![]() ![]() It was, and remains in some ways, a book for its time, and one that serves a specific purpose. In my review in Aboriginal History of Dark Emu when it was first published, I considered that, despite concerns about the author’s sources, it was “a powerful argument for re-evaluating the sophistication of Aboriginal peoples’ economic and socio-political livelihoods”. In this comprehensive, well-written work, Sutton and Walshe pursue a forensic critique of Bruce Pascoe’s book, which was originally published in 2014 as Dark Emu, Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? Pascoe wanted to enlighten the public by reassessing Indigenous Australians’ ways of living not as “mere hunter-gatherers” (as Pascoe put it), but as farmers and agriculturalists. It is an important intervention in a discussion about the myriad ways in which Indigenous Australians have continued to procure their living from the land and manage the environment. ![]() Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate by anthropologist and linguist Peter Sutton and archaeologist Keryn Walshe is an impressively researched work of scholarship. ![]()
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