Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe

One of the TV programs I like to watch most days is The Drum. This is a discussion  between an assortment of different panelists on the ABC. The ABC here is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Australia's independent national broadcaster, and they don't shy away from sometimes uncomfortable subjects, uncovering scandals and criticising those in politics. You can guess how well this might go down with some politicians and their supporters and The Drum comes in for a lot of criticism because of the diversity of its panellists who come from all sides of the political spectrum and give their sometimes controversial opinions on several subjects during the course of the program. Given 'the drum' in Aussie slang generally means the facts (if I'm giving you the drum I'm filling you in on the facts including what's going on behind the scenes) you can see why controversy sometimes erupts when a panellist speaks out.

While I don't always agree with the opinions stated I find The Drum often opens up conversations and increases my awareness of things that I hadn't known about - and this is exactly what has happened over the last six months or so. Aboriginal panelists often feature talking about indigenous current affairs while NAIDOC week every year brings indigenous matters into focus with an indigenous moderator and panellist discussion. It's not always comfortable listening because colonial settlement of Australia has many dark passages with long lasting consequences.

It was on The Drum that I first heard of Bruce Pascoe and Dark Emu, his book on Aboriginal culture before the arrival of the European colonists. I'm so glad I did because I've now read it and so many of the questions that had been raised about the traditional way we were taught about Aboriginal culture were answered. I was taught that the original inhabitants had been nomadic hunter gatherers with no permanent settlements. This meant that the land belonged to no-one - the so-called terra nullius - a convenient fiction which made it open for European settlers to lay claim to it. Terra nullius was manifestly untrue since there was already a thriving indigenous population but a resident population didn't stop any of the European colonial powers from as far back as Christopher Columbus in 1492 moving in on other lands and taking over whatever they wanted.  The Australian land grab was only one of the later parts of the world-wide invasions where indigenous people were dispossessed and then put under the 'protection' of the new settlers' laws. The people concerned, of course, were never consulted.

This had long ago ceased to make sense to me and as carbon dating developed and the length of time indigenous people had been in Australia stretched further and further back - it's now estimated that Australia has been continuously occupied for at least 60,000 years - it made even less sense. These were people who shared a cultural heritage and lived successfully on pretty much every part of the continent, from rainforest to desert, exploiting and managing the landscape to their advantage, not the half starved, wandering primitive savages unable to look after themselves that I was taught about in school.

It's turned out that this view was very far from the truth and Pascoe shows us just how untrue as he quotes from the journals of the early settlers and explorers. Indigenous Australians had developed a way of land management that suited this largely dry land using fire. Early visitors continually commented on how the landscape was laid out like 'a gentleman's park' and that the 'natives' were frequently burning small areas but never connected the two. Similarly they ignored the evidence of coastal fisheries and the fish and eel traps in wetlands and on watercourses and the extensive fields of crops like yams. In the journals there's even mention of permanent villages but these were destroyed as soon they got in the way of pastoralists and farmers. In the same way the landscape was changed - if you don't burn at the right time of the year scrub and trees take over and the newcomers didn't grasp this - and the park-like vista disappeared. By the 1830s there were starving Aboriginal people living and wandering homeless - and the reason for this was because they had had their traditional land use where they cultivated plants like yams and their traditional hunting grounds taken away as the new arrivals sought to make the continent over using European methods.

This has had repercussions that echo down to the present day and affect all Australians. You will have heard about the horrific bushfires that have engulfed much of the eastern part of the country. Trying to impose European farming and pastoral practices on the country and not listening to indigenous experience has left us ignorant and at the mercy of natural events like El Niño-Southern Oscillation - and without the tools to survive them.

Recently the eastern part of the country has been suffering a prolonged drought, which left everything tinder dry, and climate change has played its part with wild weather events and higher than average temperatures. Dry lightning strikes have been responsible for starting almost all the fires - very few (less than 1%) were the result of arson despite the false figures irresponsibly reported around the world - and the bushfires themselves have been so extensive that they generate their own weather which includes more dry lightning and fire tornadoes. The problem is massive and we still have much of the fire season to come.

I'm not suggesting we can return totally to the pre-colonial indigenous land management practices - European settlement has fundamentally changed the way Australia uses land - but maybe, just maybe we need to look at both current and pre-colonial methods and what is happening to the planet now then we can work out what is best for our country and by extension the world. It's worth considering and this book with its historical background might be a starting point.

I'd suggest, too, that all Australians would profit by reading Bill Gammage's The Biggest Estate on Earth which also looks at how indigenous Australians used land in pre-colonial times and we might learn something. First Nations people have much to offer if we're willing to listen.