In his book Dark Emu, Bruce Pascoe argues for a reconsideration of the ‘hunter-gatherer’ tag for pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians and attempts to rebut the colonial myths that have worked to justify dispossession. Bruce provides compelling evidence from the diaries of early explorers that suggests that 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.
This new and uncovered evidence challenges some long held assumptions just as in this presentation Bruce challenges his audience to take action by querying any library or school still holding out dated history books and by asking them to remove them. We can all do our bit here.
Updated evidence of grain grinding stones now shows that the aboriginal people were making bread from native grasses up to 40,000 years ago, some 25,000 years before the Egytians who were thought to be the 1st bakers. Dark Emu is rivetting reading and comes as a surprise to most readers and indeed rewrites the history of mankind as we have known it.
