« Paralysed settler colonialism: Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Fear and Loathing in Settler Australia’, in Dan Tout, Emma-Jaye Gavin, Julia Hurst (eds), Barriers to Truth and Justice in Settler-Colonial Australia: Why Won’t Settlers Listen? Springer, 2026, pp. 155-167

Clearly, on Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu: Kim Alley, Dan Tout, ‘Backlash: Dark Emu, Settler Nationalism, and Indigenous Sovereignty’, in Dan Tout, Emma-Jaye Gavin, Julia Hurst (eds), Barriers to Truth and Justice in Settler-Colonial Australia: Why Won’t Settlers Listen? Springer, 2026, pp 129-153

21Apr26

Abstract: Over the past decade, Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu has become a flashpoint in Australia’s ongoing History Wars. By challenging colonial myths that depicted Aboriginal peoples as ‘mere hunter-gatherers’ and demonstrating the complexity of pre-colonial practices of cultivation and land management, Pascoe directly unsettled the legal fiction of terra nullius and, with it, the legitimacy of the settler-colonial nation-state. This chapter situates the backlash against Dark Emu—and against Pascoe himself—within the politics of Australian settler nationalism. It argues that what is at stake in this controversy is less the technical question of whether Aboriginal peoples were ‘farmers’ or ‘hunter-gatherers’ (whether ‘mere’ or ‘complex’) than the threat posed to foundational settler narratives and their enduring ideological, cultural, and legal force. The often vitriolic responses to Pascoe, including attempts to delegitimise his identity and work, exemplify a reactionary effort to extinguish the basis for Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. In tracing these dynamics, we show how the Dark Emu debate represents a twenty-first-century iteration of the History Wars, illuminating both the persistent anxieties of dispossession structuring settler nationalism and the possibilities opened up by truth-telling for unsettling its shaky foundations.


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