Loudness 7
World’s first bakers
A grindstone is a tool. Bread is a bakery. ABC Education sold the bakery.
Aboriginal people were the world’s first bakers and they invented bread.
ABC Education, a classroom digibook for Years 5–10: “Bruce Pascoe states that Aboriginal people were the world’s first bakers and that they invented bread.” The same page asks whether grindstones mean flour 65,000 years ago, and “Were they the world’s first bakers?” Pascoe has said it in his own voice: “I come from the country that invented bread. And that’s Australia.”
This card files that invention. It does not file “nobody ground seed on this continent.”
What did have a receipt:
- Seed-grinding is old in Australia. A grindstone is not a bakery, and processing seed is not planting a crop. Sutton and Walshe, in The Dark Emu Debate, separate hunter-gatherer processing from agriculture. Implements colonists called “picks” were not “for tilling or ploughing the soil in preparation for planting seeds.”
- The world’s earliest bread, on the usual archaeological definition, sits in the Natufian / Fertile Crescent record, millennia later than a grindstone and still not “invented in Australia.” ABC Education leaves the question mark in the heading and Pascoe’s statement in the lesson.
- The public broadcaster is the government in the classroom. The book had already won the NSW Premier’s prizes. The lesson plan is the support.
Grammar: invented bread. Logic: milling is not baking a first. Rhetoric: world’s first.