Bruce Pascoe’s new book dares us to decolonise our minds – but moralising trumps nuance

Résumé détaillé

The author of Dark Emu returns to agriculture in The European Mind, a collection of essays big on denunciation.

Bruce Pascoe is a theorist of human civilisation, drawing on history and ecology to point the way for the human species to survive. The University of Melbourne has recognised his work by appointing him an honorary (enterprise professor) in its School of Agriculture, Food and Ecosystem Sciences. He also farms.

Review: The European Mind: Colonialism, Capitalism, Christianity and how to recover – Bruce Pascoe (Magabala Books)

In his new book, The European Mind, Pascoe argues there is more than one way for humans to get food from working the land. For the sake of our species’ survival, we should recalculate the cost of the practices typical of contemporary, industrialised agriculture.

His phrase “the European mind” refers to all the ideas that stop us from making the changes we must make. The book is thus a sequel, of world-historical scope, to his investigation of Australia’s agricultural history in Dark Emu (2014).

Like Dark Emu, this sequel is a highly moralised and political history. The primary argument of Dark Emu was that Aboriginal Australians once practised a kind of agriculture. This thesis could have been no more than an esoteric contribution to archaeology, but for Pascoe, an account of the past is also an opportunity to charter our future in explicitly moral terms. By attaching two secondary arguments to his Aboriginal agriculture thesis, Pascoe gave a contemporary political edge (and evident reader appeal) to his portrayal of Aboriginal civilisation.

One argument was that Australians have been denied knowledge that Aboriginal people were skilled practitioners of a kind of agriculture. From the beginning of colonisation, he asserted, there arose an intellectual tradition of seeing Aboriginal people as ignorant, opportunistic wanderers.

Dark Emu’s other secondary argument was that although Australians have supposed their own use of natural resources to be superior to Indigenous Australians’, our exploitation of nature since 1788 has been ruinous.

Dark Emu…

Pascoe’s…

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