It seems Professor Sutton, after an extended period of reflection, has finally decided that a brilliant career and lifetime spent with Aboriginal peoples all over Australia, his integrity as an anthropologist and his seminal book The Politics of Suffering, are worth more than seeing the discipline that has been his life brought into widespread disrepute by a carpetbagger such as Pascoe. His book is animated by nothing so much as the radical political intent to steal the legacy of those who created Australia and give it to those who claim it did their ancestors wrong. Pascoe preaches that pre-settlement Aborigines were a homogeneous, peaceful, federated group of sowers and reapers occupying their very own Garden of Eden when whitefellas “invaded” without so much as a beg your pardon. If the Aboriginal people were farmers and gardeners, as Pascoe would have us believe, then white arrivals in Australia were morally obliged to seek a similar accord.
He arrives after Geoffrey Blainey reminded us that the ‘agricultural revolution’ made it to New Zealand and the islands of the Torres Strait but not to Australia and, in the final analysis, that this helps explain why Maoris, with their stable villages and tribal political systems, were able to force a treaty with the colonists while Aborigines were not. Professor Sutton brings late to the Pascoean Hoax his considerable authority. He slights the Quadrant book as ‘a polemic’ whilst presenting his own focused study as a work of scholarly provenance and merit, which it is without a doubt. Yet Sutton, to his shame, damns Peter O’Brien’s Bitter Harvest with faint praise. Almost all the evidence in Dark Emu comes from the records and diaries of the Australian explorers, impeccable sources.There’s something of America’s entry into World War II about Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers?, Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe’s assault on Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu - very, very late to arrive but, nevertheless, a most welcome game-changer. Gerritsen and Gammage in their latest books support this premise but Pascoe takes this further and challenges the hunter-gatherer tag as a convenient lie.
The evidence insists that Aboriginal people right across the continent were using domesticated plants, sowing, harvesting, irrigating, and storing - behaviours inconsistent with the hunter-gatherer tag. Dark Emu injects a profound authenticity into the conversation about how we Australians understand our continent… essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what Australia once was, or what it might yet be if we heed the lessons of long and sophisticated human occupation.' Judges for 2016 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Dark Emu puts forward an argument for a reconsideration of the hunter-gatherer tag for pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians.
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