Young Dark Emu By Bruce Pascoe.

Young Dark Emu, By Bruce Pascoe.

I have just finished reading the book Young Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe, & to say that I am saddened by what I read would be an understatement. This book tells the true story of the Australian Aboriginal people, their lifestyles before the European invasion. We have been taught that the indigenous peoples of Australia were nomadic & had no permanent settlements, they lived in makeshift humpies & were continuously foraging for food. This is all a lie, these Aboriginal people had permanent towns, and their dwellings were very similar to the Woodland Indian wigwams in the New World. Some villages were within a fenced area, & they had extensive farmlands.

Far from having continuously to forage, these native people farmed & harvested the land & stored their produce for use in hard times. When Australia was invaded, settled by white people, these Aboriginals were driven from their farms, their villages were burnt to the ground. Explorers robbed their food catches with no thought to what hardships this would case these people.

Fish traps & fish farming constructions dating back at least 40,000 years were found, does this sound like a people that had not already settled the land? The whites brought in cattle & sheep that destroyed the farm lands already there, they ate all the crops & trod down the malleable soil until it was hard. Some settlers found & used some of this farm land commenting on how good the soil was. They moved in on this good farm land taking it for themselves.  No wonder then that we read about nomadic tribes, they now had no choice. Their villages & farms destroyed, their stored food supplies robbed. They had no choice but to keep on the move to avoid these invaders, & even so many hundreds of them were systematically murdered, this was genocide. Those that were not killed were enslaved.

I urge you to read Young Dark Emu, it is an eye opener to say the least. To think of what we have lost, what the Aboriginals have lost due to the ignorance & pure maliciousness of the white settlers is soul destroying. As living historians living in Australia, this history is something we should know & share.
Keith.

 Available from local book stores or from: https://www.angusrobertson.com.au/books/young-dark-emu-bruce-pascoe/p/9781925360844?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI7Jinq5Ly4wIVlIBwCh22aQGyEAQYAiABEgLaI_D_BwE