Black Duck, A Year at Yumburra by Bruce Pascoe with Lyn Harwood

Book review –

Bruce Pascoe needs no introduction as he is considered to be the man behind the book that changed the nation – Dark Emu.

It is now a decade since this thought-provoking, challenging, bestseller – a seminal historical text and a launch pad for controversy – landed on our booksellers’ shelves.

The book reframed the colonial lens through which Australia understood its Indigenous history, which had reduced Aboriginal people to simple hunter-gatherers and later unbelievably to flora and fauna.

Dark Emu has sold more than 360,000 copies, making it one of the highest selling books of its kind.

But this success has not come without a culture war.

For every positive, for every award or critical acclaim came backlash, a challenge to Pascoe’s Aboriginality, and another to the validity of his research – the controversy was focused on the wrong part of the story.

Now years later and through all the noise comes Black Duck, a blueprint for traditional food growing and land management processes based on very old practices.

This book is not the retelling of tragic history but offers us a different way of living, striving for Indigenous food sovereignty and a sea change in “white” Australia.

Pascoe’s writing pays as much care and respect to the wildlife he encounters as it does the humans in his life, acknowledging their agency and importance for the land.

You cannot help but wonder how wonderful it would be to have such a connection to everything around you.

Black Duck Foods is an Aboriginal social enterprise committed to traditional food growing processes that care for country and return economic benefits directly back to the community.

This is a map, a story of someone who leads by example, lives the life, shows us what can be done on and with the land – a land management system based on very old ancient practices.

Pascoe says this is a book about consequences and responsibilities.

Bruce Pascoe is a Bunurong, Yuin and Tasmanian Aboriginal writer of literary fiction, non-fiction, poetry, essays and children’s literature.

He is the enterprise professor in Indigenous Agriculture at the University of Melbourne.

He is best known for his work Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture (Magabala Books 2014).

Julie Chessman