In Dark Emu, Pascoe claims Indigenous Australians were farmers with large settled villages in contrast to settled research and buttresses his work by claiming without apparent evidence to be indigenous himself.
Pascoe’s work seemed shot through with the ignorant belief that societies would leap at the opportunity to be farmers, which is a type of Eurocentric technological chauvinism. Instead most societies preferred to remain hunter gatherers given the choice. Agricultural is harder work than hunting and gathering. It remains an open question why we ever became farmers.
As the Kung bushmen of the Kallahari said in retort to the South African Government urging them to become farmers, “Why work so hard as farmers when there are plentiful mongongo nuts?”
It wasn’t ignorance that had Australian indigenous remain gathering, they were aware of agriculture prior to European settlement and encountered New Guinean agriculturalists from time to time.
So why didn’t Australian indigenous, contrary to Pascoe’s claims, adopt agriculture? Partly because of the lack of suitable plants but mainly because they didn’t feel the need to, they had sufficient sources of food that could be gleaned with much less effort – see Jared Diamond, “Guns, Germs and Steel.”
One suspects Pascoe is deeply Eurocentric, believing that indigenous can only be regarded as equivalent to Europeans if they can be claimed to have similar food production and live in settled villages with population supposedly numbering in the thousands.
One suspects that his book came as a relief to the wider Australian population who may share his Eurocentricity and are disquieted by how to applaud a pre-colonial culture based “merely” on hunter gathering.
It’s curious how Pascoe refers to colonial sources for evidence about indigenous Australians. Why not simply ask those indigenous who remember the old practices, don’t they have a voice?
At root, Pascoe’s book is underpinned by the belief that human societies are ranked according to their technological practices as are the people that constitute them and hence to advocate racial equality one must fabricate technological practices. This is a patronising deeply racist perspective.
It’s ironic that much of Pascoe’s audience sees his book as an antidote to racism rather than its opposite.