Dark Emu, by Bruce Pascoe

One of the most fundamental differences between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people is the understanding of the relationship between people and land. Earth is the mother. Aboriginal people are born of the earth and individuals within the clan had responsibilities for particular streams, grasslands, trees, crops, animals and even seasons. The life of the clan was devoted to continuance. (1)

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Having just read Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?, which argues that an extensive system of agriculture (and aquaculture) existed in Australia prior to colonisation, I find I am having to completely reevaluate my understanding of indigenous Australia, which of course is a good thing. Though it is not because I thought that Aboriginal culture was ‘primitive’ or ‘unsophisticated’, but for quite the opposite reason: I think that the development of agriculture is problematic. It very often leads to overpopulation (and the conditions for famine), systematic violence (as food surpluses need to be protected, and more land acquired to provide for more people), as well as soil degradation and erosion – and the soil is the very thing all terrestrial life depends upon. 

Further, my (admittedly fairly limited) understanding of the Aboriginal way of life, and the nature of the land here, had led me to believe that agriculture simply wasn’t possible, and thus the hunter-forager way of life was both necessary and wise. And yet the evidence put forward in the book suggests that not only was extensive farming taking place, but that it was sustainable. It had been happening for at least 4000–5000 years (though potentially much longer), and involved careful attention to building and maintaining the soil, strict rules about how plants were to be harvested, and respect for other people’s crops and food stores. Importantly, there seems to have been no violence, no need for conquest of other people’s land, but instead a continent-wide web of mutuality and respect, based on cultural laws derived from the law of the land itself. Pascoe writes:

Aboriginal Australian law insisted that the land was held in common and that people were the mere temporal custodians. Individuals were responsible for particular trees, rivers, lakes and stretches of land but only so these could be delivered forward to the next generation in accordance with law. Individuals and families might be said to own a particular fish trap or crop but they worked in co-operation with the surrounding clans.

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The system in operation could be considered a jigsawed mutualism. People had rights and responsibilities for particular pieces of the jigsaw but they were constrained to operate that piece so that it added to rather than detracted from the pieces of their neighbours and the epic integrity of the land.

The piece of the tree or stream or the land that a group retained responsibility for bled into country so distant that they may never visit that country. They had to imagine how the whole picture looked …

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The religious, social and governmental rules were forged and entwined in mandala that had to be imagined in the soul. (2)

If this system of farming existed then, clearly, Aboriginal Australia has always been much more complex than we have been led to believe. Much evidence has been suppressed or ignored (or literally obliterated by the hooves and mouths of sheep and cattle), in favour of the ‘nomadic hunter-gatherer’ narrative, because that is what suited, and often still suits, the white/Western perspective. 

Yet now what I am imagining is a land where many people lived more or less settled lives in comfortable houses of various designs, with crop farming, food storage (including dried and smoked fish and meat), and even some evidence of pottery use. It puts me in mind of what I know of life in Neolithic Old Europe, though of course I know it’s not a good idea to start developing new assumptions based on unrelated cultures. Aboriginal Australia, because of its isolation, is incredibly unique, and must be evaluated on its own terms. 

That a truly sustainable agriculture could develop, without population overgrowth or violence, based on respect for the soil and other people’s crops, and a sharing of the land’s bounty, proves that agriculture can be done very differently. There are many lessons that could be learned from this, though how they would be successfully implemented in the modern world I have no idea. Though without a change in the way we view and relate to the land, which means (re)developing a spiritual and moral understanding of it, I don’t think much can be achieved. Still, there is hope to be found in this newly uncovered narrative.

I, for one, want to know what the food of this indigenous agriculture tasted like: the seeds ground into flour and baked into cakes; the yam daisies; the fresh or smoked fish; the Bunya nuts. I want to know how the women sewed their possum skin cloaks with fine bone needles and kangaroo tail sinews as thread, and what their houses were like. I also want to know what the land looked like before European settlement, because the Australia that now exists clearly bears little resemblance to what it once was. This makes me incredibly sad. Even more has been lost than I realised.

The world’s most ancient and sophisticated culture just got way more complex and intriguing, and my eyes have been opened. Dark Emu has not only reminded me to be aware of my preconceptions and prejudices, but has also given me much to ponder.

References

1. Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu – Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?, Magabala Books: Broome, Western Australia, 2014, p. 145

2. pp. 138–139 

Witchlines: The Mother-House

Here is the third creative piece I have completed as part of my Witchlines studies.

In Neolithic Old Europe, some villages had so-called ‘focal houses’—buildings that were larger and often better built than the smaller dwellings around them, which were probably occupied by core family groups of a matrilineal lineage. It is surmised that such houses may also have been gathering places, perhaps for village councils or other events. For this task, I have imagined what one of these houses may have been like, and an event that took place there, both inside and out.

Inside a reconstructed Neolithic house, by Szilas (Source: Wikimedia)

The Mother-House

This is the first year she has missed it, her new belly too round and heavy, and her ankles too swollen to make walking down to the fields a possibility. She does not mind. Someone has to look after the youngest of the children. She looks over them as they make little clay pots, rolling out long thin snakes of smooth clay, joining them one atop the other. She has shown them how—See! Smooth down the sides like this—and now they are intent on their work, their little hands finding joy in the tactile experience of shaping earth into new forms, making shapes that are round and full, just like the women do in the temple.

The day is warm and still, the only sounds the soft murmurings of the children at their work, and, from inside the mother-house, the shuffling movements of the grandmother, as she scrapes the ashes from the belly-shaped oven in each of the three rooms, and lights a new fire in readiness—the cyclical work of each day, done with joy. Her knees are too old and stiff to walk far, so she too has stayed behind. She hums a little to herself, a tune that goes round and round, curling back upon itself, as the flames catch and heat begins to radiate from the earthen walls of the ovens. It is one of the old songs she has sung so many times, to dance the grain home each year. And beyond her own voice, in the distance, she hears it—the rising swell of the song, the shouts and laughter. 

With a grunt of effort she pushes herself up from her crouching position, bows to She Who Protects, and walks from the dimness of the inner room out to the brightness of the day. The children too have looked up from their making, eager to run to meet the returning villagers, but the grandmother calls them back with a tut and a smile—Wash your hands of clay before you rush off, she gently admonishes them. 

The almost-mother stands, hands pressed to her lower back, and laughs as the children run off with dripping fingers, the older ones carrying the smallest. On the pathway that runs up from the fields, alongside the furthest houses, the villagers appear. The women dance in a line, hands held, circling, circling, and singing the harvest song around the men, who carry the last round baskets and sheaves of grain. They reach the mother-house and lay down their loads, amidst laughter and cheers.

When the song of harvest is complete, some of the women of the mother-house, dressed in their fineries, their hair curled and plaited, go into the house and bring out the round loaves of bread that they baked that morning, and oil, herbs, and meat. And, seated on stools and blankets in the yard, the people feast.

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Later, the celebrations complete, the chosen members of each house in the village enter the mother-house, one by one, carrying their vessels, clay-made mouths empty, awaiting fulfilment. They move through the granary room, with its large, curved urns, and smell of grain and earth, and the newly made clay pots drying on the attic floor, reached by a ladder; then through the living quarters, with its pallets, piles of blankets and sheepskin, and musty, yet comforting, human smell; and finally though to the inner room, where She Who Protects dwells, her rounded, winged and lined forms standing by the oven, and on the low shelf up against the wall. Here the people assemble, kneeling, as the grandmother takes up her ladle, and dishes out generous scoops of grain into their proffered vessels, filling them. 

As the clan mother, the grandmother takes great pride in sharing the gifts that the earth has offered with each house, each family, so that all are fed. To let anyone—woman, man or child—go unfed would anger She Who Protects, and the ancestors whose bodies, born from the land, have returned to feed it. In the coming days, as the rest of the grain is threshed and sorted, the granaries in every house in the village will be filled. And though the feasting may be over, the feeding never is, for it is the feeding that matters, the offerings that go back and forth, and around in a circle. All must be celebrated and sung and shared, and will be, for She will live on in her daughter, and her daughter’s daughter, and her daughter’s daughter’s daughter.

Wise Words: Eating From The Tree

In pagan stories around the world, there is usually no original sin; human beings as a species are not guilty. Neither are they perfect, and there is no final judgement. There is death and resurrection or reincarnation, but it happens every day, through making love, bearing children, telling stories, killing animals, eating their flesh, wearing their clothes, and leaving animals enough, and fish enough, and trees enough, that they will be here next year and the next and the next without end. There is, I think, an implicit understanding in these stories that you must eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, a little every day, and that you can eat from the tree day after day, but what you mustn’t do is cut down the tree or sell the ground on which it grows. 

(Robert Bringhurst, ‘The Polyhistorical Mind’, in The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind and Ecology, Counterpoint: Berkeley, 2006/2008, p. 34) 

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Beings eat one another. This is the fundamental business of the world. It is the whole, not any of its parts, that must prevail, and this whole is always changing. There is no indispensable species, and no indispensable culture. Especially not a culture that dreams of eating without being eaten, and that offers the gods not even the guts or the crumbs.

(Robert Bringhurst, ‘The Persistence of Poetry and the Destruction of the World’ in The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind and Ecology, Counterpoint: Berkeley, 2006/2008, p. 44)