This entry refers to two very important recent books of direct relevance to Australia’s history, both past, and present. In each case, I have briefly referred to my basically ‘non-professional’ reflection of these books, and then submitted a selected overall summary and review in each case by a professional journalist, which I believe provides a concise description of what you are getting !!
At the end of November, 2021, I finished reading Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers: The Dark Emu Debate by Peter Sutton & Keryn Walshe: pub. 2021; 288 pages.
Now prior to reading this book, I had previously read [and reviewed] two of the principal books referred to by Sutton and Walshe, which through their research and studies have been much discredited, in particular Dark Emu..
In the case of Bill Ramage’s [The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia], I would write in 2013 that ‘Very interesting, but difficult at times to read with a lot of seemingly repetitive material, however a perspective of the Aboriginal treatment of this country that should be learnt and respected’…….and from the book jacket – ‘Across Australia, early Europeans commented again and again that the land looked like a park. With extensive grassy patches and pathways, open woodlands and abundant wildlife, it evoked a country estate in England. Bill Gamage has discovered this was because Aboriginal people managed the land in a far more systematic and scientific fashion than we have ever realised…..Once Aboriginal people were no longer able to tend their country [with the arrival of the white man] it became overgrown and vulnerable to the largely damaging bushfires we now experience’.
Bruce Pascoe’s ‘Dark Emu’ went much further, in fact too far, as far as Sutton and Walshe are concerned, yet I mistakenly, in retrospect, gave Pascoe a little too much leeway. In that case I wrote :in 2020 ‘An inspiring read, leaving much to reflect upon…In Dark Emu [first published in 2014, revised edition in 2018], Pascoe examines the journals and diaries of early explorers such as Charles Sturt and Thomas Mitchell and early settlers in Australia, ‘finding evidence’ in their accounts of existing agriculture, ,engineering and building, including stone houses, weirs, sluices and fish traps, and also game management.. This evidence of occupation challenges the traditional views about pre-colonial Australia, and “Terra Nullius”, and were the type of findings that were likely to quickly ‘upset’ people like Andrew Bolt, amongst others!! I believe ‘Dark Emu’ should be essential reading for all with a genuine interest in the true stories of our nation’s history. Bill Gammage’s earlier publication ‘The Biggest Estate on Earth’ should also be read in conjunction with Pascoe’s book. Pascoe also attributes a major influence on his book to the historian, and independent scholar Rupert Gerritsen, who in 2008 published ‘Australia and the Origins of Agriculture’, which argued that Aboriginal people were agriculturalists as much as hunter-gatherers. Gerritsen died in 2013, and Pascoe cites him as a scholar who languished in obscurity because his theories contradicted the mainstream view. Possibly, Pascoe’s book is likely to have a similar affect on those of the Australian populace who simply don’t want to be told that what they have always been taught to believe may not be ‘accurate’, and that, as Pascoe writes in his introductory comments ‘not only that the frontier war had been misrepresented in what we had been taught in school, but also that the economy and culture of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had been grossly undervalued……so very distinct from ‘the primitive hunter-gatherer lifestyle we had been told was the simple lot of Australia’s First People’.
Well. In this 2021 publication [by Sutton and Walshe], I finished the book feeling that I had been truly ‘hoodwinked’ by Pascoe’s many exaggerated claims and theories based on flinty evidence and ‘selected’ sources emphasised to suit his purpose. In many ways, while constantly attacking Pascoe for his incorrect assessment of the real facts – as these two highly respected scientists and authors write ‘We contend that Pascoe is broadly wrong, both about what Australians have been told of pre-conquest Aboriginal society, and about the nature of that society itself’. They devote 288 pages, including an extensive Notes and References section of 66 pages, in support of their material [Pascoe 29 pages] That material was extremely detailed, constantly referring back to Pascoe’s surmising with proven scientific, archaeological and spoken and written records of the Indigenous people themselves. I actually found the extent of the detail of evidence provided as almost painful, so precise and far-ranging it went.
Whilst it fair enough that different versions of a story need to be looked at, I felt disappointed that some sectors of the country’s Education system, have since promoted Pascoe’s book as the ‘Bible’ of Aboriginal ‘history’ in Australia, in the absence of the kind of scientific and anthropological analysis that Sutton and Walshe provide us with, with their central question in writing the book being to ask why Australians have been so receptive to the notion that farming represents an advance from hunting and gathering – there is a middle ground which they explore and examine thoroughly
The following review provides a much more substantial assessment of the book than I can manage, and I include it, to encourage readers.
From ‘The Conversation’ by Christine Judith Nicholls 14/6/2021
Eminent Australian anthropologist Peter Sutton and respected field archaeologist Keryn Walshe have co-authored a meticulously researched new book, Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate. It’s set to become the definitive critique of Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu: Black Seeds — Agriculture or Accident?
First published in 2014, Pascoe’s Dark Emu has spawned numerous derivatives. Pascoe contends that in pre-contact times, Australian Aboriginal people weren’t “mere” hunter-gatherers, but agriculturalists. Descriptors like “simple” or “mere” are anathema to people like me who’ve lived long-term with hunter-gatherers.
For many Australians, Pascoe’s book is a “must-read”, speaking truth to power. For such readers, Dark Emu seems a breakthrough text. Not so, in Sutton and Walshe’s estimation. Nor mine.
Underpinning Dark Emu is the author’s rhetorical purpose. This proselytising is partly achieved by painstaking “massaging” of his sources, a practice forensically examined by Walshe and Sutton. It has led to converts to Pascoe’s dubious proposition. But this willingness to accept Pascoe’s argument reveals a systemic area of failure in the Australian education system.
On the basis of long-term research and observation, Sutton and Walshe portray classical Australian Aboriginal people as highly successful hunter-gatherers and fishers. They strongly repudiate racist notions of Aboriginal hunter-gatherers as living in a primitive state.
In their book, they assert there was and is nothing “simple” or “primitive” about hunter-gatherer-fishers’ labour practices. This complexity was, and in many cases, still is, underpinned by high levels of spiritual/cultural belief.
Not agriculturalists
As Sutton attests, seeds were and are occasionally deliberately scattered. But in classical Aboriginal societies they were never planted nor watered for agricultural purposes. Such aforementioned rituals are collectively called “increase ceremonies”. Sutton’s alternative term, “maintenance ceremonies”, invokes spiritual propagation as opposed to oversupply.
Their objective was continuing subsistence. Australia’s hunter-gatherer-fishers left an extremely light carbon footprint — the diametric opposite of many contemporary agricultural/industrial practices. A photo [depicted in the book] taken in 1932 or earlier, shows Pilbara people throwing yelka (nutgrass) — not threshing or scattering seeds.
Pascoe’s sources and approach
Pascoe draws on records of explorers and early colonists, also citing recent works, including Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines made Australia. Dark Emu leans most heavily on the work of the late historian/ethnographer Rupert Gerritsen.
Counter-intuitively, Pascoe mainly cites non-Aboriginal sources. There is no real “voice” given to the few remaining people who lived traditional lives as youngsters, or are cited in books or articles.
While some have described Dark Emu as fabrication, Sutton and Walshe are more measured. They methodically show that in Dark Emu, Pascoe has removed significant passages from publications that contradict his major objectives. This boosts his contention that all along Aboriginal people were farmers and/or aquaculturalists.
One example concerns Pascoe’s quoting of the journal entries of the explorer Charles Sturt. Sutton writes:
Sturt is quoted [by Pascoe] on his party’s discovery of a large well and ‘village’ of 19 huts somewhere north of Lake Torrens in South Australia.
This “village” concept arose from colonial records, and is still sometimes used in recent articles.
Pascoe’s edit of Sturt’s original 1849 text breathes oxygen into Dark Emu’s polemical edge. It’s misleading at best. For Sturt’s diary reveals Aboriginal people didn’t live in “houses” in any single site all year round.
Such accounts destabilise Pascoe’s argument, reinforced by ethnographic, colonial, and archaeological records.
Hunter-gatherers did alter the country in significant ways — most Australians know about the ancient practice of firing the country, recently discussed in depth owing to our increasingly devastating bush-fires. This involved ecological agency and prowess. But expert fire-burning isn’t an agricultural practice, as Pascoe avers.
Misidentification of implements
In a key chapter, Walshe homes in on Pascoe’s mis-interpretations of hunter-gatherer implements, which he labels “agricultural” tools. For instance, Pascoe misconstrues grooved “Bogan Picks” as heavy stones used for agricultural activity.
Walshe disputes Pascoe’s claim, stating that, “with their adze-shaped end and grooved midline for hafting, they were likely used in a similar way to stone axes.”
Wooden digging sticks were also used for breaking up the earth to extract yams when in season, among various other purposes — not for “tilling” or “ploughing” the soil in preparation for planting seeds.
Language used by early colonists and explorers — words like “village” and “picks” — befuddles readers. British colonists’ monolingualism meant they used English words, often imposed arbitrarily, to name never-before-seen hunter-gatherer implements. For example, “Bogan Pick” references the nearby Bogan River.
Hunter-gatherer mobility and stasis
Sutton expertly summarises the experience of escaped convict, William Buckley, who spent 32 years travelling around country with the Wathawurrung people in Central Victoria.
Over time, Buckley became fluent in the language of his Wathawurrung hosts. Later, his oral account of the hunter-gatherer group’s approximate lengths of mobility and stasis at numerous sites was transcribed. It’s a unique document covering a significant timespan.
This account reinforces earlier chapters in Dark Emu Debate. Sutton and Walshe make it crystal clear that Aboriginal people weren’t “simple nomads” wandering around randomly, opportunistically searching for food and water. They knew their country intimately.
Rather, hunter-gatherers engaged in purposeful travel to sites with which they familiar and able to source seasonally available food, water and shelter at variable times of year.
Another conspicuous weakness in Dark Emu’s approach, pinpointed by Sutton and Walshe, is Pascoe’s penchant for choosing exceptions to the general rule, implying that these atypical practices were widespread or universal. It’s another strategy to consolidate his argument but involves eliding vital information.
Pre-contact aquaculture
Pascoe offers two examples of “aquacultural” practice, one in Brewarrina (NSW) in the bed streams of the Barwon River, and the other in Lake Condah, in south-western Victoria.
He seizes on rock use in the Brewarrina fishery and Lake Condah’s fish and seasonal eel trapping as “proof” of Aboriginal people’s aqua/agricultural prowess — giving the impression they created these complex hydrological systems from scratch.
But Sutton writes, “The fish traps of Brewarrina … were not claimed as the ingenious works of human beings, but … regarded as having been put there in the Dreaming, by Dreamings.” Both he and Walshe readily acknowledge the fact that Aboriginal people use/d their human agency to create modifications. It’s not an either/or matter.
However, a chapter written by Walshe throws light on the seismic activity that forged Lake Condah’s unique terrain and waterways. This area, she writes, is part of
a volcanic system … last active … 9,000 years ago, with a major eruption much earlier, about 37,000 thousand years ago, causing a massive lava flow across the pre-existing drainage system.
The natural tilt southwards, she explains, facilitated “naturally formed ancient river channels … to reach the Southern Ocean”.
This enabled migratory fish to spawn. Fish, and at certain times of year, eels, swam through both fresh and salty water — making for ease of catching. Local Aboriginal people moved the heavy stones into semi-circular formations to enable netting, spearing or grabbing by hand, possibly creating further semi-captivity of these food staples.
In this way, hunter-gatherers consistently and constantly “value-added” to, or enhanced, nature’s creation.
Not a bunfight
Pascoe’s skilful editing of his sources involves conscious, deliberate intervention. Does he hope Dark Emu will convince people to change their belief in the noxious evolutionary ladder, once uniformly, but still sometimes, applied to different groups of homo sapiens?
Or was his book written to prove Aboriginal people were/are more like Europeans, which could perhaps lead to much needed progress on reconciliation? Perhaps that accounts for its rapturous reception by many Australians, especially the young.
Why not simply celebrate the long-term achievements of hunter-gatherers?
Hunter-gatherers worked in concert with the natural world, not against it as most humans do today, resulting in insoluble difficulties such as overcrowding, pandemics and toxic agricultural and aquacultural practices. Survival depends on this. For eons, it ensured the continuity and the continuing existence of Australia’s hunter-gatherer people and their culture.
Farmers or Hunter Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate needs to be read carefully, keeping an open mind. The book’s focus is on both material and spiritual economies and their misrepresentation. Despite racist commentary from some, this isn’t an exclusively right or left-wing issue or a bunfight.
Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu will continue to be granted recognition, if not immortality. But Sutton and Walshe’s Dark Emu Debate will undoubtedly be acclaimed. As a critique of Pascoe’s book, it’s just about perfect — a volume with the twin virtues of rigour and readability.
Late in December, 2021, I also finished reading ‘Escape From Manus: The untold true story” by Jaivet Ealom; published in 2021; 347 pages. A very disturbing read, which despite denials from some quarters, needs to be read and believed, as it confirms so many of the reports and feedback that have been denied by successive governments for almost two decades. It is a story that reflects very poorly on Australia’s so-called humanitarian policies towards refugees. If it wasn’t already shattered, this book certainly added to my personal disillusionment of government [Liberal in particular] policies and attitudes to the whole question of refugees and asylum seekers in our modern Australian society where all forms of empathy have been diluted by the forceful impressions ‘conned’ onto the population by pronouncements of government, and especially a succession of Immigration Ministers, with Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton being prime suspects in the enforcement of such harsh policies..
This book is a powerful account of how one man escaped the prison of Manus Island. A true story of bravery and resilience. It’s the awe-inspiring story of the only person to successfully escape from Australia’s notorious offshore detention centre on Manus Island.
In 2013 Jaivet Ealom fled Myanmar’s brutal regime and anti-Muslim persecution, and boarded a boat of asylum seekers bound for Australia. Instead of receiving refuge, he was transported from Christmas Island, to Australia’s infamous Manus Regional Processing Centre.
Blistering hot days on the island turned into weeks, then years until, finally, facing either jail in Papua New Guinea or being returned to almost certain death in Myanmar, he took matters into his own hands. Drawing inspiration from the hit show Prison Break, Jaivet meticulously planned his escape. He made it out alive but was stateless, with no ID or passport. While the nightmare of Manus was behind him, his true escape to freedom had only just begun.
How Jaivet made it to sanctuary in Canada in a six-month-long odyssey by foot, boat, car and plane is miraculous. His story will astonish, anger and inspire you. It will make you reassess what it means to give refuge and redefine what can be achieved by one man determined to beat the odds.
From ABC Radio National, we learn that we’ve all heard stories of great escapes — soldiers cutting the wire or tunnelling under the fence of POW camps, and spies assuming new identities to evade the security services on their trail. Here, we meet someone who’s done almost all of that.’ While Manus closed in late 2017, it was not before Jaivet’s audacious, and at times, distressing flight. These days, Jaivet resides in Canada, where he has become a prominent spokesman for the Rohingya community. He is studying at Toronto University and works for a company that providers software to non-profit organisations.
Again, I include one specific review of the book which explains the content and the story.
From The Guardian [Australia], as reviewed by Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore, on 2 July, 2021
In 2013, when Jaivet Ealom sat squeezed in a boat with other asylum seekers, he prayed, not for the first time, for an easy death. They were far from shore off the coast of Indonesia, the vessel was sinking, and Ealom could not swim. Fishermen from a nearby island came to the rescue, hauling each passenger from the half-submerged vessel. Ealom was saved. But during the chaos, a small baby fell into the ocean. “It never resurfaced,” remembers Ealom. “[The mother] just screamed from the bottom of her lungs. It was traumatising.”
The event was just one of the horrors that Ealom faced in his long route to freedom: from persecution as a Rohingya Muslim in his homeland Myanmar, to three and a half years internment in Manus Island, to his time living in a homeless shelter in Toronto, where he eventually settled.
Now Ealom’s book, Escape from Manus, tells the story of his journey. In particular, his six-month odyssey to flee the offshore detention centre using tricks he had learned from the TV series Prison Break, which involved, among other things, studying his guards’ movements and faking his identity.
Escape from Manus begins, though, in Myanmar, where Ealom was born a decade after the ruling military junta spearheaded increasingly barbaric controls over the country’s stateless Muslim minority.
“They were burning down whole entire villages, whole entire neighbourhoods,” recalls the 28-year-old University of Toronto student when we speak on the phone. “That was when we collectively decided in the family that those who could leave, should.”
Ealom fled to Jakarta before deciding he would try to make it to Australia. But, as he was at sea, the then prime minister Kevin Rudd declared that any asylum seekers arriving by boat without a visa would never be settled in the country. Ealom was detained first on Christmas Island, then on Manus.
The conditions on Manus were as bad as Myanmar. Ealom lived in a cramped modified shipping container, which roasted in the oppressive heat. His rancid food was filled with debris, including stones and human teeth. Locals attacked the compound, thinking that the asylum seekers were terrorists; they shot at his accommodation, leaving bullet holes in the walls, and forcing inmates to shelter behind their mattresses.
As he writes: “The prison looked and felt like the scene of a horror movie about a perverse site for human experimentation; a floodlit laboratory in the middle of nowhere.”
Worse than the physical discomfort, Ealom says, was the emotional strain: “In Burma the torture was physical: you only feel it when you are being tortured, you only suffer when you are being chased. But in Manus it was psychological, the torture is with you 24/7.”
The stress of indefinite detention, with no end in sight, led to a rash of asylum seekers trying to take their own lives, including Ealom. “There wasn’t even a private place to commit suicide,” he says, bitterly.
In 2017, Ealom decided, once again, he must flee. He had been served paperwork stating that he would either be returned to Myanmar – and, he feared, death or incarceration – or sent to prison in Papua New Guinea. The news was a wake-up call. He escaped Manus in May, in part by using tricks from Prison Break, including tracking his guards’ schedules. Then, slipping away at an opportune moment, he boarded a plane to Port Moresby.
Helping him were people working within the system. “There were good people among the guards,” he says. “Some didn’t realise it was this torture camp that they were signing up for.”
The Manus Island detention centre was found to be illegal by the PNG Supreme Court in 2016 and forcibly shut in violent confrontation a year later. The detained men were moved to other centres in Manus province or to Port Moresby. In 2021, about 130 men remain held in the PNG capital.
From Port Moresby, Ealom made his way to the Solomon Islands. There, in order to get a Solomon Islands passport, he spent months perfecting how to pass as a local, from learning Pijin, the local language, to chewing betel nuts, which stained his teeth a deep crimson.
Travel document in hand, using the last of his money, he bought a ticket to Toronto.
Ealom arrived on Christmas Eve 2018, with only a light jacket for warmth. He sought asylum and, after a stint sleeping on a homeless shelter floor, was finally granted refugee status.
“I didn’t know a single person here,” he says. “I didn’t have any idea two days prior where Canada was. It was the only place I could buy with the money and the only place with relatively easy visa requirements. I just took a leap of faith.”
It worked.
Proficient in English, Ealom is now finishing his degree and works at NeedsList, which matches the needs of victims of humanitarian crises with help using special software.
The aid sector “is always top to bottom”, he says. “It needs to be bottom up: we [should] identify what is needed on the ground so there is less waste.”
As for returning home to Myanmar, “given the Rohingya situation … is not going to get any better soon, I don’t see any opportunity,” he says. Plus, after all the years of waiting and frustration, of pain and plotting his escape, “I am satisfied with the life I am building in Canada.”
Site Title 
Leave a comment