# Capture — not hunter-gatherers

- **Claim filed:** “Dark Emu argues for a reconsideration of the hunter-gatherer tag for pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians.”
- **Who:** Bruce Pascoe / Magabala Books
- **URL:** https://www.magabala.com/products/dark-emu
- **Date on page:** 2014-03-01 (first edition)
- **Publisher:** Magabala Books
- **Captured:** 2026-08-16
- **Method:** saved HTML (`magabala-dark-emu.html`, `abc-education.html`, `conversation-sutton-2021.html`)

## Verbatim

`magabala-dark-emu.html`

> Dark Emu argues for a reconsideration of the 'hunter-gatherer' tag for pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians and attempts to rebut the colonial myths that have worked to justify dispossession.

Awards listed on the same page: 2016 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards — Book of the Year and Indigenous Writer’s Prize.

`abc-education.html` — ABC Education digibook, Years 5–10
https://www.abc.net.au/education/digibooks/bruce-pascoe-aboriginal-agriculture-technology-and-ingenuity/101734320

> In 2014, Bruce Pascoe wrote a book called Dark Emu that challenged the belief that the First Australians were hunter-gatherers.

> we learn about the vast agricultural fields, ingenious aquaculture systems, sophisticated use of fire and successful industries that existed in Australia prior to colonisation.

A later note on the same page names Sutton and Walshe, *Farmers or Hunter Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate* (MUP, 2021).

## The other meter

`conversation-sutton-2021.html` — Christine Nicholls reviewing Sutton & Walshe, 14 June 2021

> 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.

> Not agriculturalists

> Pascoe’s edit of Sturt’s original 1849 text… It’s misleading at best. For Sturt’s diary reveals Aboriginal people didn’t live in “houses” in any single site all year round.

## What this file does not do

It does not file “there was no fire-stick farming” or “grindstones are fake.” It files the dropped hunter-gatherer tag and “birth of agriculture” against the ethnographic and archaeological record Sutton and Walshe put back on the table.