Bruce Pascoe: Respecting and falling in love with Mother Earth (Ep438)
“We need policies and plans, but the first step is to fall in love with the ground, the world, the water, the air, and the clouds.”
How is the common portrayal of Australia’s first peoples as hunter-gatherers who lived on empty, uncultivated land misguided, and wrong? What does the word “Country” mean in Aboriginal Australian thought? And what do we need to interrogate in terms of the subjectivity of how knowledge is produced or how stories are substantiated?
In this episode, we are honored to speak with Bruce Pascoe, a Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian man best known for his book Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture.
Join us in this warm, grounding conversation as we explore Aboriginal Australian agriculture, land practices of working with fire, maintaining respect for and falling in love with Mother Earth, and more.
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About our guest:
Bruce Pascoe is a Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian man and a writer of literary fiction, non-fiction, poetry, essays and children's literature. He is the enterprise professor in Indigenous Agriculture at the University of Melbourne. He is best known for his work Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture.
Artistic credits:
Song feature: Blue Lake by Forest Veil
Episode artwork by Em Nguyen
Dive deeper:
Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture, a book by Bruce Pascoe
Country: Future Fire, Future Farming, a book by Bill Gammage, Bruce Pascoe, Margo Neale (Editor)
Black Duck: A Year at Yumburra, a book by Bruce Pascoe
Watch “A better future for all: Kerry O'Brien in conversation with Bruce Pascoe”
Watch “A real history of Aboriginal Australians, the first agriculturalists”, a talk with Bruce Pascoe
Expand your lenses:
Indpependent media is more important than ever! Please consider making a donation to support our show today.
episode transcript
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Kamea Chayne: One of the pivotal moments of your career and life came from publishing your work Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture. An introduction to this book reads, “History has portrayed Australia's first peoples, the Aboriginals, as hunter-gatherers who lived on an empty uncultivated land. History is wrong.”
For people who haven't tapped into these conversations, what curiosities initially led you to dig into this history of how Aboriginal Australians stewarded their lands? What did you learn that challenged common perceptions of Aboriginal Australian history?
Bruce Pascoe: During research for a book I wrote about the colonial wars, in which the invading white population was at war with Aboriginal people for the land, I began seeing references to Aboriginal people engaged in extensive food production. As an Australian student, I had been exposed to what was presented as Australian history - that Australian Aboriginal people were simply nomadic, had no skills whatsoever, didn’t have houses, and lacked social organization. I became aware that Australian Aboriginal civilization was much more sophisticated and progressive than Europeans had wanted to believe.
One of the factors of colonization is you have to believe that the people from whom you are taking the land don't deserve it.
That is, they are not using the land; they are simple, backward people. Words like "headhunters" and "cannibals" are used, even when the people are not cannibals.
In my research, I found lots of evidence that Aboriginal people had sophisticated food preparation and collection techniques. They were often planting grains and harvesting them over large areas. Some of the tuber crops for the Aboriginal people, such as Murnong, stretched to the horizon.
White explorers were saying that they couldn't believe that the plane was so open where everywhere else there were trees. They were confused about why the trees weren't on the plains. The reason, as some white people understood, was that Aboriginal people were keeping the forest off the plain so that they could grow crops. This is a very profound moment, not just for Australian Aboriginal development, but human development. It was a long time ago, maybe 120,000 years ago. So it's very important for humans, not just Australian Aboriginal people.
While I was writing about the contact wars [violent conflicts between Indigenous Australians and British settlers], I was collecting information about Australian Aboriginal food production our houses, dams and all of these things that my education had not provided me with. I was very fortunate to have several older Aboriginal people who kept on prodding me and pushing me to learn more. During those years, I had excellent guidance from elders. They knew that I was a book person, that I could write and that I loved going to the library. Most Australian Aboriginal people are scared stiff of libraries because of their experience in school.
I didn't have that experience because my family didn't identify [as Aboriginal] during my childhood. And so I escaped under the radar. I'm pale-skinned, and no one treated me as Indigenous (for those first eight or nine years anyway). So I had the keys to the city and the keys to all their libraries. And I was able to do that investigation, that study, almost by default.
Kamea Chayne: In the aftermath of Dark Emu coming out, I'm aware that it's impacted a lot of people's perspectives and also has materially supported Aboriginal causes as well. At the same time, it also ruffled some feathers and sparked a national debate around the idea of Aboriginal Australians being hunter-gatherers versus farmers. After engaging with some of the pushback and critique by other scholars about your choice of particular sources, selective use of information and so on, what has been your biggest takeaway from being caught up in all of this divisiveness?
And I wonder how you might have expanded your perspectives on everything you've learned in any way or otherwise. What are still the key messages that you would simmer down your contributions to, that still feel like the main points that you want to get across?
Bruce Pascoe: I think I was aware that the colony would fight back because the book was very successful. It sold a lot of copies. A lot of Aboriginal people bought the book, which was fantastic because I was getting communication with communities from all over the country (and Australia is a big country). So there were people who were living maybe 20 hours away by plane who wanted to talk about these issues. A lot of non-Aboriginal people said it completely changed their perspective on their own country and its history.
Some colonists believed that the occupation of Australia was peaceful and that Aboriginal people had no skills and therefore didn't deserve the land.
This old colonial trope that the colonists used everywhere was last used in Australia, and they had refined the tools of colonization to a very fine point by that stage. And so we were affected much worse in some ways, and also Australian Aboriginal people did not have a military tradition. We were able to defend ourselves, but not from organized armies and modern weapons. We fought back, but we were being decimated by European bullets.
But the thing that got us was smallpox, which some say, was deliberately introduced into Australia, just like it was deliberately introduced to First Nation American Indians and elsewhere. And when I read about the international history of colonization, that seems to be a common thread. Europeans were aware of what exotic diseases could do and used them as a tool in war. So our people succumbed quickly to that (even though they had been mounting a very effective defence of the nation). And in some parts of Australia, we had driven back the Europeans.
I knew that those Europeans were not going to accept the Aboriginal version of history, instead they were going to fight back. And of course, the way they fight back is by attacking the messenger, as we see in America now.
In my case, they attacked me as being not truly Aboriginal, and that I had fabricated the evidence. And Kamala Harris is suffering now, because yesterday Donald Trump said she had become Black, meaning that she's a “pseudo-Black person”. And this is the way the colony fights back. It's not an intellectual position. That's a vicious and typically demeaning attack on people. But I knew it was coming. I didn't understand it would be that devastating, but other Aboriginal people in Australia have fought this fight, and have suffered the ignominy of these vicious attacks.
And at the moment it's my turn and other Australian Aboriginal people are copying it as well. I'm not on my own and never have been. We've been standing on the shoulders of other people who have been attacked like this. It's just how European colonies work. And they're still working in the same way and we have to expose that methodology, not just accept it for what it is. So I'm very grateful for my brothers and sisters in Australia who understand what's going on and how the colony works and are fighting back.
We had a referendum in this country in October last year. The media were pretending that Aboriginal people were divided about being recognized as the first people in the country. And they dragged out Aboriginal people who were against that constitutional recognition. We knew, the community knew, that 80 per cent of us were rock solid behind voting “yes” in that referendum, “yes” for recognizing Aboriginal people as the first national people of the country. But in the end, 61 per cent of Australian people voted against it. We as a people voted for it. But 61 per cent of Australian people voted against it and the referendum was lost. We knew that, and many of us think that this is positive because at least we know where we stand now.
The colony is not dead. The colony has not changed its mind. So, we have to work harder.
[Working harder] is what the older people who came to my farm did immediately after the referendum. I live very remotely on a farm beside a great river, and a lot of Aboriginal people came to this farm in the days after the referendum just to get away from the world and to be somewhere restful so that we could talk in private about what we were going to do. I had cousins and community people come down, seemingly dropping in for no particular reason, but wanting to talk about what we did. And everyone agreed that we had to work harder, and education was the way. We weren't going to change the minds of those old white fascists. We had to talk to their children and grandchildren. And that's what we're doing now.
Two of my most recent books have been books on Dark Emu, agriculture and forestry, but as children's versions these books are going out into schools, the fascists say that I've invented it and I'm corrupting children but this is what we have to do. You won't find any children under the age of 10 who can't see the logic of what has happened in this country and understand implicitly that there was a war that Black people lost and that there needs to be reparation. Kids understand this because it's natural justice. It's just that their grandfathers (and it's usually their grandfathers, although there are some cranky grandmothers as well!) are so vicious because they can remember the last days of the war.
Kamea Chayne: I think it's mind-boggling that even the recognition of the first peoples of Australia is still a controversy. And this is also a reminder that all education is political. I think a lot of the discourses that have come out from your work also speak of broader questions around worldviews knowledge production methodologies and measures of credibility. And I think what I'm curious about is, that our knowledge of our deeper history is so gravely limited.
And this idea that we need some sort of physical evidence of something to know that it's valid, I find to be very reductive because we might not have physical evidence of some prehistoric community having built certain things. For example, if they built houses out of mud and cow dung like my grandparents did, there's not going to be many remnants of that. But just because there's no remaining evidence doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
And therefore, when there are any glimpses of evidence, whether that's oral or observer accounts, that should be groundbreaking and significant. There's probably a lot more to this than we had previously thought. I think the whole idea of needing certain types of proof otherwise it's not true. What are your thoughts on all of this?
Bruce Pascoe: The colonizers like to shape history in their image. So if you're not using horses and a plow to plow the land, you're not involved in agriculture. Because Australia is the oldest continent on earth, apart from Antarctica, the soils are quite depleted and almost completely lacking in phosphorus. So, our people used perennial plants - grasses that were already growing there and didn't require phosphorus. Perennial agriculture offers incredible benefits for the earth because it requires less water, needs no fertilizer, doesn’t rely on pesticides, and serves as an effective soil builder.
Europeans didn't recognize that in Australia, and even when they did notice that that's what Aboriginal people were aiming for, they couldn't afford to accept that Aboriginal people build houses because that would be admitting to possession. And even now, the far right wing is saying that I've invented those houses, but the evidence for them is everywhere. They weren't like European houses. We didn't gild our ceilings with gold, for instance, so [from the colonizer’s perspective] it's not a house.
And yet, the houses that our people built looked so much like an Irish croft house of the time. This is in the 1780s, early 1800s. Many Irish people who came to Australia as migrants or prisoners would have recognized our houses for what they were. But the word “house” never appears in Australian history. It's always represented by words like “humpy” or “hovel”.
When I was writing Dark Emu about the contact wars I deliberately used the word “house” and when I talked about our food production I provocatively used the word “agriculture”. Why can't our food production techniques, which were complicated and used over wide areas, be called “agriculture”? Europeans are very selfish because they think, “We're the only ones who do agriculture. We're the only ones who plough the land. You, other people, don't know about how to grow food.” But in fact, we do know how to grow food, and we also know how to look after the earth.
That's something that a lot of Australians are coming to understand — that our Aboriginal agricultural methods were soil-saving, world-saving, water-saving, and so respectful of Mother Earth.
I don't know what your people say, but we refer to the Earth as our mother. And when we say Mother Earth, and we say it every day, a lot of white people laugh. They think that we've gone soft, that we live a myth, that we're sentimentalizing our relationship with the land. No, we're not. The Earth is our mother, we have to look after her. And our primary responsibility is not to look after ourselves, not to look after our children or our family, it's to look after Mother Earth. And then we look after ourselves. And if the world were to know that, if the world would take on that responsibility of care, we wouldn't be thinking about the end of the world, which is what we're thinking about now. We're thinking about the destruction of the globe, and we don't need to go there.
Kamea Chayne: I want to stay on worldviews a little bit here. To add to everything that we just talked about, the book that you later co-authored, Country: Future Fire, Future Farming, shows how “Aboriginal peoples cultivated the land through manipulation of water flows, vegetation, and fire stick practice. Not solely hunter and gatherers, the first Australians also farmed and stored food”. To start with, I'd be keen on hearing you expand on Aboriginal thought and philosophy around this word and title, “Country”. So what does “Country” mean and refer to for you, and what do you think is the significance of this sort of worldview?
Bruce Pascoe: Country is Mother Earth. She is everything and all the animals and the trees and the rocks are our relations; because we're made from the same stuff.
When we die our bones will be pulverized and our atoms will begin to mix, we might become a wattle tree, the feather of a bird, or water.
So we have an intimate relationship with the land and it is family to us. And we strive to explain this to non-Aboriginal people as a way of going forward to care for Country. But the thing about it that fascinates me is that if you have a continental system like that, that pervades the whole country, how did it come about that belief and how was it maintained? And it was maintained in Australia. I can't speak for elsewhere.
But in this country, the people, when trying to organize a society, decided that the rules of the society would be that Mother was number one, that the Earth was number one, and that we would come second. A lot of other world religions believe that man shall have dominion over the earth. We don't believe that. That is anathema to us. We believe that we owe everything to Mother Earth. And then in the organization of humans, that very difficult animal, our people decided that violence would be constrained. That nothing could be done about the bad temper of humans, their predilection towards violence, jealousy, greed and cruelty.
All the rules would be to contain the worst of human nature and to utilize the best. And I'm in awe of those old rule makers in our society who thought so profoundly, and with such deep philosophical intent to create a world where the best things in humans could be given their head. I'm writing a book now called The European Mind: Looking at Alexander the Great because he's supposed to be emblematic of Western success. And he was a psychopath. And his society brought to the fore his cruelty. They utilized his cruelty. That could never happen in Australian Aboriginal life, and that is why we lasted for 120,000 years before the invaders arrived.
I've got a Cornish background and an English background. I'm very aware that there's not a lot of Aboriginal blood in our family, but I'm so in awe of it. I'm so respectful of it, because here's our chance as humans to be better. My Cornish ancestors stumbled on this land and began fornicating illegally with Black women. And I'm one of the products.
I'm responsible for doing better than my grandfathers, my great-grandfathers and my great-great-grandfathers. It’s my duty. And so I identify as Aboriginal.
I'm not ashamed to do it. I'm not trying to be better than anyone else. I'm not trying to be grander than anyone else. I'm not trying to be Blacker than anyone else. What I'm trying to be is respectful of Mother Earth.
I'm so grateful that my Mother and Australian Aboriginal people in general have taught me that that is the rule. That's the rule to work by in your whole life. Not harm the world. She's the jewel, we're only here for a short time, so make sure we leave it for our kids and our grandkids so that they can catch a fish in the river. They can eat a duck and respect them. When my kids kill fish, ducks and kangaroos, I tell them they've got to be so respectful. No wasting. Cook that bird as well as you can and don't catch too many. I go cook it for my grandson if he catches fish and then wastes them. Kids are kids, their eyes light up when the fish are biting. But I say, “No we're done now mate, we're done. We've got our fish. Respect Mother Earth, respect the life of that golden fish”.
Kamea Chayne: I want to pivot a little here. Because of everything that happened after the publication of Dark Emu putting you in the spotlight, questions about your belongings and so forth, I'm mindful that it has taken a toll on your life. And we can cut this out if you prefer to not speak on this front, but if anything is sitting on your chest that you would like to put out there that would feel supportive of your healing and continued journey, I want to honor that as well and leave some open space here for you to share anything that you'd like to, in terms of how you've moved with and past the post-Dark Emu era being on the receiving end of both immense support and backlash?
Bruce Pascoe: I have to always remember that the pain of the backlash is well and truly overwhelmed by the support from Aboriginal people around the country. Everywhere I go, people want to talk positively about the Earth and are grateful to me, which I found very encouraging, for having spoken up for Mother Earth and made Australia take a bit of notice. So I'm very aware of that. The pain was really difficult to deal with because I'm a very private person, I'm a very quiet person. I'm not a talker, I live alone mostly. I live remotely.
So I don't have a lot of society, I like it that way. I've always lived in the bush. And so the thing about all that difficult time was, I was living in the Country. I was living beside the river, swimming in the river, eating food from the land, I had birds laying on my shoulder and my head talking to me. So even though there was this sort of modern-world pain, I had this old-world solace going on around me.
And a lot of Aboriginal people say, how did you survive all that bullshit, that attack? I said, Country. When I lay down at night, Country wants to talk to me. A bird came through the window, fondled my hair and talked to me. How could I last in pain when I had that love? So for me, I survived because I was in the Country. Country teaches us everything. This is what we have to do. You mentioned policy before about us sort of leaping into policy.
We need policies and plans, but the first step is to fall in love with the ground, the world, the water, the air, and the clouds. Be in love with it.
The stars that we saw last night. Follow, if you're awake at night, don't worry. Track the stars, follow their movement, learn their story, and be reassured by that story. And if you live like that, if you're in love with the world and are responsible for her health, all your decisions will be good. This is what I think the world needs now, which is that we need to learn the willingness to go to war, where does that come from in the human spirit?
It comes from not having any regard for Mother Earth. How can you drop a bomb on a piece of open ground that kills nobody? How could you do it? Because you've attacked your mother. If we fall in love with our world and are respectful of the ancestral history of our world and our contemporary connection to that world, our decisions will be good. Like I said, I'm writing this book called The European Mind, where I'm arguing for a different kind of world government.
Not that we get rid of populations, and capitalism, not that we get rid of ice cream, but that we just do things in a way that maintains the health of Mother Earth and values every citizen. Every citizen has the right, an equal right to the bounty of the world as long as they look after that bounty, and protect its source, Mother Earth. People think I'm Pollyanna or some kind of sentimentalist. This is hardcore economics.
Hardcore economics would not tolerate the disappearance of the world's capital, which is the earth. A hard-nosed economist would say, “Hang on, you've got to look after your means of production.” That's a white principle. And yet white people are so intent on being the best or having the most, that they're prepared to destroy the primary means of production. It's ridiculous. Have a look at the birds, you capitalists. Have a look at the fish in the river. Feel the wind on your face and say, “Ah, they're the means of production. That's what we have to look after.”
We eat too much, we make too much, we waste too much, and we destroy too much. We can still have a capitalist economy if you like, while we maintain all of those other things. And a capitalist economy is no less able to love the world than an indigenous economy. It's just a way of thinking. And we have to change our way of thinking. And if we change our way of thinking, we will stop dropping bombs on Palestine and Israel. We will make sure that food gets delivered to the homeless. We will do all the things that our world religions, Christianity and Islam, say we should do. So how come we're in this situation now, where Christians and Muslims are denying food to the homeless, and bombing the homeless? How could you do that? It's because you've lost contact with your roots, with Mother Earth. You've let go of your mother's hand.
Kamea Chayne: I think this is a beautiful invitation for us to reframe, and as you said, conceptualize, “means of production” and earlier as well, how we define things like farming, housing, and how might we expand our understandings of all of these things. With that, I honor you and everyone who's contributed and helped to enrich our understanding of our deeper history, even when it's difficult and pushes back against mainstream currents.
I think for me, no matter how people want to name things based on limited definitions (whether worldviews, language or fields of study), the main message is that pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians were not “primitive” in the colonial understanding of that word coming from a sense of superiority. But for Aboriginal Australians to have lived with their landscapes for over 65,000 years, according to the National Museum of Australia, that's a long, long time. So I have no doubt that there has already been a lot of accumulated and advanced place-based knowledge and practices and experimentations that people were engaging with and building upon and also passing down intergenerationally.
And to rethink our food systems of today, I'm curious how you've personally translated what you've learned to support Aboriginal foods where you are. So what has your farm and food project looked like in practice? And what is your vision for supporting Aboriginal food sovereignty in ways that align with the healing of Mother Earth given this present “post-colonial” context?
Bruce Pascoe: On the farm, it's a beautiful Country. We've got three rivers that meet at the foot of the hill. The hills themselves are folded and covered with our food, grass, tubers and trees. So it's a beautiful place to be. And the old people's agricultural tools, we find them all the time. We built a new shed last year, and we uncovered a lot of the old people's tools, which were tools to do the very jobs that we were already doing. There were grass harvesting tools, grinding tools, and cutting tools, which gave us so much confidence that we were doing exactly what the old people had designed.
Cross the river from here, we can see a hill where there is a story about bread, about a giant loaf of bread or a damper. In our language, two greedy brothers made and didn't want to share it. And so the creator brought a big wind that dropped that bread onto the two greedy brothers and killed them. So it's a story about sharing, about not being greedy. We can see that from where we're harvesting grass. So we're constantly aware of who we are and what we have to do, what our law is.
I'm very lucky to have met a man from this Country who watched me for several years and eventually asked me to listen to a story about his grandfather. And the story about his grandfather isn't a story at all. What it is the law. He's telling you the law of the land. And I was fortunate to hear that because his grandfather was the son of a single survivor from a white massacre of our people. A single boy survived. That boy taught his son about the law. That boy then taught old Uncle Max. Uncle Max then taught us. So it's an unbroken thread of this massive civilization, probably the oldest in the world, a civilization that maintained itself through peace, not without anger and greed and things like that.
Thus, all those stories are about, “don't be greedy, don't be angry, don't hurt people”. That's what our stories are about. When you get down to them, they might feature a crow, but they’re telling you about being a good human, using the best of your skills. So that law that old Uncle Max gave us comes from way back in history. And on the farm, we live that every day. Every day when we're harvesting food, and preparing food for growing, we're surrounded by that story. And it gives us so much strength.
We may not be the biggest producers of food, or the most efficient in terms of industrial agriculture, but our food is good and it keeps us alive and it teaches us stories.
The old man used to say to us during law, that we didn't have medicine and that our foods were our medicine. We ate our medicine and loved it. It's a good message to learn that 80 per cent of the Aboriginal diet was vegetables.
I eat far too much meat. I'm trying to educate myself to eat less of it. I'm eating more vegetables, especially our vegetables. I'm trying to tell Australia, to eat these vegetables. They're double the amount of nutrition in one tiny little finger-sized root vegetable. It's an incredible message and I'm sure that newspapers and television shows will get all excited about the new food or whatever you're going to call it. But I can't be bothered with that because all I'm trying to do is make sure that our people are part of that industry. Make sure that our people know what this food is like, and how to grow it. And make sure that when our people are eating that food, that they are paying respect. That's my job. That's what Uncle Max asked me to do.
I just wanted to say how grateful I was to that old man. And to all the old men, all the old women who taught me. I’m also grateful to all the young men, and all the young women who want to learn and show respect, but also to the Mother who cares for us so well. And my responsibility when I finish this podcast is to go out and look after Mother Earth and to be with her and to be warmed by her. It's such a privilege to be alive.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you. We are wrapping up here, but I wonder if you have any final words of guidance that you might have for us as Green Dreamers? Especially for people who find it challenging to be in the times that we're in…
Bruce Pascoe: Patience, tolerance, respect. Love the Earth.
