Sutton draws on more than fifty years of fieldwork experience with senior Aboriginal men and women in many areas of the Australian continent to test Dark Emu’s agriculturalist thesis. During the 1970s, Sutton did his own share of hunting and gathering as

the only non-local person living with Wik people for months in the wetlands country north of the Kendall River in Cape York Peninsula ... All of our fat and protein came from hunting … My teachers were mainly people who had been born and raised in the bush, some to full adulthood. Apart from the practice of leaving yam stalks undisturbed while the tubers were removed, I never heard of or saw any older practices that could be even remotely described as horticulture, agriculture or farming in the common-sense way these terms are used.

Sutton also describes recording ‘many Aboriginal languages and learn[ing] to speak three by month after month sitting at the feet of teachers whose languages were still spoken, yet unwritten’. He notes a plethora of words for agricultural terms in the two Torres Strait Islands languages, where Eddie Mabo’s people have long practised horticulture, yet (apart from English loan words) virtually no evidence of such terms in about forty dictionaries of Aboriginal languages he has consulted.

Aboriginal people in Cape York never took up their Melanesian neighbours’ agricultural practices, nor did people in the Northern Territory adopt those of the Macassans, who introduced a number of tree species during annual visits to the Top End. Indeed, there is extensive evidence of active resistance to agriculture by Aboriginal people. In a characteristic fieldwork gem, Sutton quotes senior Kuku Yalanji man Johnny Walker’s observation in the early 1980s that ‘Bama [Aboriginal people] know where to get mayi [vegetable food] already, why should we stay in one place and have to hoe and bother with a farm!?’

Nincompoops on both the right and the left have produced equally shallow responses to Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? An unfortunate yet predictable toxic by-product of the book’s publication is that it will launch a thousand tedious Quadrant and Daily Telegraph diatribes by professional right-wing provocateurs like Andrew Bolt and NSW One Nation leader Mark Latham. In a similarly superficial response to this important historical debate inspired by Australia’s powerful anti-intellectual tradition, the Dark Emu controversy seems to have been represented by some culture warriors of the left as a contest between ‘stale old white academics’ and a plucky First Nations amateur who respects Aboriginal people (unlike them!) and who has overturned the racist myth of terra nullius (apparently single-handedly).

The political controversy surrounding the book has generated some public confusion, and it is important to clarify that Sutton and Walshe have had no part in the despicable ad hominem attacks on Bruce Pascoe launched by Bolt and others. Sutton himself is hardly a man of the right; he describes the British Empire as ‘the greatest kleptocracy in human history’ and is one of the unsung (non-Indigenous) heroes of the Aboriginal land rights movement, having served as an expert anthropologist on eighty-seven land claims since 1979. His influential account of the ‘post-classical’ transformation of Aboriginal land-holding systems has assisted many Aboriginal groups in longer settled areas of the continent to successfully argue for recognition of their property rights under native title law. Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? has a scholarly and historical, not political, agenda; in the words of historian Tom Griffiths, its authors ‘pay Bruce Pascoe’s work the respect of a forensic analysis’.

Sutton and Walshe concede that, by popularising the work of earlier scholars, Dark Emu has stimulated renewed interest in Aboriginal history, environmental management and housing, and has been rightly critical of ‘the uninformed view that classical Aboriginal society consisted of constantly nomadic people who were not ecological agents, did not stay in one place for more than a few days and did not store resources’. Yet despite Dark Emu’s obvious merits in reviving interest in Australia’s Aboriginal history, the book is not a reliable guide to that history, and for Sutton, ‘its success as a narrative has been achieved in spite of its failure as an account of fact’.

Defenders of Dark Emu are apt to cite its use of nineteenth-century explorers’ journals as a kind of ‘smoking gun’ that supports the book’s claim that Aboriginal people practised agriculture. Yet these colonial outriders of the agricultural civilisation that was later to dispossess and shatter Aboriginal society interpreted what they saw using the European agriculturalist framework they were familiar with. These were ‘blow-ins’ who typically did not speak the language of the Aboriginal people they observed, and did not stay around for long enough to learn very much at all about their culture and society. Worse still, Sutton produces numerous examples where Dark Emu misquotes, misinterprets, selectively quotes, or fails to reference these sources at all. Pascoe relies on the explorers’ journals, while almost completely ignoring the evidence of Australia’s First Nations people themselves, as well as the important accounts of several non-Indigenous people like William Buckley, who spent thirty-two years living with Aboriginal people beyond the colonial frontier in Western Victoria. Dark Emu also largely ignores a huge body of work by anthropologists like Donald Thomson, Ursula McConnel, Ian Keen, Sutton himself and others, all of whom learned local Aboriginal languages and spent months or even years living with remote-area Aboriginal people while being mentored by their senior knowledge holders (Sutton acknowledges fifty-nine such Aboriginal mentors in the appendix).

Sutton’s co-author, archaeologist Keryn Walshe, provides a two-chapter critique of evidence cited for Aboriginal people’s use of ‘aquaculture’ and agricultural implements. The Budj Bim and Brewarrina fish traps discussed in Dark Emu were certainly complex, yet they were also exceptional in scale: ‘Pascoe is prone to finding a localised or regional exception to a general continent-wide pattern and then suggesting the exception was the norm.’

One of Dark Emu’s most disturbing features is its resurrection of the long-discredited ‘social evolutionist’ model of human development. In Sutton and Walshe’s analysis, Dark Emu presents a simplistic dichotomy between Aboriginal people as ‘agriculturalists who lived in permanent housing’ and a completely outdated notion of ‘hapless wandering’ by ‘mere hunter-gatherers’; ‘it is Pascoe who adds pejoratives such as “primitive”, “simple” and “mere” to the term “hunter-gatherer” … There seems to be an assumption that subsistence based on hunting and gathering is itself not complex. This is far from the truth.’ Sutton prefers the terms ‘complex hunter-gatherer’ or ‘hunter-gatherer-plus’ to describe the sophisticated ecological knowledge developed by Aboriginal people that allowed them to survive for millennia across a wide range of changing climatic zones in Australia: ‘they were ecological agents who worked with the environment, rather than against it. They frequently used slow burning fire to make their landscapes more liveable. However, they did not cut down bush to clear the land, plough and hoe the soil in preparation for planting or then sow stored seed or tubers or rootstock in gardens or fields … They had their own way. This should be cherished.’

In a notable instance of historical amnesia, some Dark Emu proponents seem to credit the book with undermining terra nullius (the spurious legal doctrine used to validate Aboriginal dispossession by the British Crown). Yet ‘Dark Emu’s claims to be debunking myths are unfounded’: the fact that Aboriginal hunter-gatherers could and still did have systems of land ownership was demonstrated by Australian anthropologists in the 1960s. A system of Aboriginal land tenure rights in the Northern Territory was later articulated by anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner and recognised at law in the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976. The legal doctrine of terra nullius was itself finally overturned by the High Court in the celebrated Mabo case in 1992; Aboriginal people’s property rights were recognised the following year in the Native Title Act 1993, and these same rights have since been reconfirmed in countless Federal Court native title determinations.

As I was writing this review, cost-cutting measures were announced at the University of Western Australia that would see the abolition of its Department of Anthropology, established in 1956 by Ronald Berndt, one of the leading figures in the development of Australian anthropology. Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? is in many ways a defence of this legacy. For Sutton, the uncritical acceptance of Dark Emu’s flawed version of Aboriginal history highlights the degree to which anthropology and ‘the authority of the academy has slipped’. Many of the discipline’s key figures like Elkin, Stanner, the Berndts, and others played a leading role in publicly challenging the racist dogmas of the time, and since then, ‘Australian anthropologists’ activism in support of Indigenous causes has only increased’. Like Robert Manne, many of these anthropological scholars felt obliged as public intellectuals to address a wider audience outside the academy, as in Stanner’s electrifying 1968 Boyer lectures After the Dreaming. Yet today, Sutton and Marcia Langton are perhaps the lone exemplars of this earlier tradition of the anthropologist as public intellectual. Did Australian anthropology retreat to an ivory tower during its ‘postmodern turn’ in the 1980s, and lose the ability to engage a broader audience in the way Dark Emu, for all its flaws, has clearly done so powerfully? Perhaps.