Often the explorers only lived because they raided the grain stores of the Aboriginal people’s whose land they were passing through. A lot of this book is taken from the journals of explorers who had first contact with Aboriginals. The line I kept thinking of while reading this was from Paul Simon’s The Boxer: ‘All lies and jests, still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest’. Including the types of crops we should grow. One of the major arguments of this book is that modern Australia has much to learn from Aboriginal Australia in terms of how to manage our land and waterways. That they farmed extensive areas of land, including grains and yams, and that their management of the land proved much more sustainable than anything we have achieved, where they have turned deserts into food bowls, we've done pretty much the exact opposite - as the million or so fish we have just killed over summer in the Darling River shows all too clearly. This book provides lots of evidence that the Aboriginal peoples of Australia had much more advanced agriculture and fishing technologies than we have ever given them credit for. Of course, this says something particularly disgusting about western civilisation – that we can’t come into contact with a civilisation less developed than our own without completely destroying it – but then, if the last 1000 years or so have taught us anything about white people, surely it is that.

They had no agriculture and no permanent settlements, so, when they came into contact with our much more advanced civilisation, really, the outcome was inevitable. Sure, they had clever sticks they could throw like the boomerang or to help them throw spears further, like a woomera, but really, all this was very prehistoric. This meant they had to live the nomadic lives of hunter-gatherers, and it also meant they were very unlikely to be able to develop any other forms of technology - they were effectively trapped in the Stone Age. The standard understanding of Australia prior to white settlement, even in the kindest versions, is that the Australian Aboriginals were trapped in a land without domesticable plants or animals. ) but this book goes into much more detail. There is a Ted talk by Bruce Pascoe that covers some of the ground covered here (.

This book ought to be made compulsory reading for every Australian.

Dark emu by bruce pascoe