In the decade since Bruce Pascoe’s book Dark Emu was published, it has become a bestseller, a seminal historical text and a launchpad for controversy. The book reframed the colonial lens through which Australia understood its Indigenous history, which had reduced Aboriginal people to simple hunter-gatherers prior to European settlement.
In Dark Emu, Pascoe set out to prove ancient Aboriginal practices of agriculture and construction, which showed a sophisticated use of land that had predated colonisers.
