Bruce Pascoe

Bruce Pascoe is a Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian man who has published widely in both adult and young adult literature. Pascoe’s best known work Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? interrogates the assumption that Indigenous Australians were hunter-gatherers and cites evidence of pre-colonial agriculture, engineering and building construction by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Dark Emu has won numerous awards including the Children’s Book Council of Australia Eve Pownall Award and the New South Wales Premier’s Book of the Year Award in 2016. In 2018 Bruce was awarded the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.

Bruce lives on his farm in East Gippsland, Victoria which is home to his latest project, Black Duck Foods. An Indigenous social enterprise, Black Duck Foods is committed to traditional food growing processes that care for Country and return economic benefits directly to Indigenous people. Bruce’s research has also inspired a number of projects at the University of Sydney, including the Indigenous Grasslands for Grain project which works with Aboriginal people to bring the native grain production system to modern agroecosystems and foods. This act of food sovereignty aims to provide environmental, cultural and economic benefits. Bruce’s work explores why we must learn from and engage with diverse knowledge systems in order to develop just and effective adaptation strategies in a changing climate.