3 ideas
Explorers' and settlers' diaries record details they did not interpret, such as stooked grass, cleared paths, storehouses and hut clusters, because those details did not fit their assumptions about 'savages'. Re-reading these incidental observations as evidence, rather than accepting the writers' own conclusions, recovers a picture of land use the authors themselves missed.
Classifying Aboriginal people as nomadic hunter-gatherers with no agriculture or fixed settlement made the land appear unowned and unimproved, which fed the legal and moral logic of terra nullius. Pascoe argues that the category of 'primitive' was therefore political, not just descriptive, and that restoring evidence of farming and building undermines the justification for taking the land.
At Brewarrina, stone fish traps on the Barwon River formed a large engineered weir-and-pond network managed under shared rules among several groups. At Budj Bim in Victoria, channels and ponds were cut through lava flows to trap and hold eels, with stone house foundations nearby. Pascoe uses both sites to argue for permanent, engineered food production and settled occupation.