I got Bruce Pascoe’s book Dark Emu for Christmas and I’ve already finished it. I’ve known for a while not that most of the stuff I was taught about Indigenous Australians at school—that they were nomadic hunter-gatherers, that when the British arrived Australia was wild, untamed bush and barren desert, that the pictures painted by Europeans of Australia looking like an English garden or countryside were nostalgic misrepresentations rather than a true depiction of Australia—were false, but the degree to which I have discovered they were false has shocked and horrified me.

Pre-Invasion, indigenous Australians lived in partly sedentary communities, in large villages of hundreds of people, in sturdy permanent homes made of stone or baked clay or large logs, many with internal walls and doors, some over 12ft tall and able to hold tens of people.

They farmed the land—not using European techniques, but using fire to regenerate some areas while other areas grow, as well as using hoes and turning the soil. But they didn’t grow monocultures, so the soil was never degraded. They used complex terracing and irrigation techniques, even in the desert, to stop soil erosion and runoff.

They ground grains to bake cakes, caught fish, eels, kangaroos and emus in elaborate and complex traps (some 40,000 years old), and stored huge surpluses of food in sealed containers for up to a year.

They ticked all the boxes that Europeans have decided designate a “civilisation”—living in towns, farming, pottery, etc.

British settlers burnt down their villages, dismantled their structures and built over their wells, and despite written and photographic evidence, none of this is ever taught in school.

The truth of pre-Invasion Aboriginal civilisation is hugely important. The common assumption is that humans are essentially greedy, and that any society whose technology advances far enough to be able to produce a surplus of food will inevitably develop class divisions, masters and slaves, kings and peasants, bosses and workers. But Aboriginal society shows that is not true.

For tens of thousands of years, Indigenous Australians used advanced technological and agricultural knowledge to produce huge surpluses of food while living in an egalitarian, collaborative society based on relationships of mutual reciprocity. Families, clan groups and individuals had responsibility for taking care of different elements of the land, such as forests, animal herds, or rivers. However, instead of owning these elements, they know they were sharing it with others—for example, the clans on the other side of a forest, or the clans along the whole length of the river, even if they would never meet some of these people—and that they were passing it down to for future generations. There is also no evidence of any warfare in the history of Aboriginal society.

At Marxism Conference there is going to be a session discussing Can Humans Live Collectively? (marxismconference.org/program/can-humans-live-collectively/) introduced by activist, author and historian Sandra Bloodworth. Dark Emu is an excellent book to read in preparation for it, totally busting the myth of human nature as selfish and violent and inherently hierarchical. Grab your tickets at marxismconference.org/tickets today!