BRUCE PASCOE REWRITES HISTORY
SUBJECT Bruce Pascoe
OCCUPATION Writer and farmer
INTERVIEWER Lydia Fairhall
PHOTOGRAPHER Supplied
LOCATION Yuin Land
DATE November, 2018
ANTIDOTE TO Scarcity
UNEXPECTED Doesn’t want to be a farmer
Yarning with Bruce Pascoe (Yuin/Bunurong) is an experience that transcends the parametres of everyday conversation. On face value, it’s hard to grasp that the radical and defying concepts Bruce has spent his life writing about, researching and now practicing come from such a calm and unassuming exterior—he is measured, steady and mild. Yet his higher purpose and life’s work is anything but.
In his critically acclaimed book, Dark Emu, Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?, Bruce challenges the claim that Aboriginal society was marked by a regressive hunter/gatherer existence—an existence that was largely viewed as inferior and in great need of modernisation. The widely-held belief of the time was that Australia, a plentiful and abundant estate, could become domesticated and habitable with the knowledge and systems of European farming. Dark Emu, however, rewrites Australia’s agricultural history, and rewrites the legitimacy of invading a land that had thrived not just spiritually and culturally, but economically for over 80,000 years. Drawing on material from early colonisers, Bruce paints a radically different picture of what agricultural life was like before invasion: terraced yams as far as the eye could see on the eastern ranges of the Kulin Nation, and complex and sophisticated systems for food storage. The list of refined land management and food production practices is lengthy. As I prepare for my conversation with Bruce, it becomes unavoidably apparent that the absence of this knowledge in our education systems, and more broadly in Australian society, is no accident.
“We didn’t fight for land. Our Lore was so strong and logical that we knew that our responsibility was to look after the land, and I think it’s just genius of the Old People to do that.”
Bruce’s love of country is equal to his gift for storytelling. A critically acclaimed writer, editor, anthologist and now a somewhat reluctant farmer, Bruce’s accomplishments have culminated in some heavy-hitting literary awards, including the 2018 Lifetime Achievement in Literature by The Australia Council for the Arts. And yet, Bruce is also a man whose version of success is simple: spending time on country with his family and dogs, swimming in the river and slowing down enough to hear the voices of the Old People, and applying their wisdom to caring for country and food growing practices.
It never ceases to amaze me how we are brought to experiences and people that match our intention and energy right at the moment we need them. Part of my life’s purpose is to ask the questions, “What is next for us as First Peoples? How do we move beyond de-colonisation, towards consciousness—or rather, back to the ways of our Old People?” We have been through, to say the least, a very intense period over the past 230 years, so how do we find wholeness and begin to explore the concept that caring for country is caring for ourselves and each other, and that radical wellbeing is our strongest form of resistance? How do we share
