Indigenous Australians
That book is Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, and if you haven’t read it, you should. I believe it is a compulsory read for everybody that chooses to live in Australia. If you want to get it for your kids as well, I think there’s even a children’s version of Dark EMU, which is a must to learn about. But last night on Q&A, I heard an excerpt from Bruce Pascoe talking about the continuous presence of up to 120000 years in Australia. Now, that is mind-boggling.
There was an article written back in 2019 which actually should have been front-page news on every news outlet in Australia, let alone the world to say that the bones had been discovered or human bones had been discovered in Australia, that date back 120000 years. If I can possibly I will cut or maybe insert the Q&A segment at this point. And if I can do that, I will.
This is what Bruce Pascoe said…
Trajectories of growth, ever-increasing growth, can the world sustain that? Are we always going to assume that our wealth will get greater, production will get greater? What about the poor old Earth? She can’t sustain this and yet we assume with our ever-increasing industrialization and our ever-increasing population, which no one wants to talk about, that we can just keep on going at this escalating rate and we can’t and we have to address it.
And, you know, this country has we talked about Australian history for Australian political history. Well, Australian political history is one hundred and twenty thousand years old minimum. And that was a society basically egalitarian. We probably got the oldest village on earth in this country, which meant we invented society and that society for one hundred and twenty thousand years was largely egalitarian. I think this is a triumph and I think we need to refer to it more and more frequently and stop looking at the cycle of news as if this is the world.
It is not the world. The world is in our hearts and it’s what we. It’s what we believe in, what we do, which are the main things not about looking at perceptions of a deed, but it’s actually what we do, what we the people do to each other and for each other.
Conclusion
I think that’s incredible. Don’t you? Every time I hear Bruce Pascoe, honestly, it’s the message, so simple, so articulate, so perfect. We have so much to learn from the indigenous people of this country and the egalitarian nature of the fact that the country was made up of two hundred and fifty different nations that survived for tens of thousands of years, over 100000 years on this on land, which is an old country. You only have to travel anywhere in Australia beyond the coast to see how old this country is.
When I was in New Zealand about a year and a half ago, the mountains are really pointy and that means a new country. You know, they are incredible. They’re remarkable but when you go to the Blue Mountains, the mountains are flat and warm and you look out beyond the Blue Mountains into Australia and you realize how old and warm this country is. To think that the indigenous people have lived here in harmony with nature and yes, they have shaped nature, all human beings do tend to shape the environment in which they are. They’ve lived in harmony with it and we have so much to learn from it.
It’s just an incredible experience. I’m hoping to really explore this in much greater detail on the podcast in the coming years. I’ve been trying to get Bruce Pascoe on as a guest, but he’s a very busy man. But anyway, we’ll be exploring others in that. I just wanted to bring your attention to the book Dark Emu be the incredible history of the indigenous people’s relationship with this country and see how much we have to learn from it.
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