Willy Lit Fest

Dark Emu, Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? author Bruce Pascoe challenges the long held belief that Australia’s first people were hunter-gatherers at the time of colonisation. Join Bruce at Williamstown Literary Festival as he discusses his award-winning book with ethnographer and researcher Jason Gibson and takes a new look at Australia’s past.

Dark Emu attempts to rebut the colonial myths that have worked to justify the dispossession of Australia’s Indigenous people. Bruce Pascoe provides compelling evidence from the diaries of early explorers that suggests that systems of food production and land management have been blatantly understated in modern retellings of early Aboriginal history.

Winner NSW Premier’s Literary Award Book of the Year 2016
According to the judges’ official comments, “Dark Emu reveals enormous Aboriginal achievement in governance and agriculture, and restores these to their rightful place at the epicentre of Australian history”.