Platypus Matters

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.