Aaron

The most irritating book I've ever read. Irritating in that uniquely American way, with all the usual faux pas related to identity. It's schmaltzy, overwrought, and littered with sentences that pained me to read.

“It's what his muscles know, especially that largest muscle in his inventory - his soul.” 

🤮🤮

The best word to describe this book would be “earnest”. The author's love of Australian monotremes and marsupials carries through and is a pleasure to read at times. Ashby is clearly deeply knowledgeable in this area and passionate about his subject matter. He does stray into socio-political territory frequently throughout, in fairness making some important and valid points about colonisation and how we frame Australian species as ‘primitive' or inferior in relation to northern or European mammals, a pervasive attitude that may well be contributing to their ongoing destruction. 

Ashby repeatedly and naively analyses historical wrongs (and they were wrongs) through the lens of today's standards, which can grow tiresome. It's obvious how harmful these actions were, his overt moral outrage and condemnation is not required and comes across as immature frankly.

Sadly in the final chapter things really went off the deep end. Ashby takes a wild reach way outside his area of research and actively peddles a trope and book which has done a great deal of damage here, one described by Senior Indigenous Fellow and sitting UNPFII member, Hannah McGlade, as “not very truthful or accurate, ideological and subjective, misleading and offensive to Aboriginal people and culture”. 

There IS of course a point to be made about how terra nullius and colonial brutality toward, and misrepresentation of, Aboriginal peoples have also contributed to destruction of native species. But uncritically championing the cherrypicked arguments of a single controversial author (or two if we count Gammage, lifted straight from Pascoe's own references) is not it. Ashby presents an enthusiastic summary of dark emu in the tone of a paid promotion. It speaks to academic laziness, without the rigour and balance one would expect from an academic and museum director like Ashby. 
The undercurrent too in this final chapter is a persisting eurocentric attitude that sophisticated nomadic hunter-gathering is simply backward and primitive (ironic given Ashby's defence of ‘primitive' monotremes) and that Aboriginal peoples are somehow more worthy of respect if they practiced large scale agriculture in the European style..

I appreciate the earnestness with which Ashby writes, his deep love for Australian wildlife that I share, and his good intentions in learning from the harms of colonisation. Some reflection is needed on the final chapter, however, and why he didn't take the time to delve more deeply into a complex and nuanced matter before publishing.

Coming from a similar background and holding similar disdain for cosplaying middle class ‘anarchists' maybe I wasn't the intended audience for this one..

There was some wisdom here. Some critical thought. But also dogma. I lost count of the number of times the term ‘white-supremacist patriarchal capitalist society' was deployed.
Hunter's early life experiences read like trauma/poverty porn to me, possibly written that way to shock a middle class reader? But to those familiar with these kinds of encounters it wasn't particularly novel or worthwhile. More just fucking horrible.
It was reassuring at times to hear class being centred with the rage and passion it warrants, but where that fell flat was in tying social position to character- ie that all the author's ‘good'/empathetic/collectivist characteristics came from being poor and all his ‘bad'/domineering/evil characteristics came from being white or being male. This incessant categorisation of struggle is a dead-end for the left, it's cult-like and leads us into a state of constant self-flagellation, unable to build anything. Was hoping for something more with this book