One of the pleasures of Salt is that it weaves his earlier fiction writing together with his now-celebrated nonfiction. When Dark Emu was published in 2014, Bruce became a household name and many readers encountered him for the first time.

I’ve been a follower of his work since the early 1980s, when I read his fiction and subscribed to the literary magazine he edited and published with Lyn Harwood, Australian Short Stories. To some, Dark Emu seemed to come out of nowhere, but Pascoe’s latest book, Salt: Selected Stories and Essays, helps us to see how it grew from the author’s life experience and earlier storytelling. I’m grateful for a book that has so enlivened the engagement of Australians with their country’s history. They did not previously understand the sophistication of Aboriginal land management they had not previously felt the full injustice of European conquest and dispossession. Many readers speak of it with a sense of astonishment and revelation they often tell me that Pascoe’s book completely changed their understanding of Australian history. Using compelling evidence from the records and diaries of early Australian explorers and colonists, he reveals that Aboriginal systems of food production and land management have been blatantly understated in modern retellings of early Aboriginal history, and that a new look at Australia’s past is required-for the benefit of all Australians.ĭark Emu, a bestseller in Australia, won both the Book of the Year Award and the Indigenous Writer’s Prize in the 2016 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.In recent years, as a historian of Australia, I’ve found that the book people most wanted to talk to me about is Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu. All of these behaviors were inconsistent with the hunter-gatherer tag, which turns out have been a convenient lie that worked to justify dispossession.

In this seminal book, Bruce Pascoe uncovers evidence that long before the arrival of white men, Aboriginal people across the continent were building dams and wells planting, irrigating, and harvesting seeds, and then preserving the surplus and storing it in houses, sheds, or secure vessels and creating elaborate cemeteries and manipulating the landscape.

History has portrayed Australia’s First Peoples, the Aboriginals, as hunter-gatherers who lived on an empty, uncultivated land. Contradicts the conventional wisdom that native peoples were primitive hunter-gatherers

Marcia langton bruce pascoe