Dark Emu

Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? is a 2014 non-fiction book by Bruce Pascoe. It re-examines colonial accounts of Aboriginal people in Australia, and cites evidence of pre-colonial agriculture, engineering and building construction by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. A second edition, published under the title Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture was published in mid-2018, and a version of the book for younger readers, entitled Young Dark Emu: A Truer History, was published in 2019.

Both the first and the children's editions were shortlisted for major awards, and the former won two awards in the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards. The book has also proved very popular with the Australian public, selling 250,000 copies by mid-2021. Its strengths have been said to lie in the storytelling style, making it more accessible to the general reader than the more scholarly examinations of Aboriginal history in the past.

According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the publication of Dark Emu "ignited a culture war". The book has been praised for stimulating debate about the diversity of Indigenous economic and land management practices. However, academics have challenged some of its claims, especially Pascoe's thesis that Indigenous Australian society was based to such a large extent on sedentary agriculture rather than hunting and gathering.