Transcript of A real history of Aboriginal Australians, the first agriculturalists | Bruce Pascoe | TEDxSydney

[Music] [Music] 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]