Black Duck is Bruce Pascoe and Lyn Harwood's account of building Black Duck Foods — a working blueprint for traditional food growing and land management that emerged from the storm surrounding Dark Emu and pointed toward a genuinely different Australian future.
About This Book
When the national conversation around Dark Emu threatened to eclipse its own argument, Pascoe turned back to Country. Black Duck documents a year at Yumburra — recovering from devastating bushfires, grieving an elder, rebuilding a marriage — while laying out the practical and philosophical foundations of Black Duck Foods. The book makes the case that Indigenous land management and traditional food systems are not romantic relics but working solutions to carbon emissions, water scarcity, and soil degradation. Pascoe and Harwood show that caring for Country is an act of sustained attention, not spectacle: you look, you listen, you tend. The result is equal parts memoir and manifesto for a distinctly Australian agriculture.
Key Features
- 304 pages of interwoven personal memoir and practical advocacy for Indigenous food systems and land management
- Co-authored by Bruce Pascoe and Lyn Harwood
- Published by Thames & Hudson Australia, ISBN 9781760763114
What You'll Discover
- How Black Duck Foods translates ancient land management practices into a contemporary model for sustainable Australian agriculture
- The environmental argument for traditional food growing — reduced carbon emissions, preserved water resources, and soil regeneration — grounded in specific experience at Yumburra
- The personal cost of starting a movement: bushfire recovery, loss, and the labour of rebuilding alongside Country
- What it means to develop a uniquely Australian cuisine rooted in reciprocal relationships with the land rather than extraction from it
About the Author
Bruce Pascoe is the author of Dark Emu, which sparked widespread national debate about the sophistication of pre-colonial Aboriginal agriculture and land management. He co-authored Black Duck with Lyn Harwood, with whom he established Black Duck Foods as a practical expression of the principles that work underpins.
Specifications
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 304
- Dimensions: 24 x 15.5 x 2.5 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781760763114
- Publisher: Thames & Hudson Australia
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Readers engaged with Indigenous land stewardship, sustainable agriculture, environmental design, and the intersection of cultural practice and ecological thinking.