We Respond to a Reader's Comments on our Critique of Mr Pascoe's Dark Emu. — Dark Emu Exposed

May 27

May 27 We Respond to a Reader's Comments on our Critique of Mr Pascoe's Dark Emu.

Aboriginal Agriculture, Debunking Dark Emu

We have received this thoughtful, detailed email from one of our readers which raises many excellent points for debate. The following is the reader’s email (name supplied) and our response.

Dear "Editor",

So as not to be hypocritical, I'll identify myself as a lecturer in agriculture at an Australian university. To be very clear, these views are my own and I am not representing the university in this capacity. I was motivated to reply, and to leave a message on the website site to begin with, because I teach agriculture and felt the over-arching message on your site was wrong and not being made in good faith. (See Editor’s Response #1 below).

One of the first things I do with new agriculture students is ask them to define agriculture. As this exercise demonstrates, the definition of agriculture is vague. Yes, there is big contrast between modern industrial agriculture and what we might call a "hunter-gatherer" culture, but differences shrink when comparing people who practice something like slash-and-burn agriculture and, for example, "non-agricultural" indigenous Californians burning under oak trees to increase acorn yields. (See Editor’s Response #2).

There is abundant evidence from all around the world that suggests indigenous cultures actively and consciously "managed" their landscapes through the use of fire. European accounts of precolonial landscapes in Australia and North America make little sense without assuming indigenous peoples were using fire to shape them. As I tell my students, agriculture is probably just an extension of older human landscape management practices like burning. (See Editor’s Response #3).

I found Bruce Pascoe's book thought-provoking, but admit I also felt he stretched the evidence. However, one can't ignore the evidence for conscious landscape management by Australian aboriginal people, or the fact that what counts as agriculture isn't clear. (See Editor’s Response #4). Is the tending of Dioscorea hastifolia in Western Australia agriculture? It depends on definition, but I think it reflects incipient agricultural behavior that lead to the development of agriculture in other parts of the world. (See Editor’s Response #5).

So I read Bruce Pascoe's book in this way, and as an attempt to regain some recognition for a marginalized and dismissed ethnic minority. I don't blame him for that. (See Editor’s Response #6).

Why a group of "business people, teachers and public servants" would care enough to start a whole website dedicated to essentially nit-picking and dismissing arguments in a book is what has me puzzled. (See Editor’s Response #7).

What possible negative consequences could the book have for you or Australia? I think you're being needlessly paranoid if you think an honest and well-intentioned critique of the work would be problem. (See Editor’s Response #8).

If you are concerned about intellectual rigor and good scholarship then why not identify yourselves? (See Editors Response #9) Feel free to argue otherwise, but your desire to remain anonymous, and your apparent dismissal or ignorance of accepted science around the origins of agriculture and ethnobotany, suggests to me that you are in fact motivated by prejudice or a desire to debase indigenous Australians. (See Editor’s Response #10).

Sincerely,

A reader, N (name and email supplied)

Thankyou for your email and here are our responses:

Reader : '“So as not to be hypocritical, I'll identify myself as a lecturer in agriculture at an Australian university. To be very clear, these views are my own and I am not representing the university in this capacity. I was motivated to reply, and to leave a message on the website site to begin with, because I teach agriculture and felt the over-arching message on your site was wrong and not being made in good faith”. Editor’s Response #1: Please be assured that we are participating in this debate in good faith, or to put it another way, we are not engaging in ‘bad faith’, the dictionary meanings of ‘bad faith’ being, “an intent to deceive or, in existentialist philosophy, a refusal to confront facts or choices”. Indeed, it is our position that Mr Pascoe’s “good faith” should be questioned, given his apparent manipulations and distortions of his ‘evidence’ that we have uncovered! If you can find on our website any instances of “bad faith” on our part, please let us know and we will check and amend or delete as appropriate.

Reader : “One of the first things I do with new agriculture students is ask them to define agriculture. As this exercise demonstrates, the definition of agriculture is vague. Yes, there is big contrast between modern industrial agriculture and what we might call a "hunter-gatherer" culture, but differences shrink when comparing people who practice something like slash-and-burn agriculture and, for example, "non-agricultural" indigenous Californians burning under oak trees to increase acorn yields.” Editor’s Response #2 : We are not sure why a definition of ‘Agriculture’ has to be vague – yes we can see why some Post-modern academics might prefer a ‘vague’ answer, to further their re-writing of history, but why wouldn’t an academic, such as yourself, teach the class the accepted, scientific definition of ‘agriculture’ and then maybe let the class explore the variations you suggest, without having to discard the long-held, accepted definition?

Our understanding of the definition of ‘Agriculture” is from Harris & Fuller (2014) as follows:

Agriculture : “The most comprehensive word used to denote the many ways in which crop plants and domestic animals sustain the global human population by providing food and other products. The English word agriculture derives from the Latin ager (field) and colo (cultivate) signifying, when combined, the Latin agricultura: field or land tillage. But the word has come to subsume a very wide spectrum of activities that are integral to agriculture and have their own descriptive terms, such as cultivation, domestication, horticulture, arboriculture, and vegeculture, as well as forms of livestock management such as mixed crop-livestock farming, pastoralism, and transhumance”.

The Oxford English Dictionary (1971) defines agriculture very broadly as :

“the science and art of cultivating the soil, including the allied pursuits of gathering in the crops and rearing live stock; tillage, husbandry, farming (in the widest sense).”

Harris, David R. and D. Q. Fuller , (2014) Agriculture: Definition and Overview. In Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology (Claire Smith, Ed.). Springer, New York. pp 104-113, provide a very instructive summary table on the stages of agricultural development :

Table showing development of Agriculture from ‘none’ (left column where Aboriginal Australia was) to fully developed Industrial Agriculture (far right column where Modern Australia is today). - from Harris & Fuller (2014). — Table showing development of Agriculture from ‘none’ (left column where Aboriginal Australia was) to fully developed Industrial Agriculture (far right column where Modern Australia is today). - *from Harris & Fuller (2014).*

We understand that some Australian authors such as Bruce Pascoe, Bill Gammage and other, lesser known ones, have their own (one could even say, ‘Newspeak’) wider definitions of the terms “agriculture” and “farming”, where they expand the definition to include the use of fire and burning to ‘manage’ the environment (eg:‘fire-stick farming’). However, we note that the generally accepted understanding is that the use of fire/burning only, without cultivation, seed selection and planting, is classified by Harris & Fuller as ‘Non-agricultural’ - see Column 1 in Table above. So, Pascoe, et al ., can claim whatever definition they like; it does not mean other scholars have accepted it.

Reader : “There is abundant evidence from all around the world that suggests indigenous cultures actively and consciously "managed" their landscapes through the use of fire. European accounts of precolonial landscapes in Australia and North America make little sense without assuming indigenous peoples were using fire to shape them. As I tell my students, agriculture is probably just an extension of older human landscape management practices like burning. I found Bruce Pascoe's book thought-provoking, but admit I also felt he stretched the evidence. However, one can't ignore the evidence for conscious landscape management by Australian aboriginal people, or the fact that what counts as agriculture isn't clear.” Editors Response #3 and #4 : Yes, fire was being used by the world’s indigenous peoples and yes, humanity is/was on a food producing spectrum from simple hunter-gatherers using fire burning right up to high-technology, industrial, broadacre farming, but your argument here appears to be that because Aborigines on the left of this spectrum used fire they should be considered ‘agricultural’ just because others on the far right of the spectrum, who are now agriculturalists and farmers, were originally fire-using, hunter gatherers themselves generations ago? We are not sure this logic follows. For example, sugarcane farmers are not agriculturalists because they ‘manage’ their cane-plots by only just burning them – they are agriculturalists because they, prepare and till the soil, select for good cane varieties, prepare and plant cane setts, maintain the crop by keeping it pest free and fertilizing it as the crop grows, burn and then harvest it and finally store some cane setts for re-planting next season. We do not think that the Aborigines’ ‘managerial’ use of fire to clear forest regrowth, flush out game and to encourage grasses to grow to attract game, entitles them to move to one of the ‘agricultural’ columns in Harris & Fuller’s table.

Similarly by your logic, if the Aborigines were shown to be “industrious”, as they were, in their daily lives by spinning hair, making grass-seed cakes (Pascoe’s bakers), constructing wooden dishes and stone tools, on a regular, defined basis to set design specifications, does this mean they had an economy that could be described as “industrial”?

For example, would Mr Pascoe argue that the 1965 film clip below, showing Yanindu, a Western Desert Aboriginal woman, spinning her hair into string very ‘industriously’, is ‘evidence‘ that the Aborigines were on the same spectrum as the spinning mills of Manchester’s Industrial Revolution? With the stretching of the language using Mr Pascoe’s ‘Newspeak’, can we expect to see soon possibly a new book from Mr Pascoe, entitled, Dark Wombat – a re-interpretation of the Aboriginal Industrial Revolution?

Wonderful 1965 Film clip of yanindu 'industriously' spinning her hair into string

Reader : “Is the tending of Dioscorea hastifolia in Western Australia agriculture? It depends on definition, but I think it reflects incipient agricultural behavior that lead to the development of agriculture in other parts of the world.” Editor’s Response #5: You appear, like Mr Pascoe, to completely miss the conclusion of Rupert Gerritsen’s work regarding the ‘tending’ of the Dioscorea hastifolia yam in Western Australian Aboriginal ‘agriculture’. Please see our blog post of June 28th - Did the Dutch Teach Aborigines How to Cultivate Yams?, which details Gerritsen’s conclusion that the seventeenth-century Dutch introduced this yam, and its cultivation to the local West Australian Aborigines. This only seems to confirm in our eyes that the Aborigines were ignorant of what we define as ‘agriculture’ – tilling of soil, planting of seeds/tubers, tending of crop, harvesting and storing of seed/tuber for the next season crop - until introduced to it by Europeans, in this case the Dutch and then later by the British in Eastern Australia.

Reader : “So I read Bruce Pascoe's book in this way, and as an attempt to regain some recognition for a marginalized and dismissed ethnic minority. I don't blame him for that.” Editor’s Response #6 : This in our view is a fundamental error and exposes Mr Pascoe’s, and his supporting readers, real motives. It is completely acceptable for Mr Pascoe to put forward a new theory describing the pre-colonial, Aboriginal economy. He should present his evidence, argue his case and let us all debate the merits, or otherwise, of his theory. We fear however, that it is a fatal error to base scholarship, science and economic theory on a ‘feel-good’ desire, which you describe is aimed to ‘regain some recognition for a marginalized and dismissed ethnic minority’. To us, this is using emotion, politics, and a desire for a certain social justice outcome to prejudice the scholarship. On reviewing the inaccurate conclusions based on the poor evidence presented in Dark Emu, we believe our fears are substantiated.

Reader :”Why a group of "business people, teachers and public servants" would care enough to start a whole website dedicated to essentially nit-picking and dismissing arguments in a book is what has me puzzled.” Editor’s Response #7 : With all due respect, we think that this comment is highly elitist and misses the point of our project. We may be ‘only’ a group of "business people, teachers and public servants" amongst others, but we still care deeply about truth, the miss-use of our language (‘Newspeak’), the re-writing of our history and the continued appropriation and manipulation of Aboriginal culture and history by people who should know better. Rather than sit idly by, we are being pro-active. And it not just us; we note that, quite independently, Peter O’Brien has just released a new book also debunking Dark Emu. It is becoming all the rage apparently!

Reader : “What possible negative consequences could the book have for you or Australia? I think you're being needlessly paranoid if you think an honest and well-intentioned critique of the work would be problem.” Editor’s Response #8 : Where do we begin! Several blog posts are being constructed on this very topic, which we hope to post in the next few weeks.

Reader : “If you are concerned about intellectual rigor and good scholarship then why not identify yourselves?” Editor’s Response #9 : We are anonymous for a few simple reasons. Many of our contributors are in positions where openly expressing a non-Progressive Leftist view would be career threatening – sad but true. Some contributors are bound by clauses in their employment contracts that potentially could be used against them if they express “non-approved” views, even outside the work-place (with consequences possibly similar to the cases of Prof. Peter Ridd and Israel Folau); while others quite enjoy the intellectual freedom to say what they really think under the protection of a pen-name.

Anyway, the Progressive Left make us chuckle at the thought of their support for an anonymous whistle-blower leaking on the Liberal government, but the moment an anonymous blogger writes an expose on a darling of the Progressive Left, like Mr Pascoe, the accusations of foul-play fly! We operate under the premise of letting our arguments stand or fall on their own merit – it doesn’t matter who wrote them – they are up for debate, debunking or confirmation as the case maybe.

Reader : “Feel free to argue otherwise, but your desire to remain anonymous, and your apparent dismissal or ignorance of accepted science around the origins of agriculture and ethnobotany, suggests to me that you are in fact motivated by prejudice or a desire to debase indigenous Australians.” Editor’s Response #10 : We can assure you that our position has nothing to do with prejudice or a desire to ‘debase’ Aboriginal Australians - far from it : we are absolutely in awe of the skill and success of pre-colonial Aboriginal society in its ability to survive, and indeed thrive, for some 50,000 years on this most difficult of continents. The stories and film clips we have unearthed in our research into the hunter gatherer societies of the Aborigines has left us in complete respect for their abilities.

Instead, what we find totally disrespectful to Aboriginal society and its history is the attempt by Mr Pascoe and his supporters to decide that in fact, to be ‘only a hunter gatherer society’, is a bit of a ‘marginalised’ and ‘debased’ proposition - much better if one can re-brand the pre-colonial Aborigines as people who, “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 system of pan-continental government that generated peace and prosperity…” (from Dark Emu, 2018 reprint, dust jacket blurb). In our mind this is real prejudice and hints at an intellectual arrogance that assumes that agricultural societies were always ‘better’ than hunter-gatherer societies in any given landscape.

And finally the attempt by the Progressive Left to have their cake and eat it too – we are expected to accept that, for example, the Science of Climate is settled due to the conscensus of 97% of scientists, but then we are admonished for our “apparent dismissal or ignorance of accepted science around the origins of agriculture and ethnobotany” because we are with the 97%+ conscensus of anthropologists and historians who say Aboriginal society was a hunter gatherer one. In the 3% camp claiming that the Aborigines were agriculturalist’s are Pascoe, Gammage and half a dozen other less prominent writers, whereas we are in the 97%+ camp with the likes of Tindale, Gould, Stanner, Elkin, Mountford, Thomson, Diamond, etc., many of whom actually lived with, and documented the lives of, the Aborigines which they described as nomadic, hunter gatherers.

See below some conclusions regarding Australian Aboriginal ‘agriculture’, or the lack of it, from other scholars.