Dark Emu Exposed Exposed: A Critique of the Critique

Bruce Pascoe’s 2014 piece Dark Emu puts forth a compelling argument for Australia to reconsider its precolonial history. It provides primary and secondary sources to back the claim that Indigenous Australians were not uniformly “hunter gatherers”, and instead had diverse and complex societies. Overall, it is an interesting read, and poses important questions about Australian pre-colonial history.

Dark Emu Exposed, however, it the opposite, in more ways than one. It attempts to “disprove” Dark Emu with what can only be described as intellectually dishonest claims: most of which rest on Bruce Pascoe being “politically motivated” (as if the only motivation to challenge historical misconceptions is “politics”, or that Dark Emu Exposed is any less “political”). The ultimate thesis of this site is, in all honesty, a reinforcement than pre-colonial Indigenous society was uniformly a “stone age hunter gatherer” society, and it only follows then that therefore they were savages and inferior to the superior and intellectual European tradition.

This is not a stretch, mind you; they describe themselves as “Quiet Australians”, a moniker used by Scott Morrison to refer to LNP voters, an overtly political phrase used by the reactionary right-wing to refer to the mythical majority who agree with them but are too frightened to say so, or else risk being attacked by the totally real Woke Mob. This is an infantile position to hold.

In this piece, I will do my best to critique Dark Emu Exposed, by not only addressing the arguments they make which supposedly “disprove” Pascoe’s original, but also do what many people have probably forgotten to do: contemplate the implications of such “rebuttals”. As I am not myself an academic (don’t worry, neither are the Dark Emu Exposed crew, so I am no less under-qualified than they are in this field), I will do my best to cite as many relevant sources as possible.

First, I will go into the background of Dark Emu Exposed and give you a general outline of the people involved.

This article will also go into genocides against Indigenous people, so consider this a sensibility warning. If you would rather not read about justifications for colonial genocide, or the murder of Indigenous Australians, give this one a miss. I won’t mind.

Part One: The Who

According to their about page, they are managed by one Roger Karge, and allegedly have “thirty independent researchers”. The next sentence, “Unfortunately, in the current climate in which we live, most of our researchers need to operate under pseudonyms to protect their careers” gives the general impression that these “researchers” are more-than-likely the kind of “academics” who think they are being “censored” by the Woke Mob for telling The Truth!

Roger Karge is himself somewhat of an enigma. He cannot be found by a single google search, however I did manage to procure the link to a LinkedIn page which turned out to be dead. My only frame of reference for this “Roger Karge” person is a twitter post by Kate Emerson calling him a “liar” and a “fraud” (a great first-impression of Karge, I’m sure) and a brief write-up on Richard O’Brien’s isocracy blog.

In it, O’Brien posits that Karge is part of the right-wing reactionary upheavel in response to Pascoe’s book, which includes their disgusting attempts at degrading Pascoe by “disproving” his aboriginality. I don’t think I need to go into the problematic implications of white people feeling the need to “disprove” someone’s indigenousness (as if they have the right to), however I will talk about this later in the piece.

Karge’s blog (Dark Emu Exposed) is the source of these claims, and Karge describes himself as, get this, AMATEUR HISTORIAN! The “amateur historian” and his merry band of kooks demand to be taken seriously, it seems. Karge is allegedly a businessman based in Melbourne, and an occasional writer for the Murdoch Press. This has given me enough of an impression of Karge: a right-wing faux-historian who gathered his other faux-historian mates to make baseless, vitriolic claims about Pascoe’s book.

Now, am I saying that Pascoe’s Dark Emu is some perfect record? Of course not, nothing ever is, but it is a far better historical analysis than anything Karge and his kook friends could come up with. The primary and most fatal failing of Karge is that he mistakenly believes that Dark Emu is an academic work, which it isn’t, because Pascoe is not a historian. Does this take away from the central thesis of the book? Not necessarily. But does this lend credence to Karge’s argument? Not in the slightest.

The crew behind Dark Emu Exposed appear to be nothing more than right-wing charlatans, and I’m using the most civil words possible to describe them. A businessman amateur historian has no right to declare himself more qualified to speak on a matter than Pascoe, especially when Pascoe himself does not make a similar declaration. Karge is throwing knives in the dark and hoping one sticks.

Part Two: The What

I will now talk about the site itself. Dark Emu Exposed is essentially a blog, which mostly focuses on Pascoe the Man and not Dark Emu, ironically enough. Karge and his kooks put great effort into trying to paint Pascoe as a liar, a narcissist, and worst of all – a Leftist! It even goes so far as to reference GEORGE ORWELL, a renowned socialist, in the classic conservative style.

One of the main arguments that Karge makes is that pre-colonial Aboriginal societies were, and I quote:

“classic stone age hunter-gatherers”

There are… many problems with this statement.

Firstly, does Karge mean for us to believe that hunter-gatherer societies were all identical? There is no other way to interpret this statement, which leads us to another critical flaw of Dark Emu Exposed: it is an idealist interpretation of history! It views “hunter gatherers” as all being poverty stricken savages who, somehow, can’t figure out language or religion. On the contrary, you don’t even need a PhD in prehistory (or whatever the relevant field is, I’m unsure) to figure out that there is no such thing as a “classic stone age hunter-gatherer society”. Do they mean cavemen? Such caricatures did not exist in reality. Karge and his ilk are idealists, pure and simple.

In reality, hunter gatherers had fairly complex economic and social structures. To put it into context: hunter gatherers did not work nearly as much as we do today, as much of their labor was expended in, well, hunting and gathering. This was not an all-consuming process, and often left entire weeks of free time available to them. I believe this comes from a fairly eurocentric view of “progress”: one that is represented accurately by the “tech tree” notion of technological progress, one that posits that technological and social advancement is a linear process, in which certain pre-requisites must be made before a new advancement can be “achieved”. How can you have religion if you don’t have a writing system? How can you develop societies without the wheel?

These misconceptions sour all discussion of any pre-colonial civilizations, be they from Australia, Africa, Asia, Turtle Island (the Americas, North and South), the Pacific, the Carribean, and so on. It fuels ahistorical “Western Chauvinist” narratives that The West Is Best, which is an idealist tendency.

Karge also tries to argue that Dark Emu is a “political” work, and that Pascoe is some kind of “Leftist”. Bruce Pascoe’s personal political beliefs are only tangentially related to Dark Emu; and it’s not like Karge challenges the political convictions of the settlers he believes uncritically either. That brings me to my next point.

Karge quotes the diaries of settlers and takes them at face value, whilst simultaneously waxing poetic about the need for “intellectual honesty”. He’s really showing that he’s less “historian” and more “amateur”. Anyone who is even superficially interested in history would (or at the very least, should) know that primary sources such as diaries must not be taken at first hand, they must be approached from a critical perspective. Consider these important questions:

These questions are by no means perfect, but they address the general who-what-when-where-why. Now, consider the following quote:

“They [the Australian Aborigines] are, of course, nomads — hunters and foragers who grow nothing, build nothing, and stay nowhere long. They make almost no physical mark on the environment…They move about, carrying their scant possessions, in small bands of anything from ten to sixty persons…Their tools and crafts, meagre — pitiably meagre — though they are, have nonetheless been good enough to let them win the battle for survival, and to win it comfortably at that. With no pottery, no knowledge of metals, no wheel, no domestication of animals, no agriculture, they have still been able to people the entire continent…”

- W.E.H. Stanner, The Dreaming & Other Essays, Black Inc Agenda, 2010, p 64,65 & 70 [Taken from the Dark Emu Exposed ‘about’ page]

When approaching this quote, we need to take a critical position. Who is the writer? W. E. H. Stanner was no random settler, he was an anthropologist who worked closely with Indigenous Australians and also helped establish the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. However, it must be acknowledged that Stanner himself was impressed by the cultural richness of Indigenous Australian culture, which he divulges about in The Dreaming and Other Essays, the alleged source of this quote. It must be said, though, that this quote, if it even is from Stanner, is incorrect.

It is possible to be profound whilst also factually incorrect. This is not fault of Stanner’s himself, in his time this was probably the accepted fact, however this notion of the unsophisticated hunter-gatherer was disproven by evidence found in Victoria. It should also be said that the above “Stanner” quote is similar to another quote from an unrelated 1984 text, Their Ghosts May Be Heard:

The Aborigines were nomads or wanderers. The wandered from place to place as they searched for food and water. But each tribe has its own special territory and members of the tribe did not move outside this area […] The Aborigines knew the places where they would be most likely to find water and things to eat and they visited each place in turn […] The Aborigines did not farm the land. They didn’t plant and harvest crops or herd animals.

- “Their Ghosts May Be Heard: Australia to 1900”, Sheena M. Coupe, 1984.

Am I saying that Karge invented a quote by a renowned anthropologist in order to prove his point? No, of course not, however the similarity between the quotes cannot be dismissed. Either way, archeological evidence found in the 1970s disproves this claim nonetheless. Which is startling for Sheena Coupe’s piece, as it was written after these claims had already been proven as factually incorrect.

On Gunditjmara country in Victoria, it was discovered (as early as the 1840s) that the Gunditjmara people had been constructing and using eel traps. Right off the bat, this disproves the notion that they were simple “hunter gatherers”, however if you aren’t immediately convinced by eel traps alone, they had also constructed roughly six hectares’ worth of channel systems that worked in tandem with the eel traps. Hunter gatherer nomads do not do this. This was initially discovered in 1841 by one George A. Robinson, who was Chief Protector of the Aborigines at the time.

On this, he wrote:

“an immense piece of ground trenched and banked, resembling the work of civilized man but which on inspection I found to be the work of the Aboriginal natives, purposefully constructed for catching eels.”

- George Augustus Robinson, on the Gunditjmara eel traps, 1841.

I have little reason to believe that Robinson invented these eel traps himself, especially when contemporary evidence was found further proving their existence. At the time (the 1840s), this clear and conclusive evidence of Indigenous agriculture was ignored. After all, they were engaging in a process of dispossession, and it was politically inconvenient for them to acknowledge that Indigenous Australians tilled the land.

The proper investigative work began in the 1970s with Dr. Peter Couts, from the Victoria Archeological Survey. The survey was carried out at Lake Condah, which was central to the Gunditjmara eel-trap channels, as originally discovered by George A. Robinson. Writing on this investigation, Ian J. McNiven commented:

Coutts and his team found what local Gunditjmara people had long known about – extensive Aboriginal fish-trapping systems comprising hundreds of metres of excavated channels and dozens of basalt block dam walls constructed over innumerable generations before European contact. Coutts estimated that the volume of basalt blocks moved measured in “the many hundreds of tonnes”.

(McNiven, 2017)

Coutts, then, had stumbled across the same set of extensive fishing systems, among them the aforementioned eel traps, thus proving conclusively that (in Victoria at least), pre-colonial Indigenous Australians had developed methods of agriculture unique to their material circumstances. This was a long tangent, but for good reason. There is no mention of this by Karge and his kooks, only further declarations of Pascoe’s “political bias” and of the “Dark Emu hoax”. Accepting that pre-colonial Indigenous Australians had complex societies would force European-descending Australians to challenge their preconcieved notions of their national identity, and require them to embrace a more plural, multicolored interpretation of their national history (McNiven and Bell, 2010, pg. 83).

Part Three: The Frontier Massacres and the Truth Telling Commission

I believe this requires a section of its own as I will go into the necessity of “Truth-Telling” Commissions as they pertain to anti-Indigenous massacres of the past, generally during the Frontier Wars. This is a single article posted by Karge on the Dark Emu Exposed blog, which I have many problems with. Firstly, the title. “Massacres & Makarrata – Truth-Telling or Moving-on? It's Our Choice”. I disagree with the framing.

Karge words this as if Indigenous Australians, suffering from two centuries of inter-generational trauma brought upon them by imperialist genocide, can simply “move on”. Imagine the shock and horror from rightists if I was to write a popular article entitled “War and the Anzacs – Truth-Telling or Moving-on? It’s Our Choice”. They would go mad and scream for blood. And they both suffer from the same fatal flaw: that they dismiss the importance of their respective massacres.

Another primary mistake Karge makes in his article is that he attributes telling the truth about Australia’s colonial history to “denigrating Australia”, immediately poisoning the well in terms of the conversation itself. How can we ever have a truthful, honest conversation about Australia’s history if the rightists can’t even accept that it’s possible to be critical of the wider narrative of Australia without “denigrating” it? This belies the entire purpose of the Dark Emu Exposed blog: they are not interested in “conversation”, they are trying to stop it. The “arguments” this blog makes are thought-terminating. They do not want you to think critically about Australia’s history, they want you to nod along and agree uncritically with their ahistorical narratives. Now, with that aside…

The Frontier Wars are an unrecognized series of guerilla conflicts in Australia between Indigenous Australians and the European settlers. Contrary to the popular narrative, Australia’s settlement was far from peaceful. In fact, roughly 20,000 Indigenous Australians and 3,000 Europeans died in this conflict, spanning from 1788 (from first contact with the Europeans) to at the latest, 1934. However, by that time, the fighting had mostly died down, as the Settlers consolidated power.

“Makarrata” is a Yolgnu Matha word referring to “peacemaking”. The purpose of “makaratta”, then, is to make peace between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, by telling the truth about our history. Australian colonization was a brutal, genocidal process. This is not the fault of individual white people. No one is blaming them for this. What we simply want is, well, the truth. Makaratta will heal the wounds of inter-generational trauma, and begins with acknowledging that this brutal history is shared by all Australians (Grieve-Williams, 2019).

In response to this, Karge instead declares that he will create a map plotting areas in which massacres against Indigenous Australians by other Indigenous Australians took place. What does he hope to accomplish with this? What does this have to do with the Frontier Wars? He has done the equivalent of throwing out “13/50” in a discussion about police violence against POC Americans. It is a lacklustre attempt at dodging the core thesis of Makaratta, and instead distract people by presenting a dodgy map of “native on native violence”. It is an inherently reprehensible act.

In their article, Karge does not even attempt to disprove the presented Frontier Massacres, but instead dodges this by talking in length about his reprehensible “Indigenous Massacre Maps”, that is, maps of massacres of Indigenous Australians by other Indigenous Australians. This only serves to prove further that Karge has an infantile thought process, and is incapable of accepting criticism of what to him is a universal fact. This is the main issue with “debating” conservatives: they don’t care about debate, they don’t care about facts, they only care about their own feelings and emotions. They are idealists, and will remain idealists.

Karge makes particular reference to a piece by Michael Grewcock entitled “Settler-Colonial Violence, Primitive Accumulation and Australia's Genocide*”*. In the usual Karge fashion, he insults Grewcock by declaring that he “hates his country”, and dismisses his piece as being “post modernist rubbish”. Again, Karge does not try to hide his political biases: he is a rightist through-and-through, and treats his contemporaries as traitors if they don’t support his ahistorical narrative.

On the topic of Grewcock’s piece, I found it to be unproblematic. Of course, I’m not a rightist such as Karge, and find no issue with someone questioning the predominant narrative of Australian history. I found his abstract to be the most interesting:

This article explores ways in which state crime theory, which is predominantly based on contemporary conceptions of human rights, might be applied to settler-colonial violence and the forced dispossession of the land from Indigenous peoples. The Australian state was established through the foundational violence inherent to settler colonialism and the processes of primitive accumulation that underpinned it. This created the conditions for ongoing structural violence, inflicted through a continuum of criminogenic, arguably genocidal state practices designed to disrupt – if not eliminate – the social worlds and collective identities of Indigenous peoples. These practices have been normalized through Australian nationalist ideology and its associated narratives of progress, democracy and the rule of law. Theories of state crime need to break from these normative narratives to make sense of the criminogenic nature of settler colonialism.

- Abstract, “Settler-Colonial Violence, Primitive Accumulation and Australia's Genocide”, Matthew Grewcock

If the abstract interested you as it did me, I implore you to read the full piece, found here. Anti-Colonial ideas are not “post modernist trash”, on the contrary, they are enlightening perspectives on historical issues relating to Settler-Colonialism. Karge’s blog is rightist trash. In response to this, Karge edited a few words to create a version that degrades Indigenous Australians, which again, proves his infantility. See below:

Aboriginal societies were maintained by laws which required institutionalized violence for their maintenance over the 50,000 years of occupation. This created the conditions for ongoing structural violence, resulting in regular, systematic and ritual conflict that varied from display-parrying right up to whole clan or tribe extirpation and genocide. These practices were so normalized by 1770-1788 that many Aboriginal Nations were unable to negotiate or treat with the British settlers at First Contact in a legal, non-violent way. This normative narrative of systematic and structural tribal violence allows us to make sense of the failure of Aboriginal societies to successfully make agreements with settler colonialism.

- Dark Emu Exposed

What is this, if not a childish attempt at dunking on someone you don’t like? Why should the Indigenous Australians have “negotiate” with the invading British settlers, anyway? What right to the British have to “non-violent” and “legal” contact? They are invaders in a foreign land. They deserved no civility in the same way Wehrmacht soldiers in France during World War Two did not deserve “non-violent legal contact”. This laughable attempt at dismissing Grewcock’s abstract is a reflex defense of the nationalist mythology of Australian colonization: that Australia was a wild and savage continent that had to be tamed by the civilized Europeans. As conservatives tie their identity to this mythology, it is no wonder that they respond in such a way to anyone who dares to challenge it.

Makaratta is an important process. I’m now going to completely ignore the original article from Dark Emu Exposed now, as I have substantially proven that it is nothing more than reprehensible shlock. Truth Telling is a fundamental process of reconciliation. How can we uplift Indigenous Australians and heal the shared scars of history if we are incapable of acknowledging the historical truth? Denying history is but a political convenience for the rightists. History to them is but a tool to bludgeon the marginalized with. Those who control the historical narrative, it is said, control the way we think. This is no more truer than with the conservative hit piece Dark Emu Exposed, which, like a baby having a tantrum, flails about in a juvenile attempt at silencing opposition.

Makarrata, and truth telling, is an important step on the road to reconciliation. Through the peace making process, deeper connections can be made with our Indigenous contemporaries. We (royal ‘we’) must not view them as tamed savages, but as equals, people who were brutally suppressed, and need to be given the chance to heal. This is not helped by rightists such as Karge who throw tantrums at the mere suggestion that British settlers weren’t perfect Super-Men who were superior in every way. Karge and his ilk make me angry beyond belief. I will, however, temper myself.

Part Four: The One Where It Gets Awkwardly Personal

The implications of Karge’s worldview, especially how it pertains to Indigenous Australia, is incredibly problematic. It views the Indigenous as inferior savages who needed to be tamed, inherently violent, cruel and brutish. This is far from the truth, of course. It was the settlers who were savage, who were violent, cruel, brutish, uncaring, genocidal. Where is the civility in mass murder? In dispossession? In massacring pregnant women and children? There is none, except that which exists in the deluded brains of rightists.

I refuse to accept this narrative. To make this personal, I am “biracial”. White mother and Pasifika father. My great-grandfather on my mother’s side was Indigenous. Making me Indigenous, insofar as I am related to him. There are various insults and narratives thrown out about biracial people, especially Indigenous Australian ones: that they are only pretending, that they are pulling a “grift” to try and “benefit” from being Indigenous. What, pray tell, could someone possibly gain from being Indigenous? Our inheritance is two centuries of inter-generational trauma, dehumanization, animalization, dispossession. I don’t know his name, or where he came from, but I know that my great-grandfather was Indigenous.

He lived through the 30s and 40s, and passed away in the 50s. During his lifetime, he could not vote. He, more likely than not, had to live under a paternalistic colonial goverment that treated him like a child who could not make his own decisions without the enlightened guidance of the White Man.

I mention this because it is because of this that I relate to Bruce Pascoe’s struggle. Having all sorts of people publicly deny your Aboriginality, to try and gaslight you into believing that you’re just another White Savior. It is degrading. What is the “benefit” in that? There is no material benefit in being Indigenous. As much as rightists want to make out that Indigenous Australians get “free money”, there is no dignity in welfare. The welfare state exists to keep people in a constant state of almost-poverty: never providing so little that you are constantly starved, but never so much that you can feel like a dignified human being ON YOUR OWN LAND.

I refuse to accept Karge’s narrative because I, an Indigenous Australian, disconnected from my heritage because of men like him, refuse to continue to believe that I am inferior, or that the massacre of my people was justified. I have made that choice, as has Pascoe and many others. White rightists such as Karge are threatened by our demand for humanity, why else would they put so much effort into silencing us and our struggle? Makaratta will come in spite of the conservative status quo.

I do not need a special piece of paper signed by the State to “prove” my heritage. No one does. Whites pretending to be Indigenous is nothing more than a myth invented by rightists to justify draconian restrictions on Indigenous heritage and identity. We deserve, at the very least, the slightest glimmer of dignity. But I am no idealist: I know we won’t get it from the righists, or the State itself.

You may reject this view as being an overly pessimistic “black armband” view of history. You are free to make your own choices, as I have made mine.

Conclusion

Karge’s vitriolic blog Dark Emu Exposed is nothing more than an intellectually dishonest, superficial attempt at “disproving” Bruce Pascoe’s book. Karge’s fatal flaw is that he treats Dark Emu as if it’s an academic record, which it was never intended to be. Pascoe is a storyteller, not a historian. Although historians do tell stories, Pascoe is not an academic, and received no formal education in the field of history or archaeology. He simply compiled the sources he had at hand to create a compelling argument to challenge the predominant narrative: that Indigenous Australians were nothing more than simple hunter gatherers prior to the European settlers invading in 1788.

I hope in this article that I managed to provide a somewhat convincing counter argument to Karge’s Dark Emu Exposed, and it has at least interested you enough to do some independent reading. Dark Emu is far from perfect, and Bruce Pascoe isn’t either, but it is nonetheless an interesting and thought-provoking work that should be read critically, of course, but not denied wholesale because of pre-existing political biases, such as is that case of the rightists who reject it as a “hoax”.

This was a big article, my biggest, in fact. I wrote bits and pieces of this in last two weeks, mostly my thoughts on Dark Emu Exposed, my thoughts on the historial idealism of rightists such as Karge, and so on. Refined it with research.

Now, I could critique every single blog post on Dark Emu Exposed, but neither you nor I actually care enough about the idealist arguments it poses.

I was originally going to post a chapter-by-chapter analysis and review of Trotsky’s Fascism: What it is and how to fight it (which is really just a collection of various essays and letter extracts he wrote on the topic) but this Dark Emu Exposed thing was really weighing me down and I had to get that out first to the twentyish people who seem to read these things, l-o-l.

Below will be all of my references/sources. Go nuts.

Bibliography/References/Sources

Pascoe, B. (2014). Dark Emu. Broome, WA: Magabala Books Aboriginal Corporation.

Dark Emu Exposed. About Us. Retrieved from https://www.dark-emu-exposed.org/about-us

Hirst, M. (2020, January 24). How ‘Dark Emu’ upset the right-wing media. Retrieved from https://independentaustralia.net/australia/australia-display/how-dark-emu-upset-the-right-wing-media,13523

Marks, R. (2020, February 5). Taking sides over ‘Dark Emu’. Retrieved from https://www.themonthly.com.au/blog/russell-marks/2020/05/2020/1580868886/taking-sides-over-dark-emu#mtr

Earp, J. (2020, January 11). Australians Are Standing With Author Bruce Pascoe After Peter Dutton Referred Him To The Police. Retrieved from https://junkee.com/bruce-pascoe-andrew-bolt/237558

O’Brien, R. (2020, January 11). Bruce Pascoe Exposed?. Retrieved from https://isocracy.org/content/bruce-pascoe-exposed

Moore, R. (2020, August 3). The enduring myth of the hunter-gatherer. Retrieved from https://www.utas.edu.au/news/2020/8/3/1043-the-enduring-myth-of-the-hunter-gatherer/

McNiven, I. (2017, February 8). The detective work behind the Budj Bim eel traps World Heritage bid. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/the-detective-work-behind-the-budj-bim-eel-traps-world-heritage-bid-71800

McNiven, I. & Bell, D. (2010). Fishers and Farmers: historicising the Gunditjmara freshwater fishery, western Victoria. La Trobe Journal, No. 85 May, 83-103.

Dark Emu Exposed. (2021, March 24). Massacres & Makarrata – Truth-Telling or Moving-on? It's Our Choice. Retrieved from https://www.dark-emu-exposed.org/home/2016/2/6/chairs-for-the-foyer-yrkzx

Grieve-Williams, V. (2019 July 4). Makarrata: The Aboriginal healing process we should all know about. Retrieved from https://www.sbs.com.au/topics/voices/culture/article/2019/07/04/makarrata-aboriginal-healing-process-we-should-all-know-about

Grewcock, M. (2018). Settler-Colonial Violence, Primitive Accumulation and Australia's Genocide. State Crime Journal, 7(2), 222-250. doi:10.13169/statecrime.7.2.0222

Russel, L. (2021, April 23). The ‘frontier wars’: Undoing the myth of the peaceful settlement of Australia. Retrieved from https://lens.monash.edu/@politics-society/2021/04/23/1382962/the-frontier-wars-undoing-the-myth-of-the-peaceful-settlement-of-australia

Allam, L. (2019 March 7). Australia risks 'dysfunction' without truth telling about massacres, advocates say. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/mar/07/australia-risks-dysfunction-without-truth-telling-on-massacres-advocates-say

Reconciliation Australia. (2020, August 19). Truth-telling and reconciliation. Retrieved from https://www.reconciliation.org.au/truth-telling-and-reconciliation/