Bandwagons and bathwater

Porr and Vivian-Williams make the correct observation that few Australian archaeologists have been publicly critical of Dark Emu. I agree that this silence is an attempt to preserve the book’s positive representation of pre-contact Aboriginal society as sophisticated and complex. Yet some archaeologists, including myself and Harry Lourandos, have publicly voiced conditional support for Dark Emu (The Australian – Guilliatt 2019), subsequently becoming targets for repetitious online critique in politically conservative media such as The Spectator Australia and Quadrant (e.g. O’Brien 2019, 2021a, 2021b). It is no secret that many Australian archaeologists have had reservations about Bruce Pascoe’s use of the term ‘agriculture’ to describe Aboriginal Australian plant food production systems. I suggest that part of the problem of a lack of desire to voice such reservations publicly is a lack of alternative words and concepts to better characterise these food production systems. It is not a simple case of stating that Aboriginal people were hunter-gatherers, as this designation is equally as problematic as the term agriculture. Porr and Vivian-Williams rightly point out that the concept of hunter-gatherers was a European intellectual invention based on conjecture and not empirical observation. As McNiven and Russell (2005) pointed out in Appropriated Pasts, the ancient Greeks and Romans invented the idea of foraging peoples as part of a developmental cosmology that saw the first peoples as pure and subsisting on the fruits of nature. Pre-contact Aboriginal Australian food production systems were neither agricultural nor hunting and gathering. Anthropological theorising on these major categories of food production systems has advanced little since the nineteenth century, beyond starting that, in many cases, Aboriginal Australians fell somewhere between agriculture and hunting and gathering. One potential answer to this anthropological conundrum is to move beyond nineteenth century dichotomous thinking and to create a trinodal food resource production matrix comprising foraging, cultivation, and agriculture (Figure 1). In this matrix, foragers use the natural availability of food resources; cultivators undertake a wide range of strategies to artificially enhance/increase the natural availability of resources; and agriculturalists replace naturally available resources, usually with imported and domesticated plants and animals. All pre-contact Aboriginal Australian societies possessed varying elements of foraging and cultivation. In some cases, such as the Gunditjmara of southwest Victoria, cultivation extended to fish aquaculture. It is doubtful that any Aboriginal groups were pure foragers, living passively off the natural bounty of nature, just as it is doubtful that any Aboriginal groups artificially enhanced the availability (i.e. cultivated) of every resource they used. The reality is that all societies are cultivators to some degree. Furthermore, agriculture is not positioned as the only evolutionary outcome of increasing intensification of food production systems by hunter-gatherers (Lourandos 1980:258). In many cases, exemplified by Australia, the evolutionary outcome was sustainable cultivation. I concur with Porr and Vivian-Williams that it is easy to read Dark Emu as denigrating Aboriginal peoples as ‘mere’ hunter-gatherers. As Ian Keen (2021) and Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe (Sutton and Walshe 2021) skilfully point out, there is nothing ‘mere’ about being a hunter-gatherer. Yet my reading of Dark Emu is a little different. Pascoe refers to ‘mere’ hunter-gatherers in the sense of simplistic, colonialist, and primitivist representations of Aboriginal peoples as pure foragers who lived passively off nature’s bounty with little or no impact on the landscape. That is, Pascoe is arguing against the representation of pre-contact Aboriginal peoples as having done nothing – one of the foundations of the flawed colonial fantasy of terra nullius. He rightly adds that ‘The belief that Aboriginal people were ‘mere’ hunter-gatherers has been used as a political tool to justify dispossession’ (Pascoe 2014:129). In this sense, I think there exists some form of circuitous agreement between Pascoe, Porr and Vivian-Williams, Keen, and Sutton and Walshe. All