Not hunter-gatherers
The tag was the problem. The explorer’s ‘village’ was nineteen huts, not all year.
Dark Emu argues for a reconsideration of the hunter-gatherer tag for pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians.
Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu, 2014: reconsider the “hunter-gatherer tag.” The 2018 subtitle went further — Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture. ABC Education put it in front of Years 5–10: the book “challenged the belief that the First Australians were hunter-gatherers” and taught “vast agricultural fields.” The NSW Premier’s Literary Awards made it Book of the Year and Indigenous Writer’s Prize, 2016. That is a government stamp.
This card files that tag. It does not file “Aboriginal people did not manage country” and it does not file “Pascoe invented every grindstone.”
What did have a receipt:
- Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe, Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? (Melbourne University Press, 2021): classical Aboriginal people were “highly successful hunter-gatherers and fishers.” They “strongly repudiate” the idea that this was primitive. They find the agriculture thesis does not hold. Pascoe’s edit of Sturt’s “village” of 19 huts is “misleading at best.” Sturt’s diary: people did not live in those houses all year.
- The same ABC classroom resource, after the fact, adds a note that Sutton and Walshe “evaluated differently.” The years of assigned reading came first. The note is a footnote.
Grammar: hunter-gatherer tag. Logic: a tag you drop still needs a crop. Rhetoric: birth of agriculture.