It’s a maintenance ceremony for nutgrass (‘yelka’), to ensure spiritual reproduction. The people in this photo are throwing pebbles and dust - not scattering or threshing seeds.

The photo below, taken in 1932 or earlier, shows Pilbara people throwing yelka (nutgrass) - not threshing or scattering seeds. Australia’s hunter-gatherer-fishers left an extremely light carbon footprint - the diametric opposite of many contemporary agricultural/industrial practices. Their objective was continuing subsistence. Sutton’s alternative term, “maintenance ceremonies”, invokes spiritual propagation as opposed to oversupply. Such aforementioned rituals are collectively called “increase ceremonies”. But in classical Aboriginal societies they were never planted nor watered for agricultural purposes. Not agriculturalistsĪs Sutton attests, seeds were and are occasionally deliberately scattered. This complexity was, and in many cases, still is, underpinned by high levels of spiritual/cultural belief. In their book, they assert there was and is nothing “simple” or “primitive” about hunter-gatherer-fishers’ labour practices. They strongly repudiate racist notions of Aboriginal hunter-gatherers as living in a primitive state. On the basis of long-term research and observation, Sutton and Walshe portray classical Australian Aboriginal people as highly successful hunter-gatherers and fishers.

But this willingness to accept Pascoe’s argument reveals a systemic area of failure in the Australian education system. It has led to converts to Pascoe’s dubious proposition. This proselytising is partly achieved by painstaking “massaging” of his sources, a practice forensically examined by Walshe and Sutton. Underpinning Dark Emu is the author’s rhetorical purpose.

Bruce pascoe young dark emu