6/12/2023 0 Comments Dark emu author![]() “You have to read them in the original form, without the editing, because in some of them there was a severe edit before they became public documents, and often the only stuff missing was the observations about Aboriginal use of land,” Pascoe says. Pascoe immersed himself in those records – such as the diaries of explorers, which were surprisingly full of information about the way Aboriginal people managed their lands. They were in fact painting what they saw. And then I realised, when I had that trouble, that the sources I would have to use exclusively would be unimpeachable European sources.” I was taught to laugh at the colonial painters because they’d got it wrong. “Then the Aboriginal studies press had it and similarly they couldn’t believe the information. It didn’t ring a bell with them but then, their major editors were all English, so I wasn’t surprised. “My publisher knocked it back very promptly. “An observation of that importance couldn’t have gone straight through to the keeper without anyone in education or politics or history remarking on it, but that’s what happened. I’d read the record and kept thinking to myself, ‘surely that can’t be right’,” Pascoe says. While researching another book, Convincing Ground, about the 1834 massacre of between 60 and 200 Gundidj Mara people in Victoria, he kept reading colonial accounts of Aboriginal people farming: irrigating, harvesting, living and prospering in large villages. ![]() Writing it, Pascoe says, required a big shift in his own thinking. ![]()
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