History has portrayed Australia’s First Peoples, the Aboriginals, as hunter-gatherers who lived on an empty, uncultivated land. History is wrong.

In this seminal book, Bruce Pascoe uncovers evidence that long before the arrival of white men, Aboriginal people across the continent were building dams and wells; planting, irrigating, and harvesting seeds, and then preserving the surplus and storing it in houses, sheds, or secure vessels; and creating elaborate cemeteries and manipulating the landscape. All of these behaviours were inconsistent with the hunter-gatherer tag, which turns out to have been a convenient lie that worked to justify dispossession.

Using compelling evidence from the records and diaries of early Australian explorers and colonists, he reveals that Aboriginal systems of food production and land management have been blatantly understated in modern retellings of early Aboriginal history, and that a new look at Australia’s past is required ― for the benefit of us all.

Dark Emu, a bestseller in Australia, won both the Book of the Year Award and the Indigenous Writer’s Prize in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.

A collection of stories and essays by the award-winning author of Dark Emu, showcasing his shimmering genius across a lifetime of work. Bruce Pascoe has been described as a 'living national treasure' and his work as 'revelatory'. This volume of his best and most celebrated stories and essays, collected here for the first time, ranges across his long career, and explores his enduring fascination with Australia's landscape, culture, land management and history. Featuring new and previously unpublished fiction alongside his most revered and thought-provoking nonfiction - including extracts from his modern classic Dark Emu - this collection is perfect for Pascoe fans and new readers alike. It's time all Australians saw the range and depth of this most marvellous of local writers

Convincing Ground is a wide-ranging, personal, and powerful work which resonates with historical and contemporary Australian debates about identity, dispossession, memory, and community. This study covers their national contemporary political stage, critiquing the great Australian silence when it comes to dealing respectfully with the construction of the nation's Indigenous past. The book examines early colonial behavior on Gunditchmurra lands (near Portland, Victoria) and the shaping of Australians, then and now, physically and intellectually. Through a close, critical examination of the major historical works and witness accounts, Convincing Ground draws uncanny parallels between the techniques, language, and results of the invasion to contemporary times. For the author, Bruce Pascoe, the Australian character was not forged at Gallipoli, Eureka, and the back of Bourke, but in the more satanic furnace of Australias Murdering Flat, Convincing Ground, and Werribee. Pascoe knows the pas