![dead emu II](https://quadrant.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/dead-emu-II.png)
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…
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
Aug 29 2024
6 mins
To claim Aborigines have the world's oldest continuous culture is to misunderstand the meaning of culture, which continuously changes over time and location. For a culture not to change over time would be a reproach and certainly not a cause for celebration, for it would indicate that there had been no capacity to adapt. Clearly this has not been the case
Aug 20 2024
23 mins
A friend and longtime supporter of Quadrant, Clive James sent us a poem in 2010, which we published in our December issue. Like the Taronga Park Aquarium he recalls in its 'mocked-up sandstone cave' it's not to be forgotten
Aug 16 2024
2 mins