Dark emu : Aboriginal Australia and the birth of agriculture
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Dark emu : Aboriginal Australia and the birth of agriculture
Scribe, 2018
- : UK ed
Available at / 5 libraries
-
No Libraries matched.
- Remove all filters.
Note
Description based on 2019 printing
"First published in Australia by Magabala Books Aboriginal Corporation 2014"--T.p. verso
Includes bibliographical references (p. 239-254) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
by "Nielsen BookData"
