any modern interpretation.
Instead I suggest you study ancient art from contemporary aboriginal sources or eyewitness accounts.
Modern sources are bound to be contaminated with the political manipulations of the author.
Non-existence is found in the failure to be manifest in reality.