Dark Emu - an angry book review
Why? Because it made me look like an absolute moron. A racist, ignorant moron. Even worse, for someone who prided himself on being an Australian historian it made me look I had really made little effort to learn about the 40,000 to 80,000 year history of human occupation in the Australia. Sure I knew a little, I saw evidence of Aboriginal occupation in my own suburb of Palm Beach in the Gold Coast. There is still an Aboriginal fish trap clearly visible on Tallebudgera Creek near my home. I also saw middens on the side of the creek where oyster shells from local Aboriginal people had been discarded for thousands of generations. I was even shown sacred Aboriginal places on Burleigh hill. But I was never told at school, or anywhere else, this was the land of the Yugambeh people. I didn’t have the faintest idea of the name of the people on whose land I grew up on.
I knew a little of Aboriginal culture at the national level as well. I knew about the stolen generation, the Aboriginal mission camps where Aboriginal people were ‘re-educated’ Aboriginal people with the same gusto as the re-education camps of Mao’s communist China. I even visited communities on Palm Island in Queensland where mobs were taken away from their lands from hundreds of kilometres away and placed in offshore detention, so the whites could go about the business of dispossession. But what I didn’t know was about the rich agricultural practices like grain growing and sophisticated management of animals and fish to feed really large communities where Aboriginal people lived in houses - yes actual well constructed and sturdy houses! Not ‘humpies’.
Look, it’s not as though I’ve tried being an racist moron (though I certainly was a lot worse when I was at primary school - shamefully so!). I read a fair bit about racism. I’ve read a lot of Holocaust literature, I’ve watched a lot of documentaries and films on the nazis taking millions of innocent people to Auschwitz to be cruelly murdered. Hell, I’ve even visited Dachau near Munich, the first concentration camp the nazis set up, and I worked in Jewish aged care in Melbourne where some of the residents had numbers tattooed on their arms (just like I later read about in the Tattooist of Auschwitz). I’ve also read about colonial injustices in far away places like Mexico, and seen the disparity of wealth and opportunity for Indigenous people in places like Chiapas in Mexico.
But after reading Dark Emu I realised what a huge deficiency I had in regards to knowledge of the country I was born in and grew up in. And that made me angry. In these days of heightened awareness of #blacklivesmatter I’ve managed to make it to the ripe old of age of 47.5 with only a passable and very basic knowledge of Aboriginal history. Embarrassingly I probably knew more about the civil rights movement of the USA than I did about injustices against Australian Aboriginal people.
But Dark Emu is not actually about injustices as such, it more tells a rich Aboriginal history that rarely gets told in Australian schools, or portrayed in mainstream media. And that makes me angry. Really angry.
Dark Emu tells the story of large communities of Aboriginals, large permanent towns with sturdy buildings, on lakes where fish were harvested with ingenious technologies, where careful selection of stock allowed Aboriginal people to have an abundance of meat from kangaroos without the need for fences.
Dark Emu tells of a whole continent divided between nations according to a recognised law which meant there were no wars of conquest, as they had in Europe and the Americas, just smaller disputes that could be worked out amicably according to law. Australia was a whole continent where no one went without, where food was shared, in abundance - fish, eels, kangaroos, eggs, etc and managed according to need, where Aboriginal farmers grew native grains in desert regions that still no white fellas have been able to farm effectively, where grains were in such abundance that early white fella explorers were able to sustain themselves from grain stores they found, and that these grains were turned into bread, yes, the humble but delicious staple of many civilisations! It was a continent where elders knowledge were respected, where the environment was managed not destroyed, where fires were used to maintain pastures for animals, again without fences, and avoiding the mega fires that Australia has recently experienced. Dark Emu shows a rich and diverse culture with language, laws, art and a high degree of sophisticated agricultural knowledge.
The book makes me angry though. Because us Australians are always going on about a ‘fair go’. Australians cling to this ‘fair go’, along with ideas of mateship, larrikin ANZAC spirit, the easy going, beach-going mob who are a success story of a multicultural society. Yet we haven’t even reconciled with the culture of the first people of the country. Few of us even know the names of the people on whose land we now live. Australia is a country that still doesn’t adequately acknowledge a rich and ancient Aboriginal history. Not a white British colonial history, but a black history, which successive British and Australian governments, as well as Christian church groups, white settlers, squatters and police sort to wipe from the face of the planet with systematic genocide (not sure there’s other types of genocide come to think of it).
Just like the nazis, and the Spanish in Mexico, the colonial powers sort to grab land at any cost (well it was always going to be at the cost of the locals!). Any time there was evidence of Australian Aboriginal permanent occupation of the land they lived in for 10s of thousands of years, they were destroyed. Just like the great Templo de Mayor in Mexico was destroyed and turned into churches. Just like in other conquered worlds, like the Americas, where Aboriginal people had good, productive lands, producing food for whole mobs of thousands, they were killed, or driven off their lands. Taken into captivity in camps and missions (and cruelly told they were being saved, like the mocking arbeit macht frei slogan written on the gates of Dachau and Auschwitz),. They were taken from their lands so white farmers could take them, and put their sheep and cows on them, just like the idea of lebensraum the nazis were trying to create in Eastern Europe. Then, when Aboriginal people complained about having their lands taken, they were thrown in jail or subject to further killings, this time under the ‘justice’ of the hangman’s noose. And then, not content, the colonialists tried to completely eradicate Aboriginal languages and culture, forcing them to speak English and to ignore their own languages, taking children away from families, just hoping some day the whole lot would simply die out and not be a bloody nuisance to white society any more.
It’s a bloody miracle Aboriginal people survived at all. If the British colonialist had the genocidal efficiency of the nazis who knows, maybe they would have achieved their aim of taking Aboriginal land and then wiping them from the face of the earth. And make no mistake what happened to Aboriginal people was genocide. There has never been an agreement between ‘fair go’ Australia and the Aboriginal people to give away their land. There has never even been proper acknowledgement that Aboriginal people owned the continent before white people took it. White people knew they were stealing it, they just didn’t care.
So, Dark Emu, makes me angry. It shows my ignorance as an Australian who, like all Australians, new and old, benefits from, and owes a great, great debt, to the Aboriginal people who were so cruelly dispossessed. And there’s no excuse for it. White Australia needs to drag itself out of ignorance like Neanderthals dragging their clubs owing the ground. We’re got to stop thinking we’ve been giving people a fair go and actually start giving people a fair go. Stop putting Aboriginal people in jail, acknowledge Aboriginal people as the original owners of this country, give Aboriginal people a real voice in parliament, give land back to Aboriginal nations, allow Aboriginal people access to the same level of health, jobs, and education as other Australians enjoy. Stop pretending we’ve got this rosey history where white folk created a great nation from nothing! Because that makes Aboriginal people feel like nothing, not even worth mentioning in the same way ‘great’ white people are celebrated with statues and monuments in the parks of Sydney, Melbourne and the such.
It’s no point just saying sorry and thinking we can just move on, and ‘get over it’. Sorry is just a start of the journey. It sometimes may feel like a journey that never really begins! But you can begin with yourself, just read one book about Aboriginal history, like Dark Emu. Educate yourself and start to stop being an ignorant racist moron who has sucked up the white-washed story of Australian history. Just start by thinking how gullible you are to think that when Captain Cook came and claimed a land for the British, which was never his to claim, and where some years later his British mob landed near Sydney and settled a land that was never theirs, that the people who lived here didn’t mind. Of course they bloody minded! You reckon in any version of reality that people would say, come along and take my home and claim it as your own, I don’t mind! Really? You really think that would ever happen? Again, really????!
Read Dark Emu, or other such books. Get angry, it’s fine, don’t be scared to face a dark history but to dream of a better future. And start to give Aboriginal people the fair go they deserve, and acknowledge the traditional owners of the land in which you live, and pay your respect to elders past, present and emerging.
