Dark Emu

Pascoe — Aboriginal Australian — spent years in colonial archives reading the journals of the explorers, settlers, and missionaries who first encountered Aboriginal Australians, and found in their own words evidence that contradicted everything Australia had been taught about its Indigenous people: that they were hunter-gatherers with no permanent settlements, no agriculture, no civilization worth the name. The journals describe villages, grain storage, fish traps, aquaculture, bread-making. Pascoe argues that this evidence was suppressed because acknowledging it would have complicated the legal fiction of terra nullius — the claim that the land was empty. The most important Australian history book of the 21st century.