No Domesticated Plants or Animals? Then No Agriculture or Husbandry

Agriculture is the science and art of cultivating plants and livestock and is a key development in the rise of sedentary human civilizations. In the practice of farming, cultivation of the soil occurs for the growing of food-crops and fibres, plus animals are reared to provide food, wool and other products. It results in a food surplus that enables people to live in settled villages, towns and ultimately cities.

In Dark Emu Mr Pascoe insists that from his reading of the early explorer’s journals “that Aboriginal people did build houses, did build dams, did sow, irrigate and till the land, did alter the course of rivers, did sew their clothes and did construct a pan-continental government...” (From the back-cover of Dark Emu, 2018 reprint).

We beg to differ and say that the evidence, including a closer reading of Mr Pascoe’s own cited references, shows that Aboriginal society was a nomadic, hunter-gatherer one. This is not to say that it was an inferior strategy for Australia, but rather that the Aborigines decided, or were forced, not to progress to an agrarian society (we know the answers to this and will post our final conclusions in the April Political Sections of this blog post when we summarise this work - so keep checking our site!)

So, if Aboriginal society was really a settled, agrarian society in pre-colonial times, as Mr Pascoe claims, he would need to explain the following paradoxes :

The fruit of the cycad was a staple carbohydrate source for Aborigines for millennia.

If Aboriginal society was a settled agrarian one, why did they not cultivate ‘vast estates‘ of cycad plantations? The most they ever appeared to do was to harvest the cones from wild trees.

Why don’t we see descendants of Aboriginal farmers today operating commercial cycad plantations like, for example, Australian pineapple farmers?

We would argue, because Aborigines were hunter-gatherers and had developed no special agricultural skills.

In the 1840s at Nundah, now a suburb of Brisbane. but once the area roamed by the Aboriginal Turrbul tribe, pineapples were first grown in Australia by the colonialists.

Why didn’t the Turrbul tribe seem to have any gardens of cycads or other plants in the rich soils of Nundah? We would argue because they chose, or were forced to adopt, a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Mr Pascoe with his myrnong or native yam daisy. He writes “Surely we can no longer ignore such a valuable plant or the commercial opportunities it offers” (Dark Emu, 2108 reprint p 26-27).

It’s the old trick of the Intellectual Elites - they sit around scribbling about their ideas before hand-balling them onto the “we” (that is, the rest of us, we plebs or the taxpayer) to try to put into practice. It’s a brilliant strategy for them - if someone else does get the idea to work they can then reap the glory. If it fails, or never gets attempted, they have already moved onto the next great idea, or they can blame the plebs for failing to follow their ideas closely enough (this is why the hair-brained ideas of socialism and communism fail to die! If only Lenin, Stalin, Castro and Chavez had executed socialism properly it would have worked and millions need not have died. So let’s give it another go under my directions and I am sure it will work this time!). As the intellectuals have no ‘skin in the game’, if their idea is a stuff up, it hasn’t cost them a cent and they have made plenty of book sales in the meantime. The tragedy is that the adoption of many of these ideas have real consequences for real people who end up having their lives, or finances, ruined by these hair-brained schemes.

Mr Pascoe with his yam daisies. This looks more like a hobby, than a commercial reality.

A pathetic-looking yam daisy tuber, which we suggest will be the result of following ‘Comrade’ Pascoe’s agronomic advice of using no fertilizers, pesticides, fossil fuels or plant breeding in its cultivation, as he recommends in Dark Emu.

In our opinion, the actual output and quality of Mr Pascoe’s yam daisy tubers will be so poor that the enterprise will fail commercially.

Update of June 2020.

In November 2018, Mr Pascoe was on ABC radio explaining how he had just supplied 500grams of one of his native seeds to a bakery and now has multi-tonne orders. He predicts these native grasses will be growing in everyones backyards, will be part of everyones diet and will be readily available in supermarkets by 2022!! We await.- listen here from 05:28

These photos were taken at the local market in Dandenong, Victoria. The only thing Aboriginal here is the name ‘Dandenong’, a word from the Woiwurrung Aboriginal language.

The market is full of hard-working Australians, mostly New Australians - Greeks, Italians, and more lately, Indians, Chinese, Vietnamese and refugees from the ‘Stans’ and Africa. All working hard to grow and sell great produce, including all the cultivated tubers such as yams, potatoes, daikon, et al.

But no yam daisy, or myrnong, is on offer. Why not?

Daikon (or daikon radish) is grown and used by local Japanese, Chinese, Hindus, Panjabis and Malaysians amongst others, who’s cultures all have long histories as agriculturalists.

Why aren’t myrnong, grown by the descendants of the local Aboriginal Woiwurrung tribe, available at the market?

We would argue because the Woiwurrung were not agriculturalists and so there is no continuing culture that would result in their descendants in being myrnong market-gardeners today.

A successful Colonial version of the myrnong?

The humble parsnip, produced on-mass in Victorian soils for $2.99/kg.

Domestication of Animals

Lara, Victoria is a outer suburb of Geelong/Melbourne that was a traditional hunting ground of the Aboriginal Wathaurong tribe, and a wintering and spring breeding ground for the native Cape Barren goose. The Wathaurong would have fed on these geese, their eggs and goslings for millennia. Why didn’t they domesticate them?

Because the Wathaurong, like all other Aborigines were nomadic hunter-gatherers and they decided they did not want tend a flock of domesticated geese.

This photo, taken at Lara’s local suburban lake, is of two very tame Cape Barren Geese, quite happy to raise their young each year near human habitation.

Anyone who has been to Noosa in Queensland will know about the tameness of the local native Brush Turkeys. They are in pest proportions on the roads amongst the traffic, in the shops and in peoples gardens!

It is as if they are carrying around a sign saying - “ Please take me in - I want to be domesticated!”

Why didn’t the Aborigines, if they were settled “agriculturalists”, domestic these willing turkeys?

Simply because they weren’t “agriculturalists”. They were nomadic hunter-gatherers and preferred to kill and eat the wild Brush Turkey and its eggs as required.

Even in Sydney, the Brush Turkeys are invading people’s backyards. Here is a typical mound-nest up against the back fence. The eggs are layed inside the rotting vegetation, the heat of which incubates them.

One would think that it would have been possible for the Aborigines to have domesticated the Brush Turkey at some point during the millennia of their co-existence.

If Mr Pascoe’s thesis is true, every Aboriginal ‘stone-house village’ could have had a flock of domesticated Brush Turkey’s.

But there weren’t Aboriginal ‘stone-house villages’, and there weren’t domesticated Brush turkeys, because the Aborigines were nomadic hunter-gatherers, not agriculturalists as Mr Pascoe suggests.

On Groote Eylandt, in the Gulf of Carpentaria, the anthropologist Dr Norman Tindale describes the how the Aborigines well knew how to raid the mound nests of the jungle fowl Megapodius freyeinet.

“These birds constantly raked up leaf debris in the making of their egg incubation pits. The birds themselves were largely unmolested by the aborigines who obtained a constant supply of eggs by taxing the birds whenever they returned to the sites.” - Tindale, N., ABORIGINAL TRIBES OF AUSTRALIA, ANU Press 1974, p72.

But still the Aborigines decided not to take the next step and domesticate this fowl.

Other, originally hunter-gatherer societies in nearby New Guinea and SE Asia did ultimately become settled, agrarian societies and did domesticate birds, such as the Red jungle fowl (Gallus gallus or Gallus bankiva), which is considered to be the ancestor of the common domestic chicken.

Why did our Asian neighbours succeed in domesticating the Red Jungle Fowl, but the Australian Aborigines fail to domesticate any one of our local bird species, such as a duck, goose, turkey or even the emu?

Because the Australian Aborigines were a nomadic, hunter-gatherer society not a settled agrarian society. This is NOT to say that they were inferior, but just that to deal with the environmental conditions on this continent, the Aborigines made the decision (consciously or subconsciously) to follow a hunter-gatherer lifestyle which precluded them from adopting the animal husbandry techniques necessary to domestic a wild bird species such as the Brush Turkey.

Another example of Aboriginal people not having any knowledge of animal domestication is given by the following case :

“In December 1890, …the chief or mamoose of the Seven Rivers tribe [in Cape York known] as Tongambulo, [was] accompanied by Sub-Inspector Savage and his party to Thursday Island. One early account noted that he:

"‘cannot speak a word of English, nor had he been near a white man’s abode until brought into our midst. One of his first impressions on rambling around the barracks was conveyed in the question he asked Kio the interpreter: “Why white man could make the fowls stay about the house, when in his country they all flew away and could not be caught?” Kio explained as best he could to the mamoose that the white man possessed a magical power which was sufficient to tame anything;”

• Locating Seven Rivers by Fiona Powell in Indigenous and Minority Placenames: Australian and International Perspectives, Edited by Ian D. Clark, et al 2014 by ANU Press, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.

But wait, all is not lost yet. Here is Mr Leeton Lee in 2018 at least giving it a go with his small business in harvesting and selling the indigenous bunya nuts, which according to Mr Pascoe, “…were so prolific that they provided food for large gatherings of [Aboriginal] people, not only during the harvest, but later when stored quantities could be eaten” (Dark Emu 2018 reprint, p150).

We wish Mr Lee well and will follow his business as it develops. Perhaps Mr Pascoe could assist?

See : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-12/australian-native-bunya-nuts-great-camp-food-and-bush-tucker/9751602

It is strange that the Aborigines had been harvesting and eating native macadamia nuts for millennia, but they never decided to progress to the ‘horticultural - orchard’ stage.

This is despite the fact that a pioneer in the 1860’s in macadamia nut ‘gathering’ and selling was apparently Aboriginal : “King Jacky, aboriginal elder of the Logan River clan, south of Brisbane, Queensland, was the first known macadamia entrepreneur, as his tribe and he regularly collected and traded the macadamias with colonial settlers” (Macadamia in Wikipedia).

If Mr Pascoe was serious about developing an Aboriginal Agricultural Revolution”, macadamias, the indigenous nut known as the bauple, gyndl, jindilli or boombera, would seem to have a better economic potential than the yam daisy. A crowd-funding project, by say 200,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, investing only $100 each, would give them an investment fund of $20M. This is more than enough to start a commercial macadamia operation.

“Tasmanian Aboriginal people have hunted and eaten mutton birds for more than 10,000 years…[and today’s] commercial harvest… is almost exclusively carried out by Aboriginal people”.

- ABC report

See here - Tasmanian Mutton Birders

This we believe, supports our argument that the Aboriginal people had a successful hunter-gather society, not an agrarian one. Age-old hunter-gathering techniques, such as mutton-birding, survive amongst Aborigines to the present day, but nowhere do we see any surviving Aboriginal, “settled agricultural” practices, such as grain cultivation, sowing, irrigating, building of stone houses, etc., as claimed by Mr Pascoe.

The only animal domesticated by the Aborigines was the dingo, which arrived from Asia, presumably in Austronesian canoes, some 3500 years ago (fossil evidence), or possibly even 4,600 to 18,300 years ago (mDNA evidence).

Besides being camp companions, watchdogs, and garbage and scrap disposable servants, the Aborigines used dingos as ‘living blankets’, giving rise to the expression, “a five-dog night”, to mean a very cold night.

One wonders whether the Aborigines, with their deep understanding of Australia’s wildlife could not have, in the course of their 50,000 years on the continent, developed at least some small mammal, or marsupial, animal husbandry.

For example, guinea pigs were apparently domesticated more than 3,000 years ago in Peru, coinciding with humans’ transition from a nomadic to an agricultural lifestyle. The Incas kept guinea pigs, and the animals were bred during the same period by various people who lived along the Andes Mountains from northwestern Venezuela to central Chile. These rodents remain a sustainable food source for the native peoples of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, who either keep them in their homes or allow them to scavenge freely both indoors and out.

Our argument is that the Aborigines made a social and economic decision not undertake animal husbandry as they consciously, or subconsciously, decided the costs outweighed the benefits.

But many Aboriginal people today are giving farming, based on European and modern Australian farming techniques a go. There are some excellent projects being funded by the Australian Government’s Indigenous Land and Sea Corporation - see page 37-47 of their 2019 report. We wish them well in developing a new agrarian relationship to their country and we will follow and report on the progress of these projects.