On the rocky road into Bruce Pascoe’s remote property near Mallacoota in Victoria’s far-eastern corner, near the NSW border, the lyrebirds are feeling frisky.

Sweeping, dodging and weaving in front of our car, they flit towards the acclaimed author’s farm – where he’s already bracing for another culture war.

Pascoe’s Dark Emu, published in 2014, urged modern Australia to rethink what it knows about First Nations history. He argued traditional Aboriginal culture was largely defined by structured agricultural and aquacultural practices, and not only by hunting and gathering.

Further, Pascoe argued, the depiction of Aboriginal people as nomadic hunters and gatherers was a “convenient lie” used to justify dispossessing them from their lands.

Dark Emu was a bestseller, but it also sparked a blistering backlash – including from critics who questioned not only his arguments, but also Pascoe’s Aboriginality itself.

Pascoe grew up unaware of any Indigenous heritage and did not identify as Aboriginal until he was 32, researching his heritage after a conversation with his uncle.

The widely accepted definition of Indigenous heritage in Australia comprises three parts: self-identification, evidence of descent and community recognition.

In Black Duck, Pascoe outlines his role in the Yuin Gurandgi cultural lore group established by elder Uncle Max Harrison, tracing his connections with, and learnings from, a range of elders.

After Dark Emu was published, Indigenous businesswoman Josephine Cashman, Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania chairman Michael Mansell and others questioned Pascoe’s connections to the Yuin and Boonwurrung peoples.

While leading Indigenous academic Marcia Langton described Dark Emu as “the most important book in Australia”, the central theses of the book were also contested.

Two of Australia’s most prominent academics, anthropologist Peter Sutton and archaeologist Kerry Walshe, published a rejoinder, Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate, in which they argued Pascoe had massaged his evidence and misled readers.

The stress of it all was so great Pascoe and his long-term partner, Lyn Harwood, separated for three years. Even now, the scars are clearly visible. Harwood is reluctant to speak of it.

“It’s inevitable,” Pascoe says of a backlash to Black Duck he knows will come from certain quarters. “I am prepared for it. I tend to ignore it – I went off all social media [after Dark Emu was published] – it’s really hurtful and painful, but I’m so busy … the community work alone keeps us busy, and I get the support of the community.”

Black Duck, co-written with Harwood and released this week, is a very different bird to its predecessor. Conceived as a year in the life at Yumburra, the couple’s 140-hectare Indigenous food-producing farm, Black Duck is also a meandering musing on the large and small questions of life itself.

The book is structured along the six Indigenous seasons – loosely, late summer, autumn, winter, early spring, spring and early summer – but as each season unfolds, the storyline jumps forward and backwards in time to reveal the inner workings of Pascoe, his people and his land.

Reading Black Duck – named for the totem animal of the Yuin nation of the NSW South Coast – is like listening to an uncle telling fireside stories of times gone by, and how they relate to life today.

“It started out as a diary,” Pascoe says, clad in a Black Duck Foods work shirt on the farm.

“And I did want it to be in, you know, the Aboriginal seasons ...” he trails off, as a plover starts shrieking in alarm in the field below. The plover’s screech warns of a wedge-tailed eagle, Bunjil, circling overhead.

“That’s Birran Durran Durran, the plover,” Pascoe says. “And when that calls, we look at what’s going on, on the farm.”

For a year, Pascoe and Harwood documented their lives on the farm; the fall-out from the 2019-20 Black Summer fires that ripped through the east coast of Australia (Mallacoota and its surrounds were particularly hard hit), their efforts to establish a viable Indigenous food business, their ever-growing Aboriginal community, and the rhythms of rural life.

“In fact, we miss it,” Harwood says of the writing process. “We did it every day, and you have to look for something special every day ... it is a really good way of imprinting it in your mind and helping you, when you look back, to see the patterns. It’s a lovely process.”

These days, the couple is passionately preoccupied with the opportunities Indigenous people can find in an emerging Australia. Pascoe says he’s clear-eyed about the cost that colonisation has wrought on Country, but wants Australians to embrace the potential offered by our unique local food products.

Inside a watertight and rodent-proof shed at Yumburra is a collection of threshing and grain-harvesting machines. Here, kangaroo grass, black wattle, spear grass and microlaena (weeping grass) – among others – are processed.

The grains and seeds are milled, with some turned into a fine flour that’s popular with local bakers. Yumburra also sends Indigenous grains to Sailors Grave, a microbrewery in Orbost, which uses them to make a distinctively aromatic dark ale called Dark Emu.

“We just have to rethink our agriculture because Aboriginal people were harvesting and processing those grains for 100,000 years,” Pascoe says.

“And they’re perennial. They sequester carbon; they don’t need any fertilising – superphosphate kills these grasses – no poison, no extra water.

“Environmentally, they’re just a boon ... not every farmer is gonna [farm them] ... but if 10 per cent or 5 per cent did, we’d meet our Tokyo [climate] commitments easily.”

Having lived through the Black Summer fires of 2019-2020, which are visible in the blackened trees throughout the region, Pascoe and Harwood are alarmed at the prospect of future fires of increased frequency and ferocity.

On Yumburra, the pair has spent the years since the fires thinning the forested areas of the farm, and conducting cool burns to reduce undergrowth.

“Since the fires of 2019, the bush is dominated by black wattle and hop goodenia so thick that if you surprise a lyrebird or wallaby on the track, they have to run in a mad scamper ahead of you because it is simply impossible to penetrate this regrowth,” they write.

“The flammability of this stage of regrowth is of great concern to us. It will generate a fire far hotter and more dangerous than the 2019 fire.”

Pascoe’s dream, outlined in Black Duck, is for Aboriginal people to enjoy greater proportions of the profits generated by Indigenous foods, and for non-Aboriginal Australians to reappraise their relationships with land and agriculture – led by Aboriginal people.

“So here’s the dream … We tell [governments] that we will take over all their Aboriginal employment programs and train our people to reform Australian forests and national parks by thinning and cool burning,” Pascoe writes.

“We employ thousands and thousands in the forests and, in the agriculture and food industry, we employ thousands more ... you learn it by watching your parents do it, not from a dopey training program designed only to calm the hearts of decent Australians.”

At 77, Pascoe admits he’s tiring more easily these days. The past few years have, in his words, worn him down.

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“I don’t experience happiness in the same way as I did before,” he writes. “I am much more guarded and I don’t like that caution, it never used to be part of me.

“But I think there is a big change coming. I meet so many people who want to embrace the full history of the country. Aboriginal history is Australian history, the future of Aboriginal people is the future of all Australians.”

Bruce Pascoe and Lyn Harwood will speak at the Melbourne Writers Festival on May 11, and the Sydney Writers’ Festival on May 25.

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