❤️ loved this book because...
Dark Emu is the history of Aboriginal Australia, before the white people came. As a settler here myself, I was astounded as chapter after chapter demolished the myth of Terra nullius and showed how comprehensively the landscape had been managed before invasion. The descriptions of the early colonialists had recorded the truth, and then it had ben buried.
I know some people who have had strong negative reactions to this work as well so it is controversial.
So you know, the author Bruce Pascoe is a Bunurong man and an award-winning Australian writer and editor. Dark Emu won the 2016 NSW Book of the Year and was a joint winner of the 2016 Indigenous Writer’s Prize.
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1 author picked Dark Emu as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
History has portrayed Australia's First Peoples, the Aboriginals, as hunter-gatherers who lived on an empty, uncultivated land. History is wrong.
In this seminal book, Bruce Pascoe uncovers evidence that long before the arrival of white men, Aboriginal people across the continent were building dams and wells; planting, irrigating, and harvesting seeds, and then preserving the surplus and storing it in houses, sheds, or secure vessels; and creating elaborate cemeteries and manipulating the landscape. All of these behaviours were inconsistent with the hunter-gatherer tag, which turns out to have been a convenient lie that worked to justify dispossession.
Using compelling evidence…