Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the birth of agriculture

Pascoe, Bruce

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1911344781 ISBN 13 : 9781911344780

Editeur : Scribe Publications, 2018

Présentation de l'éditeur :

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 from the records and diaries of early Australian explorers and colonists, he reveals that Aboriginal 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 -- for the benefit of us all.

Dark Emu, a bestseller in Australia, won both the Book of the Year Award and the Indigenous Writer's Prize in the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards.

Biographie de l'auteur :

Bruce Pascoe lives in Australia and has a Bunurong, Tasmanian, and Yuin heritage. Dark Emu won both the Book of the Year Award and the Indigenous Writer's Prize in the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards.

Bruce is currently working on two films for ABC TV and a novel.