Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australians and the Birth of Agriculture

"Pascoe makes a strong argument that Aboriginal Australians were sophisticated agriculturalists, working with plants, animals, water, and soil to create a productive and biodiverse landscape. His book shows how culture and nature were deeply intertwined across the continent. He also makes clear how warfare, murder, disease, and land theft destroyed most of the foundations of this fruitful ecosystem. We cannot understand modern Australia without understanding that much of the continent has been transformed by colonial violence, fundamentally altering soils, plant communities, and animal populations. His is a powerful call to undo what he calls the “amnesia” about Australia’s history and ecology. There are parallels here with other colonized continents whose “nature” was regarded by many European naturalists as untouched “wilderness” inhabited by “primitives” who had little effect on their environments. The field of natural history writing still sometimes clings to myths of wilderness—ignoring the presence, knowledge, and ecological management activities of indigenous peoples—and Pascoe’s book provides an excellent counter, relevant everywhere. His descriptions of the extraordinary depth of integration between people and the landscape in pre-colonized Australia is also a lesson and inspiration to the rest of the world as we seek more sustainable and resilient economies. Natural history writing has always had a fascination with the relationships among layers of time. Our myopia is not temporal. Instead, the myopia in natural history writing is the gender and race bias that pervaded the genre until recently. Well into the twentieth century, the notion that female animals had agency or were equal to males in their importance in evolution was dismissed. To this day, most accounts of natural history make heteronormative and gender binary assumptions about animals and plants. Yet, in many species homosexual sexual and social bonds are commonplace. Many individual organisms have both male and female sexual organs. In some species, multiple versions of “sex” exist, and so males and females can exist in multiple forms. Almost all early natural history writers in the English tradition were white supremacist in some form or other, even those who opposed slavery. The field therefore needs more diverse voices represented among authors and, for all authors, our studies of the lives of other species (and our own) should strive to acknowledge prejudice and, as much as possible, seek to move beyond into truer representations of life’s diversity. In my latest book , Sounds Wild and Broken , for example, I have foregrounded discussions of sexism in the study of sonic evolution and of environmental injustice in forest conservation. No doubt my writing is blinkered and imperfect, but I hope that readers with an interest in natural history will understand more clearly how the biodiversity crisis is also a crisis of human rights. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Fiction writers are doing astonishingly good work in this area. For example, N. K. Jemisin is usually described as a writer of speculative fiction . True enough, but she is also one of the foremost natural history writers, in my opinion. Her stories are stunning explorations of the intersections of human justice and nature in ways that help us see our own time more clearly. Diversifying natural history writing will include an expanded notion of what the genre comprises. Fiction, poetry, graphic novels, and audio essays all belong."