Foragers or Farmers: Dark Emu and the Controversy over Aboriginal Agriculture

ABSTRACT

Bruce Pascoe's book Dark Emu, which has been a publishing phenomenon in Australia, argues that Aboriginal people were not ‘mere’ hunter-gatherers in 1788, but were farming. This article sets the argument of the book within the context of the views of archaeologists and anthropologists, as well as other historians, about Aboriginal agriculture. Some have argued that Aboriginal people were hunter-gatherers and asked why they did not adopt agriculture, while others have suggested that at least some groups were practicing farming. The article finds that while the boundary between foraging and farming is a fuzzy one, Aboriginal people were indeed hunters, gatherers and fishers at the time of the British colonisation of Australia.

KEYWORDS:

• Aboriginal Australia
• agriculture
• hunter-gatherers
• Dark Emu
• critique

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Nicolas Peterson for alerting me to Warwick Jones’s dissertation on Indigenous seed harvesting, processing and storage; Mark Moore for helping me access Warwick Jones’s dissertation; Peter Sutton for discussions on the issue of Aboriginal agriculture, for alerting me to relevant material, and for providing access to the manuscript of his and Keryn Walshe’s forthcoming book; Robert Levitus for helpful discussion and Tim Denham as well as an anonymous referee for detailed comments on the text. Shorter versions were presented at a Zoom seminar in September 2020 organised by Yasmine Musharbash under the auspices of the School of Archaeology and Anthropology seminar series, the Australian National University, and a Zoom talk for the Emeritus Faculty of the Australian National University on 2 December 2020. I thank participants in the seminar and talk for lively and helpful discussions, and Leah Boucher and Craig Reynolds for organising the Emeritus Faculty talk.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Casada possibly refers to Masdenia flavescens, ‘native potatoes’ (Hunter 1793, 409 note 26 to Ch. 4).

2 Gilligan (2010) appears to have accepted Gerritsen’s suggestion that D. hastifolia was introduced, and rejects the case as one of de novo development of agriculture.

3 Techniques for separating and collecting seeds and sporocarps included beating plants with sticks and then winnowing, threshing by putting the plants in a hole and grinding with one foot, letting Portulaca and Panicum seed fall from the heaped plants aided by internal fermentation, setting fire to the heaps and knocking the seeds out, spreading and drying in the sun, rubbing by hand in a coolamon (Jones 1979, 144–145).

4 Ashwin’s estimate seems reasonable; I estimate that a coolamon of the size reported would hold between 72 and 90 litres of grain. Wheat weighs about 79 grams per cc, so that 72 litres of wheat would weigh 56,880 grams. Seventeen of these amounts to close to a tonne (966,960 grams).

5 Tim Denham comments (pers. com.) that, ‘[f]irst, archaeologists in Australia have not really looked and archaeobotanical assemblages are very sparse in Australia. Second, people have not studied modern populations for all traits - rather than just the archaeobotanically visible ones’. Moreover, gene flow between wild and cultivated populations may have persisted. Domestication of food plants cannot, therefore, be categorically ruled out (see also Denham 2009).

6 During the Burke and Wills expedition, King observed a store of grain in an Aboriginal dwelling which he estimated at four tons, according to Pascoe (2018a, 54), who provides no supporting endnote or reference.

7 Garfinkel, Ben-Shlomo, and Kuperman (2009) reckon 1.5 tonnes for a ‘nuclear family’.

8 Gerritsen does not provide a reference for this quotation but it appears to be Lewis (1875). A previous footnote (Gerritsen 2008, 46 n93) cites Lewis (1875, 20).

9 I am grateful to an anonymous referee for making this point.

10 The expression ‘hunter-gatherer’ was seemingly coined by the sociologists Hobhouse, Wheeler, and Ginsberg (1914) in a paper on ‘the material culture and social institutions of the simpler peoples’ (Florin and Carah 2018, 48). It remains a robust anthropological category; indeed, an international conference on hunter-gatherer societies takes place every few years.