I was sent a link to this question by u/reedstilt because I regularly reference Dark Emu and recommend it to people new to studying Indigenous Australia. That being said, I feel a little uncomfortable reviewing it here since for me it was a very influential work that kind of flipped how I felt about Indigenous culture. I'm also a young left-leaning millenial studying Indigenous history focusing on dispossession, commemoration and truth-telling, so I might be too close to have an unbiased opinion. If you don't wanna read all of this, skip to the second half - the first gives background on Pascoe and the History Wars.

Before I read this book, my opinion of Indigenous Australia was similar to most non-Indigenous Australians - formed by stereotypes in films and tv, brief mentions in history books about white colonials, negative experiences on the street and negative portrayals in politics and the media. Consuming media about the Frontier Wars and colonialism was incredibly confronting and distressing. I was well aware of the History Wars and was in firm agreement with Keating and the general Reconciliation movement, but I still had a deeply ingrained distrust of 'pro-Aboriginal' media. Reading Dark Emu helped me realise that most Australian don't know anything of our own history - we cling to comforting narratives, rather than do the reading ourselves. Dark Emu really impressed me, and pushed me to learn more.

Dark Emu is arguing for reconciliation through truth-telling, which is not exactly a new idea - Bill Stanner became famous for criticising the 'Great Australian Silence' in a series of speeches for the ABC in 1968 (although he'd worked on Indigenous history for much longer), stating that white Australian historiography had made Indigenous Australia a footnote to the White Australia experience. Stanner's speech either sparked or caught the essence of the coming movement in Australian historiography towards setting the record straight by historians like Henry Reynolds, which continued into the late 90s but saw severe backlash from conservatives with the coming of the Howard government. This debate over national history and truth-telling was dubbed 'the History Wars' in the media. Geoffrey Blainey, in an interview in 1986, named these sides of Australian historiography 'the Black Arm-banders', for their miserable view on Australian history, and the 'Three Cheers' side who wanted only positive (white Australian) stories to be told. The 'Three Cheers' epithet has been replaced with 'the White Blindfold' on occasion by 'black arm-banders'. Despite several decades of eye-opening academic work, mostly focusing on the reality of war and massacre on the Australian frontier, the public still remains mostly ignorant and uninterested, and the 'Great Australian Silence' mentality is still easy to see in a lot of Australian media today, including histories of locations (just look up any Aussie city on Wikipedia, or check local shire websites), where 60-40,000 years of life are covered by 1-2 sentences, a prologue to the 'real' white Australian story. Many historians have written about the History Wars, including Stuart McIntyre's famous The History Wars.

The author of Dark Emu, Bruce Pascoe, grew up being taught similarly 'White Australian' historical narratives, until he researched his family history and discovered he had Indigenous ancestry. He kept looking further and found that a lot of local public knowledge didn't match the colonial records and primary sources. Already a novelist, he wrote the book 'Convincing Ground' (which I have not read). In this book (going off of reviews), Pascoe talks about identity and historiography, drawing links between the way colonials skirted the truth of the Convincing Ground massacre (the date unknown, but sometime in the 1830s in Gundijtmara lands near Portland, Victoria). He says the way we tell our national story didn't begin with the goldfields, the union strikes or Gallipoli, but rather the way we told our own truths about the massacres of Indigenous people (for instance, former Prime Minister John Howard saying that only history that we can be proud of should be taught). Pascoe argued that we can only move forward as a nation through truth-telling.

Pascoe's work on The Convincing Ground led to him being an expert contributor to the tv series 'First Australians', which follows the poor race relations of black and white Australia from Bennelong and the First Fleet in Sydney up until the 90s with Eddie Mabo and Native Title. The purpose of this series was to expose many of the dark realities of our past that generally aren't spoken about in white Australian society - its publication upset a huge number of people. This series was critically well received and helped legitimise Pascoe as an expert. As mentioned in the introduction to Dark Emu, and in several interviews for the book, the author had plenty of research left unused by his first book, plenty of people emailing him stories of similarly whitewashed/forgotten events and plenty of "good and smart people" who refused to believe that Australia's history was dark or falsified. A lot of people were telling him that an Indigenous voice was inherently biased and that oral histories and 'connecting the dots' were not meaningful ways of ascertaining the truth. As such, he focused on white colonial accounts of Indigenous technology, believing that this would make for a more believable 'narrator'.

Thus in Dark Emu he goes about busting common myths born out of racist 19th and early 20th century historiography and anthropology, using mostly primary sources - his main argument is that Aboriginal Australian primitivity is a deliberate lie. The primary sources used by Pascoe highlight the hypocrisy of the colonial mindset, where in one instance an explorer will marvel at the friendliness, ingenuity and contentedness of Indigenous life, and their clear ownership and mastery of the land, and then in the next sentence talk about how great it'll be when white folks come and farm every acre of land in sight, and how sad it is that the locals will inevitably be exterminated. He gives accounts of archaeology and enivronmental histories, drawing heavily on Rupert Gerritsen and the Biggest Estate on Earth by Bill Gammage, which argues that by looking at white colonial primary sources you can see the scale and impact of Indigenous mastery of the land. The developmental views of the early 20th century, wherein Indigenous Australians were a backward poverty-stricken animalistic people left behind, don't match the reality. Both Pascoe and Gammage demand that we look at Indigenous society and technology as impressive and complex.