in 2014 I wrote a book dark EMU which
exploded the myth that Aboriginal people
were being a hunters and gatherers and
did nothing with the land I wrote the
book because I found it hard to convince
Australians that Aboriginal people were
farming using colonial journals the
sources Australians hold to be true I
was able to form a radically different
view of Australian history Aboriginal
people were farming there’s no other
conclusion to draw colonial explorer Sir
Thomas Mitchell rode through nine miles
of stooped grain he wrote about seeing
massive fields of moon on tubers in
western Victoria Lieutenant grey the
first European explorer into many parts
of Western Australia was halted by yam
fields that stretched to the horizon
many explorers saw great harvests of
grain in the very dead heart of
Australia did you know that the
hillsides of Melbourne were terrorists
for yam production by local Aboriginal
people in fact there was such abundance
of staple foods but Aboriginal people
were able to preserve store and trade
vast quantities but none of his
information appears in any Australian
book of history is this absence
deliberate I believe Australia is ready
to discuss the ancient agricultural
economy let’s look at what the Explorers
reported of the Aboriginal agricultural
landscape and see if you can remember
any priest parent or professor
mentioning it were we the world’s first
agriculturalists I was having trouble
convincing academics some of Australia’s
best universities of this farming
tradition after a meeting where I was
chastised for misrepresenting Australian
history I realized I would have to use
sources which all Australians respected
so on the way home I went to the first
secondhand bookshop I could find and in
the back room I found a copy of
Mitchell’s journeys into tropical
Australia as soon as I read that he had
ridden through nine miles of stooped
grain I knew I would never have to
apologise for this argument again
Mitchell’s fellow explorers described it
as looking exactly like an English field
of harvest grain spooked for ripening
stuck it’s an interesting word never to
appear in the aboriginal history
Australians at all Mitchell also saw yam
fields stretching as far as he could see
a Garry word in western Victoria in his
journey
he’d extolled the beauty of these Plains
but assumed that God had made them just
so that he could discover them not once
thinking how peculiar it was for the
best soil in the country to have almost
no trees this was not God’s work but the
intensive management of Aboriginal
people a managed field of harvest in his
journal the missionary George Augustus
Robinson reported seeing women stretched
across the same fields of horticulture
in the process of harvesting tubers
lieutenant grey was blocked in his
explorations of Western Australia by yam
field stretching to the horizon which
were so deeply tilled he couldn’t walk
across them tilled there’s another word
you’ve never heard in any Australia
in classroom Isaac Bailey one of
Melbourne first European farmers wrote
that the hillsides of Melbourne had been
terraced to increase the production of
yams and that the tilth of the soil was
so light you could run your fingers
through them
Ian Kerr noticed that as he brought the
first vehicle into the plains south of
echuca that his cart wheels turned up
bushels of tubers once again some of
Australia’s best soils were almost
bereft of trees the plains having been
horticulturally altered to provide
permanent harvests of tubers to feed the
population but unlike Mitchell’s
self-indulgent congratulations Kerr was
aware of who had produced this
productivity and later recognized that
it was his sheath that destroyed it
tilled stooped terraced bushels
agricultural words deliberately left out
of our history that we teach our
children James Kirby is one of the first
to Europeans in the country of the Waddy
Waddy near Swan Hill they passed
gigantic mounds of bulrushes stacked up
and steaming and and they wondered about
the vast enterprise but never thought
about the productivity of that plant
Aboriginal people were harvesting the
base of the stem as a delicious salad
vegetable and making mounds of the
leaves to process starch just one more
source of baking flour
Kirby notices a man fishing on a weir
his fellows have built across the river
well
Kirby assumes with great reluctance that
blacks had built it but only because he
knows he’s the first white man to see it
the construction of the dam included
small apertures at the bottom so that
water and fish movements could be
controlled
Kirby describes the operation like this
a black would sit near the opening and
just behind him a tough stick about 10
feet long
was stuck in the ground with the thick
end down to the thin end of this rod was
attached a line with a noose at the
other end a wooden peg was fixed under
the water at the opening in the fence to
which the noose was caught and when the
fish made it dark to go through the
opening he was caught by the gills his
force undid the look from the pig on the
spring of the stick threw the fish over
the head of the black who would then in
a most lazy manner reach back his hand
under the fish and set the loop again
around the pig but how does kirby
explain the operation he writes I have
often heard of the indolence of the
blacks and soon came to the conclusion
after watching a black fellow fish in
such a lazy way that what I heard was
perfectly true so we use and
constructions machinery and productivity
all rendered by Kerby as laziness wasn’t
he describing an operation which would
fit neatly into any description of
European inventiveness and industry
there has been too little investigation
into Aboriginal domesticates and the
vast fields of Agriculture witnessed by
the Explorers the so called
unchallengeable founts of australian
history so much still remains unknown to
most Australians and the term
hunter-gatherer is stamped into the
forehead of the Aboriginal tattooed with
unworthiness Charles Sturt had his life
saved in Central Australia when he came
upon people who were harvesting a river
valley and supplied him with water roast
duck and cake
both mitchell and stewart described the
cake as the lightest and sweetest they
had ever tasted how many historians have
read those comments and yet not one has
considered that it would be in the
nations
mercial and culinary interests to find
the grass that made the flower that made
the cake all we love to talk about Bush
tomato lemon myrtle and wattle seed
because they fit our venal belief in the
hunting and gathering Aborigine but when
asked to consider the virtues of
agricultural products grown on field so
wide the explorers could see neither
their beginning nor the end we become
flummoxed querulous these crops are
perennial and they were staples of
Aboriginal diet and economy the word
staple suggests permanence and utility
and the absence of those words in our
understanding of pre-colonial history
form the sole basis for the application
of terra nullius Australia is a drying
continent world a national in action on
the human contribution to climate change
is leading to a situation where we will
soon struggle to irrigate crops
Aboriginal domestic ‘its do not require
any more moisture than the Australian
climate provides no more fertilizer than
our soils already contain and as they
are adapted to Australian pests they
need no pesticide my family and I have
been growing these foods for six years
on the south coast of New South Wales
and will conduct our first commercial
harvests of yam and grain in February
two thousand nineteen these plants are
an environmental boon to the nation
apart from the fact that as they are all
perennial with large root masses of the
plants adapted to dry conditions they
sequester carbon if we only dedicated
five percent of our current agricultural
lands to these plants we would go a long
way to meeting our carbon emission
reduction targets these foods are not
only good for the environment and our
they also teach us a truer history and
can bring all Australians together
around the kitchen table but apart from
that recent archaeology has discovered
an 80 thousand year old mitten at
Warrnambool a 65 thousand year old
grinding stone in Arnhem Land and the
remains of the oldest village on earth
in western New South Wales
so Aboriginal Australians not only
invented bread they also invented
society here’s our chance to celebrate
the real history of the country and to
begin growing the foods adapted to our
climate and domesticated by Aborigines
let’s get rid of the idea of the hapless
hunter-gatherer and recognize the
ingenuity of the first Australians
[Applause] [Music]
exploded the myth that Aboriginal people
were being a hunters and gatherers and
did nothing with the land I wrote the
book because I found it hard to convince
Australians that Aboriginal people were
farming using colonial journals the
sources Australians hold to be true I
was able to form a radically different
view of Australian history Aboriginal
people were farming there’s no other
conclusion to draw colonial explorer Sir
Thomas Mitchell rode through nine miles
of stooped grain he wrote about seeing
massive fields of moon on tubers in
western Victoria Lieutenant grey the
first European explorer into many parts
of Western Australia was halted by yam
fields that stretched to the horizon
many explorers saw great harvests of
grain in the very dead heart of
Australia did you know that the
hillsides of Melbourne were terrorists
for yam production by local Aboriginal
people in fact there was such abundance
of staple foods but Aboriginal people
were able to preserve store and trade
vast quantities but none of his
information appears in any Australian
book of history is this absence
deliberate I believe Australia is ready
to discuss the ancient agricultural
economy let’s look at what the Explorers
reported of the Aboriginal agricultural
landscape and see if you can remember
any priest parent or professor
mentioning it were we the world’s first
agriculturalists I was having trouble
convincing academics some of Australia’s
best universities of this farming
tradition after a meeting where I was
chastised for misrepresenting Australian
history I realized I would have to use
sources which all Australians respected
so on the way home I went to the first
secondhand bookshop I could find and in
the back room I found a copy of
Mitchell’s journeys into tropical
Australia as soon as I read that he had
ridden through nine miles of stooped
grain I knew I would never have to
apologise for this argument again
Mitchell’s fellow explorers described it
as looking exactly like an English field
of harvest grain spooked for ripening
stuck it’s an interesting word never to
appear in the aboriginal history
Australians at all Mitchell also saw yam
fields stretching as far as he could see
a Garry word in western Victoria in his
journey
he’d extolled the beauty of these Plains
but assumed that God had made them just
so that he could discover them not once
thinking how peculiar it was for the
best soil in the country to have almost
no trees this was not God’s work but the
intensive management of Aboriginal
people a managed field of harvest in his
journal the missionary George Augustus
Robinson reported seeing women stretched
across the same fields of horticulture
in the process of harvesting tubers
lieutenant grey was blocked in his
explorations of Western Australia by yam
field stretching to the horizon which
were so deeply tilled he couldn’t walk
across them tilled there’s another word
you’ve never heard in any Australia
in classroom Isaac Bailey one of
Melbourne first European farmers wrote
that the hillsides of Melbourne had been
terraced to increase the production of
yams and that the tilth of the soil was
so light you could run your fingers
through them
Ian Kerr noticed that as he brought the
first vehicle into the plains south of
echuca that his cart wheels turned up
bushels of tubers once again some of
Australia’s best soils were almost
bereft of trees the plains having been
horticulturally altered to provide
permanent harvests of tubers to feed the
population but unlike Mitchell’s
self-indulgent congratulations Kerr was
aware of who had produced this
productivity and later recognized that
it was his sheath that destroyed it
tilled stooped terraced bushels
agricultural words deliberately left out
of our history that we teach our
children James Kirby is one of the first
to Europeans in the country of the Waddy
Waddy near Swan Hill they passed
gigantic mounds of bulrushes stacked up
and steaming and and they wondered about
the vast enterprise but never thought
about the productivity of that plant
Aboriginal people were harvesting the
base of the stem as a delicious salad
vegetable and making mounds of the
leaves to process starch just one more
source of baking flour
Kirby notices a man fishing on a weir
his fellows have built across the river
well
Kirby assumes with great reluctance that
blacks had built it but only because he
knows he’s the first white man to see it
the construction of the dam included
small apertures at the bottom so that
water and fish movements could be
controlled
Kirby describes the operation like this
a black would sit near the opening and
just behind him a tough stick about 10
feet long
was stuck in the ground with the thick
end down to the thin end of this rod was
attached a line with a noose at the
other end a wooden peg was fixed under
the water at the opening in the fence to
which the noose was caught and when the
fish made it dark to go through the
opening he was caught by the gills his
force undid the look from the pig on the
spring of the stick threw the fish over
the head of the black who would then in
a most lazy manner reach back his hand
under the fish and set the loop again
around the pig but how does kirby
explain the operation he writes I have
often heard of the indolence of the
blacks and soon came to the conclusion
after watching a black fellow fish in
such a lazy way that what I heard was
perfectly true so we use and
constructions machinery and productivity
all rendered by Kerby as laziness wasn’t
he describing an operation which would
fit neatly into any description of
European inventiveness and industry
there has been too little investigation
into Aboriginal domesticates and the
vast fields of Agriculture witnessed by
the Explorers the so called
unchallengeable founts of australian
history so much still remains unknown to
most Australians and the term
hunter-gatherer is stamped into the
forehead of the Aboriginal tattooed with
unworthiness Charles Sturt had his life
saved in Central Australia when he came
upon people who were harvesting a river
valley and supplied him with water roast
duck and cake
both mitchell and stewart described the
cake as the lightest and sweetest they
had ever tasted how many historians have
read those comments and yet not one has
considered that it would be in the
nations
mercial and culinary interests to find
the grass that made the flower that made
the cake all we love to talk about Bush
tomato lemon myrtle and wattle seed
because they fit our venal belief in the
hunting and gathering Aborigine but when
asked to consider the virtues of
agricultural products grown on field so
wide the explorers could see neither
their beginning nor the end we become
flummoxed querulous these crops are
perennial and they were staples of
Aboriginal diet and economy the word
staple suggests permanence and utility
and the absence of those words in our
understanding of pre-colonial history
form the sole basis for the application
of terra nullius Australia is a drying
continent world a national in action on
the human contribution to climate change
is leading to a situation where we will
soon struggle to irrigate crops
Aboriginal domestic ‘its do not require
any more moisture than the Australian
climate provides no more fertilizer than
our soils already contain and as they
are adapted to Australian pests they
need no pesticide my family and I have
been growing these foods for six years
on the south coast of New South Wales
and will conduct our first commercial
harvests of yam and grain in February
two thousand nineteen these plants are
an environmental boon to the nation
apart from the fact that as they are all
perennial with large root masses of the
plants adapted to dry conditions they
sequester carbon if we only dedicated
five percent of our current agricultural
lands to these plants we would go a long
way to meeting our carbon emission
reduction targets these foods are not
only good for the environment and our
they also teach us a truer history and
can bring all Australians together
around the kitchen table but apart from
that recent archaeology has discovered
an 80 thousand year old mitten at
Warrnambool a 65 thousand year old
grinding stone in Arnhem Land and the
remains of the oldest village on earth
in western New South Wales
so Aboriginal Australians not only
invented bread they also invented
society here’s our chance to celebrate
the real history of the country and to
begin growing the foods adapted to our
climate and domesticated by Aborigines
let’s get rid of the idea of the hapless
hunter-gatherer and recognize the
ingenuity of the first Australians
[Applause] [Music]
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