No need to embellish history

According to the National Museum of Australia, Indigenous people have occupied mainland Australia for at least 65,000 years, probably predating the human settlement of what is now Europe and the Americas. Increasingly sophisticated dating methods of the earliest archaeological sites are providing a more accurate understanding of our continent’s earliest human habitation. Australia’s long, proud Indigenous history requires no embellishment or editing.

That is why anthropologist Peter Sutton and archaeologist Keryn Walshe have done Australians a favour with their new book, Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate, released by Melbourne University Press. The scholars put the blowtorch to Bruce Pascoe’s controversial 2014 bestseller Dark Emu and found it badly wanting – poorly researched, exaggerated, ignoring widespread information that does not support the author’s opinions and containing a large number of factual errors, as columnist Henry Ergas wrote on Friday.

It also won numerous literary awards and was heavily promoted by the ABC. As Chris Kenny wrote on Saturday, the ABC, en masse, “went with what it sees as the woke Indigenous narrative (one that some Indigenous people now view as demeaning towards traditional hunter-gatherer skills and knowledge). Mr Pascoe, is, of course, entitled to try to hit back at the critique point by point, if he can. The record must be set straight, so far as reliable research will allow. Until it is, it makes no sense that Dark Emu be used in schools as an education text.

The problem, Dr Walshe said on Sydney radio, was “the errors and the incorrectness of the entire work’’. It was not about a different interpretation of history, it was about the misuse of the primary sources. Professor Sutton said he had expected Dark Emu would be “a typical kind of amateur’s work that would have its day for five minutes and then disappear’’. He was motivated to act when “it got to the point of being inserted into school curriculums”, and he thought about the children. “Who’s going to stand by and watch them be misinformed?” he said.

Our earliest history is too important to be misrepresented with false, strangely “Westernised’’ notions of farming and villages of “1000 people”. As Ergas wrote, a powerful force has been at work, that “being right matters far less than being on the right side’’.That, he argued, is a recipe not for advancing knowledge but for entrenching ignorance. In putting Dark Emu to the test of fact, Professor Sutton and Dr Walshe have broken that mould, doing this country and its Indigenous people a great service.