Archaeology, deep history and the culture wars: Why most archaeologists have not critiqued Dark Emu

Abstract

I guess I must be a glass-half-full person. While recognising the intellectual thrust and many issues raised by this Forum piece and agreeing that few Australian archaeologists have engaged with Dark Emu and its propositions, I don’t think that Dark Emu is a tragedy – either for Aboriginal people – or for the relationship that Australian archaeology has with Aboriginal people. And I take exception to the statement therein that ‘Australian archaeology is also complicit in the erasure of Aboriginal diversity and alterity that is an effect of Dark Emu’s project and, as such, [is] responsible for the erasure of options to learn from the past and challenge the present’. Dark Emu’s significant achievement has been in the popularising of some of the complexities around resilience and persistence of Aboriginal people on this continent – another cog in the History Wars wheel, post the Native Title era – overturning longheld misconceptions about the hapless wandering of ‘mere’ hunter-gatherers which have been promulgated through most Australian’s education over the last 50 (100?) years (or at least since the history curriculum became a talking point). I rejoice in the fact that Australian children and youth are now being taught a different interpretation from that which was taught previously, based on the journals of foundational white explorers of this continent. Our history lessons in the sixties and seventies were focussed on these same explorers – the ‘discoverers’ of this vast continent, after whom many of our rivers and deserts and ranges are still named – despite the fact that many of them failed to survive their journeys, in part because they were dismissive of the Indigenous peoples they encountered – flourishing in the lands they traversed. The fact that it is the writings in these explorers’ journals that Pascoe mobilises in his narrative to demonstrate how firmly Aboriginal people were in place (contra terra nullius), constructing more permanent dwellings, harvesting bountiful seeds in times of plenty (no doubt to support ceremonial aggregations), has been well known to historians for decades. And indeed, Dark Emu builds on more detailed syntheses such as those by Bill Gammage (2011) and Rupert Gerritson (2008) – (see review by Peter Veth, this issue). But not since The First Footprints series (Contact Films 2013) has this type of narration captured the imagination and broader interest of the Australian public. Dark Emu is a history discourse – based on the interpretation of written texts. It engages little with the archaeological evidence which has continued to be generated over the last several decades. Nor, as Sutton and Walshe (2021) have pointed out, does it engage with the entire land rights and Native Title discourse generated by anthropologists over the last 20 years. And I guess therein lies its major flaws. I agree with the view expressed in The Tragedy that we need to consider Aboriginal Australian lifeways in a frame which transcends a debate about the hierarchy of hunter-gatherers and farmers. A knowledge system which enables continuity of cultural tradition through millennia by curating water knowledge in the desert through mythological narratives and multiple symbolic systems (rock art, sand drawing, body painting and sacred objects) is a form of social resilience and persistence which needs to be celebrated (as demonstrated by the Martu regarding exclusive water rights in their Native Title Determination: Martu 1 WAD6110/1998; Jeffery James and Ors on behalf of the Martu People v The State of Western Australia). Pascoe’s reliance on an antiquated hierarchy whereby farming is seen as being a greater pinnacle of human progress and achievement than hunting, gathering and foraging is a widespread problematic (e.g. one which human behavioural ecologists have been struggling with for decades!).