I think change is on the way: Bruce Pascoe

Covering 18 regions in detail, the book features 350 colour photographs and outlines cultural practices from each area, dreaming stories and history, told through an Indigenous narrative. Pascoe and Shukuroglou also offer advice on connecting with local Indigenous community members in each of the regions.

It was coincidental of course, but the timing has worked well.

“The fires and COVID delayed us, but fortuitously people can’t travel overseas right now,” says Pascoe. “I think a lot of Australians will be stir-crazy and wanting to have a look at Australia.”

Like much of his work – he’s written more than 30 books, from novels to short story collections and academic essays – it also features his wry sense of humour; Loving Country’s tone is both informative and, at times, playful.

“I’m glad you think that – there’s a temptation to get a bit earnest,” he says.

At first glance the guide is similar to Marcia Langton’s 2018 travel book Welcome to Country but Pascoe describes Loving Country as more companion than competitor.

“I’m not competing with Marcia – I’m not f—ing silly,” he jokes. “The two books are complementary, but different. Marcia does that kind of academic, intellectual angle and I do the broken-down cricketer’s version. Ours was always meant to be more about places rather than about the theory.”

He’s friends with Langton and describes her as an inspiration to himself and most of the Aboriginal community.

This year he’ll become an official colleague of Langton’s, having joined Univeristy of Melbourne’s School of Agriculture and Food to expand on his research into Indigenous agriculture.

Pascoe is now an Enterprise Professor. “Can’t you tell?”

He might not look professorial but after 2014’s Dark Emu, which drew on historical sources to show Aboriginal people have for thousands of years engaged in complex agricultural life, he was embraced by the mainstream, ushering in a new era of thinking about First Australians.

A former schoolteacher, he still talks at schools, and in 2019 he released Young Dark Emu, a children’s version of the book, which comes with teaching resources.

While some still see Dark Emu as controversial (perhaps none so much as NewsCorp’s Andrew Bolt), the book is now in its 40th reprint.

“We owe Andrew a lot,” quips Pascoe. “He doubled the sales of Dark Emu – five years after it had been released! Really, I think it was (that) the permaculturists got onto it and they’ve got a big sway over uni students and it lit a bit of a flame – but Andrew certainly helped.”

Our meals arrive and they’re huge; but Pascoe is hungry. “It’s nice to eat at a restaurant; I’ve been eating my own cooking for so long now.”

Usually he cooks for himself as he lives alone – “If you’re cooking for someone else you’ll have a go, but I tend to end up working outside until very late, then come in, cook up something to keep me alive,” he says – but for much of last year he had his daughter, Marnie, her husband and their three kids living with him during lockdown.

The family had been staying with him when the devastating bushfires – from which Pascoe’s property barely escaped – began, and then COVID-19 hit.

“She’s got three kids under 11, so she home-schooled them at the farm. She was frayed to a whisker!” He helped out where he could – “We made little films and I did all the nature stuff, took them fishing, but I could always leave and say I’ve gotta work now!” – but marvels at the stamina of parents during lockdown.

But like many, he enjoyed the forced long-term reunion, relishing the time together as a family.

“I got to know my son-in-law and my grandkids, but I also got to know my daughter much better. We know each other really well, she’s a great mate of mine, but we’ve had an extended period of exchanging witticism, which we loved.”

As well as clearing the local land after the fires, Pascoe has spent the past year furthering his research into traditional food-growing processes with his company Black Duck, which also focuses on country management processes, for the benefit of Indigenous Australians.

He recently launched Dark Emu, the beer – a dark lager Pascoe and the other Yuin people who work with him have made in collaboration with Sailor’s Grave Brewery in Orbost. Made with roasted seeds of dancing grass (mamadyang ngalluk) and ‘‘weeping grass’’ (burru ngalluk) from his property, Pascoe says it has a distinctive smoky flavour.

“And I approve entirely. People are getting into it now – it’s even at Dan Murphy’s,” he says.

He and his team are also working on bread made from the seeds, which some of our top chefs, such as Ben Shewry at Attica, are experimenting with. But the aim is to make Black Duck a commercially viable option.

“We’re starting from scratch but now we’ve got a manager and farm manager and we’re starting to sell stuff,” he says.

The company recently worked with the University of Sydney on a study into the feasibility of using native grains as a modern food product, and the findings were positive; the next steps are having it approved for consumption, the “food science stuff”, says Pascoe.

“People have been harvesting kangaroo grass for a long time to re-sow paddocks, but nobody has ever used it for food,” he says, “so we have to go through the whole rigmarole with food safety, getting licences done. Then there’s restrictions on how you handle it – we’ve been storing in a hay shed, but now we’ll have to find a better way.”

A second round of drinks and our chat meanders almost as much as Pascoe’s backstory. We talk about his childhood, during which his family moved frequently, including a seven-year stint on King Island, a “strange place” where Pascoe recalls his dad working in the tungsten mine and his mum not enjoying it; the ferocity of the wind and his mum chasing her washing down the street. “It’s a bleak place, but I loved it,” he says.

His dad was a builder, “but he’d do something and off we’d go,” says Pascoe. “He went broke twice, which was a good example for me. When we were publishing Australian Short Stories, we weren’t making any money, but we kept it going for 17 years,” he says. “The writers were always paid.”

He talks about the first time he went to Mallacoota, where I assumed by now he’d be the local celebrity. “I’m not even the most important person on my street,” he says. “In Mallacoota, I’m more famous for my cricket (he plays on the local team) than I am for books. Everyone watches cricket; not everyone reads books.”

He speaks too about Albany in Western Australia, which he describes as “the second-most wonderful place in my memory”; his stint as a lighthouse keeper, surely the most romantic job title he’s had (“except it’s all automatic now, but it was a great job, very dramatic”); his delight and surprise at the fast regeneration of many of the native plants on his property after the fires (including a native orchid that hadn’t flowered for 70 years and “a bunch of seeds that turned up on the forest floor and we don’t know what they are”); and the much-anticipated ABC documentary version of Dark Emu, shelved last year due to COVID-19, which he believes will further change thinking about Indigenous culture.

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“I can’t talk about it in much detail yet, but there’s been some archaeological work done south of Broome, where it’s incredibly hot, where one young woman has found that people had been making gardens to grow vegetables. They’d learned to increase the moisture content in the soil in order to make things grow,” he says. “That’s going to become really important. I can’t tell you how much that will change things.”

He’s also genuinely optimistic about Australia’s future.

“I do feel hopeful. I’ve got grandkids, so I’m not going to give up, for their sakes,” he says. “They’re all very committed and involved with their culture – they deserve a chance to do better than my generation. Not very hard!”

In the last seven or eight years, he says, “I think Australia has really changed its stance on anything to do with Aboriginal Australia. It’s nowhere near perfect but it’s vastly improved.”

More people are reading more about Indigenous history and “apparently wanting to change their minds”, Pascoe says. “I think the ultra-conservatives in Australia are fighting a rearguard action; I think change is on the way.”

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