Industrialist Indigenous Australians? In Dark Emu, Bruce Pascoe portrays pre-contact Australian Aboriginals as agriculturalists rather than hunter-gatherers. 👨🌾 Why is this controversial? Because it challenges the persistent founding myth that Australia was inhabited by literal nobodies ; no one who could be considered civilised, and was therefore fair game for seizure. It's never cool to kill people and take their stuff, regardless of their governmental system. However, the easier they are to dehumanise, the easier it is to claim we were saving them from themselves, or honestly mistaken. There's a couple of ways to elevate the status of Indigenous Australians in the modern Australian mindset. Pascoe is one of the first to propose that First Australians were closer to British invaders than previously thought. Intending that Indigenous Australians would be respected more as farmers, he does little to challenge the notion of a civilizational hierarchy, implicitly still placi
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