Talk:Dark Emu

Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate
This is outside my normal area of interest and looking at some of the august names in the page history and TP I assume this will no doubt be integrated soon. This weekend several news outlets ran stories on the impending publication of a book penned by two prominent academics “debunking” Dark Emu, titled ''Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate''. I am unsure if it is more appropriate to wait until after publication, but there are a couple of stories available already so there may be enough to add something to this page. Cavalryman (talk) 04:19, 13 June 2021 (UTC).
 * Cavalryman, all of this was already above in #Academic criticism. Would you like to undo this section? Errantius (talk) 09:23, 13 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Haha, I should have been more observant, I suspected someone here would be onto this. I am happy to leave this section here. Kind regards, Cavalryman (talk) 10:39, 13 June 2021 (UTC).
 * Sutton and Walsh were on ABC local radio in Perth this morning, talking about the books. Mitch Ames (talk) 01:58, 19 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Guardian opinion article Bruce Pascoe has welcomed the Dark Emu debate – and so should Australia. Doug Weller  talk 18:21, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

the material you added here looks like a quote ("... drags respect for traditional Aboriginal culture back into the Eurocentric world of the colonial era, privileging agriculture above a hunter-gatherer socio-economic system"). If it is, please enclose in quotation marks. If not, it needs rewording - "drags..." is not very encyclopedic. Mitch Ames (talk) 06:57, 28 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Hello Mitch Ames, it’s a slight rewording of the reporter’s words from the Good Weekend piece, I agree it is a little clumsy and should be reworded. Perhaps something like “emphasises colonial era notions of the superiority of agriculture over respect for the sophistication of traditional indigenous hunter-gatherer culture”. Cavalryman (talk) 09:17, 28 June 2021 (UTC).
 * Even that seems to be a lot of "padding" of what the article text says. (Possibly the extra details are in the audio, which I haven't listed through.) I suggest it might be better to simply quote directly "[drags] respect for traditional Aboriginal culture back into the Eurocentric world of the colonial era". Mitch Ames (talk) 12:58, 28 June 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm just not sure Stuart Rintoul is notable enough to be attributing quotes to, how about we ditch him as source for the sentence and look for a fresh one: "... devalues pre-colonial Aboriginal society, privileging agriculture above a hunter-gatherer socio-economic system." Cavalryman (talk) 00:01, 29 June 2021 (UTC).
 * OK, as long as it is a direct quote from a single source - or two separate quotes, cited independently. I don't have access to Darker issues at play over Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, but I notice that ‘Black armbands or white picket fences’: debating the Dark Emu divide says "devalues pre-colonial Aboriginal society" but not "privileging agriculture above a hunter-gatherer socio-economic system". Mitch Ames (talk) 09:52, 29 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes, the second half of the sentence is from the Taylor story. Kind regards, Cavalryman (talk) 13:09, 29 June 2021 (UTC).
 * Is the whole quote "... devalues pre-colonial Aboriginal society, privileging agriculture above a hunter-gatherer socio-economic system." from the Taylor story (Darker issues at play over Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu)? Mitch Ames (talk) 00:11, 30 June 2021 (UTC)
 * No, "... devalues pre-colonial Aboriginal society, privileging agriculture above a hunter-gatherer socio-economic system." If you think we need mid-sentence citations I won't object, I think they compliment each other. Cavalryman (talk) 00:16, 30 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Joining two separate quotes from separate sources into a single quote, within a single pair of quotation marks must surely be wrong. No one source said what is in the single pair of quote marks. A separate pair of quotation marks should surround each independent quote. Even with separate quote marks – "... devalues pre-colonial Aboriginal society", "privileging agriculture above a hunter-gatherer socio-economic system". – joining them together like that is synthesis. Mitch Ames (talk) 00:27, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

The quotations marks are for the quoting the article, not the sources, you added them above and I suppose I should not have retained them for since we're using. So ... I will rewrite it again: ... devalues pre-colonial Aboriginal society, privileging agriculture above a hunter-gatherer socio-economic system. Re SYNTH, using two sources that compliment each other to more clearly articulate the same idea is not SYNTH, arriving at a third conclusion from two non-complimentary sources is. That being said, if you object to the use of Taylor who simply expands upon Marshall you are most welcome to remove it. Cavalryman (talk) 01:49, 30 June 2021 (UTC).

separate page for Sutton and Walshe's "Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate"
In line with a recommendation made to me by the very experienced user:El_C I've made a separate page for Sutton and Walshe's Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate. Thoughts, comments etc welcome! Noteduck (talk) 07:43, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

Need for separate sections on 1. Academic Critiques of Dark Emu and 2. Media Responses to Academic Critiques
While trying to add Bill Gammage's important recent comments on the debate, plus Mark Mckenna's and Tom Griffiths', I found that there is a real problem with the lack of a clear structure to our account of the debate.

I suggest it should be chronological, which makes more sense of the "story" and also leaves an obvious place for future material. I also think we need to expand the article. For instance, Ian Keen's paper, the first peer-reviewed scholarly response to Dark Emu clearly deserves more space, since it makes many or most of the main points later made by Sutton and Walshe. Keen's neat account of the problem for academics of making points already made by rightwingers, without seeming to be a rightwinger oneself, also deserves quoting. Another problem with the present account of academic responses is that it hangs too much on Richard Guilliatt's piece in the Australian in May 2019. Guilliat did well to get such a positive view of Pascoe into the the Australian(!), but in the process he paraded his quotes of praise from academics almost like references for a job application. These quotes are not ideal "sources". There is no written source. We don't know how accurately they represent the persons quoted, or how many others he had asked before getting these favourable quotes. (He does offer a comment on this ---that we might quote.) I think we now have better academic sources to offer.

And it would greatly help to separate the academic from the popular/media debate. We might also need a section for the rush of media responses to the Walsh/Sutton book (in which many of the left-liberal media radically revised their stances). (I know there has already been an attempt to separate out a section on "Academic Responses". It failed, I think, because it lacked any obvious order, and also because most of the academic responses in our article had not in fact been moved into this section.

I had just worked out how I thought I could offer to do this job when the requirement for extended confirmed rights, which I don't have, appeared.

So all I can do is post what I had drafted as a possible re-arrangement and hope that it finds favour with someone who has the "clearance" to post it, or a revision of it. Here it is: Marcasella (talk) 05:53, 24 July 2021 (UTC)

Marcasella (talk) 05:53, 24 July 2021 (UTC)

Critiques section break

 * Short note: Many scholarly published responses to Bruce Pascoe's "Dark Emu ... " book editions have happened. Google Scholar has 584 citations of the 2014 first edition and 150 citations of the 2018 second edition.
 * A couple of notably experienced author's citations, J. Peter White's 2019 scholarly review in Archaeology in Oceania and Anna Florin and Xavier Carah 's 2018 article updating the science of the 50 years of publication's referring to the Sahul (New Guinea and Australia) "Neolithic Problem".
 * I fully referenced the first of these in a comment above under the Academic Criticism heading.
 * I'm a long time ago former Wikipedia editor (med. sized of ca. 10,000 edits). Out of it now, login not at hand so anon. talk edit here only providing these appropriate ref's. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 119.18.38.166 (talk) 02:01, 25 July 2021 (UTC)

Dear 119.18.38.166Yes indeed. Feel free to edit my proposed Section on Academic Critiques (above) in the light of any major academic papers about Dark Emu, or reviews in peer-reviewed journals, that I have missed. There is probably also some material in the current page's brief Section on Criticism that might be combined into my proposed two sections above. Marcasella (talk) 07:10, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

By the way, I'm not sure where, if anywhere, the remarks by Professor Tony Hughes-d'Aeth might best fit. His claim that Dark Emu excels in "its ability to bridge archaeology, anthropology, archival history, Indigenous oral tradition and other more esoteric but highly revealing disciplines such as ethnobotany and paleoecology" is not one of the as-told-to-Guilliat passages; it is something that he wrote in "The Conversation". The problem is that he is primarily a professor of literature (see https://www.uwa.edu.au/profile/tony-hughes-daeth ), and is not an expert in any of the disciplines he says Pascoe has mastered, except probably archival history. I suspect he was taking Pascoe's scientific and archaeological skills on trust, and assumed that the experts in these fields would by now have spoken out if there were major problems with what Pascoe claims. He may now be feeling a bit embarrassed. But as Ian Keen says, the academy was slow to react--and though a commentator might argue that Hughes-d'Aeth's piece is a useful example of the dangers of such presuming, I doubt that it is crucial to our account of the academic debate. Marcasella (talk) 07:10, 26 July 2021 (UTC)


 * Well i'm not an editor any more and i am busy organising work.
 * My note was written with the intent that an existing even handed editors read and edit into this WP article especially these scholarly articles I referred to by especially relevantly experienced authors which review and cite Pascoe's work. Obviously many more scholarly citing articles exist and I was merely suggesting some of the most experienced authors' articles i have read and carefully checked for you editors to read and use.
 * If you can't access them i can assist with access ways. Regards. 58.171.231.112 (talk) 07:42, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

Please do assist. Marcasella (talk) 14:01, 27 July 2021 (UTC)


 * • Florin, S. Anna & Carah, Xavier (2018)
 * Moving past the ‘Neolithic problem’:
 * The development and interaction of subsistence systems across northern Sahul.
 * Quaternary International 489 46–62.
 * →https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:554104/UQ554104_OA.pdf
 * – more to come, all the best. 59.100.210.186 (talk) 04:45, 28 July 2021 (UTC)


 * • Kerkhove, Ray (2017)
 * Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?
 * Broome: Magabala Books, 2014, ISBN 9 7819 2214 2436, 174 pp., A $35.
 * Queensland Review 24 (1) 170–171.
 * →https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=15026219263049647383
 * A short review by Ray Kerkhove – historian, University of Queensland (PhD) (Aboriginal Environments Research Centre)
 * Google Scholar:→https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=mM6IYhoAAAAJ
 * Uni Qld Academia:→https://uniqld.academia.edu/raykerkhove
 * – more to come, all the best. 137.219.139.101 (talk) 04:21, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

Extended-confirmed-protected edit request on 21 March 2022
Insert the following after sentence ending '...the boundary between foraging and farming is a fuzzy one" and before sentence starting 'Historians Lynette Russell and Billy Griffiths wrote...'

"By contrast, anthropologist Richard Davis argues that in the years prior to the publication of Dark Emu, there exists enough independent research to support another look at Pascoe's arguments. Davis also contends that much of the emotive backlash against Dark Emu is linked to longstanding disagreements stemming from the earliest years of British settlement, over whether Aboriginal people can and should be recognised as landowners in Australia."

The reference for the Davis article is: Davis, Richard. 2020. 'Black Agriculture, White Anger: arguments over Aboriginal land use in Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu', in Borderlands, 1, 1, pp. 57-70.

The weblinkto the article is: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344225214_Black_Agriculture_White_Anger_arguments_over_Aboriginal_land_use_in_Bruce_Pascoe's_Dark_Emu OffshoreOnshore (talk) 05:40, 21 March 2022 (UTC)
 * Red information icon with gradient background.svg Not done for now: please establish a consensus for this alteration before using the template. It does not appear there is consensus for this addition. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 14:35, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

Contents
Hello all

I have expanded this section slightly to give a better overview of the contents of the book and Pascoe’s argument. I have cut some tangential information which isn’t in the book and have rationalised the citations, removing those which don’t support the statements. I have also corrected a few errors. Happy to discuss. Aemilius Adolphin (talk) 03:31, 10 August 2022 (UTC)