Why Did Exposing ‘Dark Emu’ Take So Very Long?

There’s something of America’s entry into World War II about Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers?, Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe’s assault on Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu — very, very late to arrive but, nevertheless, a most welcome game-changer. Yet Sutton, to his shame, damns Peter O’Brien’s Bitter Harvest with faint praise. He slights the Quadrant book as ‘a polemic’ whilst presenting his own focused study as a work of scholarly provenance and merit, which it is without a doubt.

Professor Sutton brings late to the Pascoean Hoax his considerable authority. He arrives after Geoffrey Blainey reminded us that the ‘agricultural revolution’ made it to New Zealand and the islands of the Torres Strait but not to Australia and, in the final analysis, that this helps explain why Maoris, with their stable villages and tribal political systems, were able to force a treaty with the colonists while Aborigines were not. If the Aboriginal people were farmers and gardeners, as Pascoe would have us…