[8] He also describes Sturt's 1845 encounter with hundreds of Aboriginal people who were living in a village near Cooper Creek and offered him water, roast duck, cake and a hut to sleep in.

[12][13] He cites the work of archaeologist Heather Builth and palynologist Peter Kershaw and concludes that sites at Lake Condah in western Victoria are elaborately engineered eel and fish traps associated with permanent stone buildings built by the Gunditjmara people around 8,000 years ago.

"[15][7] Pascoe acknowledges his debt to the work of Rupert Gerritsen, who in 2008 published Australia and the Origins of Agriculture, which argued that some Aboriginal people were farmers as much as hunter-gatherers.

[28] Historian Bill Gammage, whose 2012 work The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia influenced Dark Emu, praised Pascoe's gift for weaving a narrative that challenges many readers' preconceptions.

[30] Tony Hughes-D'Aeth, a researcher in cultural history at the University of Western Australia, said that Dark Emu "provides the most concerted attempt [yet] to answer the question about the quality of the country ... in the pre-colonial epoch", and that the book's strengths lie in "its ability to bridge archaeology, anthropology, archival history, Indigenous oral tradition and other more esoteric but highly revealing disciplines such as ethnobotany and paleoecology".

While there is no single narrative that tells the whole story, Dark Emu might be the first step for many readers who have not previously engaged with the history of dispossession of the Indigenous peoples of Australia.

[31] Several academics have criticised Pascoe's claim that since 1880 scholars have suppressed accounts of sophisticated housing and food and environmental management practices in traditional Aboriginal societies.

[18] Some academics have specifically addressed the debate surrounding Dark Emu's thesis that Indigenous Australian society was largely built on sedentary agriculture rather than hunting and gathering.

He concluded that "Aboriginal people were indeed hunters, gatherers and fishers at the time of the British colonisation of Australia", although acknowledging "the boundary between foraging and farming is a fuzzy one".

[32] Historians Lynette Russell and Billy Griffiths wrote that Pascoe had drawn together an enormous amount of ethnographic evidence showing that Aboriginal peoples "were not hapless wanderers across the soil, mere hunter-gatherers"; however, they challenge the implicit Eurocentric idea that agriculture is the result of "progress" on a continuum from hunter-gathering, or that such an evolutionary hierarchy exists.

[37][38] In James Boyce's opinion, their most salient criticisms include that Pascoe uses white explorers' journals, ignoring the knowledge of Aboriginal sources, and also that he generalises from local examples and claims incorrectly that such technologies were used across the continent.

[35][39] Warrimay historian Victoria Grieve-Williams,[40] also in The Australian, calls Dark Emu a scandal and a hoax, and expresses deep concerns in the Aboriginal community about the story Pascoe is telling, saying that her family were not farmers, but proud of being hunter–gatherers.

[41] After Pauline Hanson's One Nation MP Mark Latham proposed in the New South Wales Parliament in June 2021 that the book should be banned from use by teachers in NSW schools (where it is not part of the curriculum, but available as an historical source for critical discussion), his motion had little support.

I don’t really care what it is called as long as Australians are allowed to know that Aboriginal people sometimes lived in houses and villages, often employed technology to harvest food and sometimes wore cloaks and sewn apparel.

[45] The Mithaka Aboriginal Corporation, representing the native title owners, has published a framework to support culturally sensitive and ethical research in the area.