As an Australian, I've only recently become aware that Aboriginal agriculture was far more extensive and advanced than I was taught in school.

by djeekay

Can anyone point me at some reasonably easily digested, accurate materials on the subject? I'd particularly enjoy some good quality documentary style videos or podcasts. Thanks!

Djiti-djiti

The best book on Indigenous Australian land use is The Biggest Estate on Earth by Bill Gammage - but it is not easy to digest. It is dense and it is dry, but it also has great reviews by other historians, including the infamously conservative Geoffrey Blainey - people who outright reject ideas of complex Indigenous land use are going against the academic consensus.

The book that has popularised reassessing Indigenous land use is Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe, who is, although knowledgable, not a historian. Dark Emu is very easy to read, and borrows very heavily from Biggest Estate and older looks at Indigenous agriculture like the work of Rupert Gerritsen. It's strength is that it takes elements of Biggest Estate and colonial primary sources and makes them easy to read for the general public.

However, whereas Biggest Estate is Gammage saying "Indigenous Australian use of the land was complex, intense and is in dire need of reassessment", Pascoe's argument in Dark Emu is closer to "Indigenous Australians were not a primitive people, because they sometimes farmed and lived in villages". He takes elements of some Aboriginal cultures that are suggestive of sedentary agricultural lifestyles and makes it appear (although likely not deliberately) as if these were the default for all of Aboriginal Australia.

They were not. Australia is enormous, and its peoples, climates and landscapes are incredibly diverse, and precolonial Indigenous culture was inherently conservative, mostly rejecting new ideas in favour of preserving ancient customs. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle may have been significantly more complex than most people (including academics) realise, and substantially different in some key locations across Australia, but for most precolonial Australians it was primarily hunting and gathering. When they were presented with the possibility of farming and village living by foreign cultures, they mostly rejected them - it had nothing to do with capability or intelligence and everything to do with tradition and choice. Indigenous Australia doesn't need a history of villages and agriculture to be impressive or deserving of respect.

Pascoe, in my opinion, is also failing to adequately credit his secondary sources when he says publicly that "nobody ever talks about this", and some elements of his book relating to culture are speculative (and thus weak and detract from his main arguments), but that's not really relevant to your question.

I'd suggest you read Dark Emu with these critiques in mind, and then graduate onto Biggest Estate if you can stomach it.

This clearly non-scholarly video by the Youtuber 'Cogito' is a great summary of what Dark Emu and Biggest Estate discuss, but it has the same strengths and weaknesses as Dark Emu.