When world-famous Australian rapper Iggy Azalea was asked on a US radio show about Aboriginal people in her country, she replied: "The thing about Aboriginal people is they don't believe in living in enclosed structures, houses... They all want to live under the stars because that's their culture, even now... The government build houses and the Aboriginal people trash them and take the beds outside cos they don't believe in houses and they want to live under the stars." Perhaps the rapper - who

When world-famous Australian rapper Iggy Azalea was asked on a US radio show about Aboriginal people in her country, she replied: "The thing about Aboriginal people is they don't believe in living in enclosed structures, houses... They all want to live under the stars because that's their culture, even now... The government build houses and the Aboriginal people trash them and take the beds outside cos they don't believe in houses and they want to live under the stars." Perhaps the rapper - who later became the first artist since the Beatles 50 years ago to hold the top two spots on the American Billboard Hot 100 chart with their first hits - should read this book. Prolific Aboriginal author Bruce Pascoe's "Dark Emu" extensively documents not only pre-colonial Aboriginal housing, but also engineering, fishing and farming methods. Here are some quotes that jumped out at me:



Many northern Australian museums display long, knife-like implements, which usually bear legends such as 'of unknown use' when in fact they are juan knives - long sharp blades of stone with fur-covered handles, which the explorer Gregory described the Aboriginal people using to cut down the grain.



As one of Australia's most senior archaeologists confided to me after struggling to gain official interest in her excavation of a sophisticated village site in the Murray River region, it is easier for Australian archaeologists to get research grants overseas than for undertaking new areas of research in Australia.



[Quoting explorer Charles Sturt:] [I]n walking along one came to a village consisting of nineteen huts... Troughs and stones for grinding seed were lying about... The fact of there being so large a well at this point... assured us that this distant part of the interior... was not without inhabitants.



[M]ost of the tool workshops associated with these constructions, as well as the constructions themselves, still do not appear on the archaeological register of Aboriginal Affairs Victoria.



King, on the doomed Burke and Wills expedition, found a storage of grain in an Aboriginal house, which he estimated at four tons.



[T]he mounds proved to be gigantic ovens for the cooking of the compung rush.



Norman Tindale... estimated the milling techniques to be around 18,000 years old, an age which, if it is true, re-writes the history of world agriculture.



We are at the beginning - not the end - of understanding pre-colonial history...



After studying Aboriginal yields from yam daisies it is easy to imagine a potato farmer turning over part of his farm to yam, thus avoiding the need to use fertiliser and herbicides.



Latz says that, 'the nutritional value of the seeds from the desert species is equal to or better than that of the cultivated grains'.



Dargin included some wonderful drawings and photographs from the early contact period and these are crucial to our understanding of the hydrology given that more recent photographs show a system compromised by channels for steamboats, levelled areas for regattas, fords and roads.



Rupert Gerritsen's important work was similarly bound and, for want of Australian interest, had to be published in London. Both his work and Dargin's are indicative of Australia's nonchalance to important considerations of Aboriginal culture.



Some Lake Condah fishery sites were seriously damaged after John Howard, Australian Prime Minister at the time, panicked farmers into believing they'd all be ruined by Native Title claims.



The reluctance to credit engineered fisheries to colonised peoples, and thus underrate their sovereignty of the land, is not peculiar to Australia.



[I]f they were houses, and if the channels were a fishing system, then around 10,000 people lived a more or less sedentary life in this town.



The Victorian Archaeological Survey seemed to be restricted by their own assumptions of Aboriginal development in the same way that so many pokers and prodders of Aboriginal culture seem not to have read the explorers' diaries. If they had, surely they would have gone further than the study of the kangaroo spear and the digging stick in their analysis of Aboriginal economies.



... Sturt's description of the evening whirring of hundreds of mills grinding grain into flour.



[W]e have all but ignored ethnographic evidence of Aboriginal engineering.



Aboriginals are now seen as poachers simply because the shellfish is so enormously valuable. When it was 'mutton fish' they were allowed to harvest as much as they wanted. Today they are gaoled for pursuing their traditional harvest.



The early history of Australia is crowded with references to Aboriginal watercraft and fishing techniques. Yet Australians remain strangely impervious to that knowledge and the Aboriginal economy in general.



[T]he observations of the first explorers and settlers provides an enormous body of material.



The reason I have provided so many examples, however, is to emphasise the depth of the available material and the desperate need for a revision of our history.



Collecting such a welter of evidence might seem a tedious excess to some readers but reference to Aboriginal housing is so remote from the Australian consciousness that, on reading of one or two examples, people might be encouraged to see them as aberrations.



Permanent housing was a feature of the Aboriginal economy and marked the movement towards agricultural reliance.



Sturt was doing it tough among the savages alright. New house, roast duck and cake!



Several villages were located near Birdsville, south-west Queensland, where today the remoteness and inhospitable nature of the land is mythologised as the desolate Outback. Many Australians find it hard to imagine the area as a once productive and healthy environment for large numbers of Aboriginal people.



On seeing houses built to accommodate forty people in groups of fifty or more both explorers resort to words like huts or hovels to describe buildings which in rural Ireland would have been called croft houses.



People here were not clinging on to survival in the desert; they were thriving and engaged in a rich and joyful life.



Mitchell is sensitive to the quality of the houses but insensitive to his occupation of someone else's residence. He occupied empty houses on many occasions and liberties of this kind were likely to have ruptured the relationship between white and black more severely than any action other than physical attack.



Gerritsen comments: The suppression, or discouragement of public disclosure of permanent settlements and more sedentary existence may have been yet another factor contributing to a distortion in historical information abut relevant groups and hence modern understandings... The suspicion is that there was intent to discredit evidence of permanent settlements because of the implications this may have had for the morality and legality of the colonial dispossession.



On the Darling River, explorers saw similar towns to those seen by Sturt and Mitchell and estimated the population of each to be no less than a thousand. Peter Dargin estimated the population of the region as 3,000 but the journals of Sturt, Mitchell and others reveal that they passed many such populous villages. These figures strongly contradict both current and past assumptions of a sparsely populated pre-colonial land.



At Mallacoota in 1842 Joseph Lingard met two Aboriginal men and, 'made bold to go into their retreat, which I found to be like a house inside'.



[Robinson] reported that the walls and rooves of the beehive, or kraal, type were so substantial that they were strong enough 'for a man on horseback to ride over'. One wonders how that observation was proven and what the owners of the house might have thought of the experiment.



The underestimation of Indigenous achievement was a deliberate tactic of British colonialism.



Burial within cemeteries is another of the indicators of sedentism recognised by archaeologists and abundant examples are provided in explorers' journals.



The importance of examining this material is to dissuade a common Australian perception that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people built nothing more complex than a piece of bark leaning on a stick.



While we continue to think of Aboriginal people having no construction skills it is easier to dismiss Aboriginal attachment to land.



Mitchell hit upon the impediment that inhibits control burns in the Australian landscape today. Farm fences.



The only yam plants to be found today are on railway verges and other lands fenced off from livestock and where no superphosphate has been used.



Daryl Tonkin, long-term resident of the country near Drouin in West Gippsland, remembers the catastrophic fires of 1939, which he attributed to the increasing reluctance of the Europeans to burn and the habit of leaving the heads of felled trees unburnt.



[Edward Curr:] '[T]he blackfellow was constantly setting fire to the grass and trees... he tilled his land and cultivated his pasture with fire'.



[Tim Flannery:] As the term firestick farming suggests, the Aboriginal use of fire resembled agriculture in some ways: it yielded certain crops at certain times, suppressed weeds and was carefully contolled...



[G]rassland production has been used as a lure to kangaroos and emus but, primarily, to keep stock away from deliberate plantings of grain and tuber crops.



The existence of infrastructure, houses, fences, outbuildings and power lines complicates the adoption of a similar method but does not prevent it. We just have to think differently about the country.



The belief that Aboriginal people were 'mere' hunter-gatherers has been used as a political tool to justify dispossession.



If we look at the evidence presented to us by the explorers and explain to our children that Aboriginal people did build houses, did build dams, did sow, irrigate and till the land, did alter the course of rivers, did sew their clothes and did construct a system of pan-continental government that generated peace and prosperity, then it is likely we will admire and love our land all the more.



[T]he skills employed to bring about the longest lasting pan-continental stability the world has known must be investigated because they might become Australia's greatest export.



Of all the systems humans have devised to manage their lives on earth Aboriginal government looks most like the democratic model.



Aboriginal people did not 'advance' like Europeans but it is also true the idea to pour boiling oil on enemies seems not to have occurred to anyone in Australia.



[Linguist Terry] Crowley admits that Australian languages are probably 40,000 to 60,000 years old, but even at 10,000 years they would be older than most other world languages.



Schoolchildren are taught that witchetty grubs were a major food source almost as if there is a deliberate attempt by educationalists to emphasise the gross and primitive. Imagine, instead, re-educating the nation and utilising the two major crops of Australia: yams (as well as other root vegetables) and grains.



A 100g sample of Microseris lanceolata tubers would provide 3-4 times the energy level of a 100g potato.



Human survival on a healthy planet is not a soft liberal pipe dream; it is sound global management and the deepest of religious impulses.



Encouraging full participation of Aboriginal people is not a simple task of handing out fluorescent vests to work in a billionaire's mine but requires a conversation with Aboriginal people about the future of the country.



Accepting the best white man is the final stage in the colonisation of Australia.