In the decade since Bruce Pascoe’s book Dark Emu was published, it has become a bestseller, a seminal historical text and a launchpad for controversy. The book reframed the colonial lens through which Australia understood its Indigenous history, which had reduced Aboriginal people to simple hunter-gatherers prior to European settlement.

In Dark Emu, Pascoe set out to prove ancient Aboriginal practices of agriculture and construction, which showed a sophisticated use of land that had predated colonisers.

Dark Emu has sold more than 360,000 copies – making it one of the highest-selling books of its kind. But it has not come without a culture war. The literary awards and critical acclaim were followed by backlash: a challenge to Pascoe’s Aboriginality, and another to the validity of his research.

In a new documentary, the Dark Emu Story, set to screen on the ABC on Tuesday, Pascoe stares down the barrel of the camera. “We are going through great change at the moment … I just got caught up in the fight,” he says. “I’m now captive to The Dark Emu.”

Pascoe’s Dark Emu journey began in a dim, secondhand bookstore, where he discovered first-hand accounts from European explorers of ancient Aboriginal practices. These journal entries detailed Aboriginal women picking yams from vast fields, their longstanding hut structures and stores of grain they would raid. His book presented this as evidence that flipped the narrative that Aboriginal people lived nomadic lives with no permanent settlements, agriculture, tools or technology. Framing Aboriginal people as hunter-gatherers implied they only had a loose connection to land – a convenient position for those who wished to colonise it.

The Dark Emu Story, directed by Allan Clarke for Blackfella Films, revisits Pascoe’s research. It steps through archeological findings on Mithaka country in south-west Queensland, where grinding stones – used for turning grain into flour – and levers have been held up as evidence of mining operations, tool creation and trade between communities.

It also reckons with the legacy of Pascoe’s research: as Stan Grant puts it, Dark Emu was an “entry point” for white Australians, which “looks into the dark heart and soul of the nation that we know as blackfellas all too well … that Australians turn away from.” Anthropologist Marcia Langton credits the book for having shifted the perception that Indigenous people were “savage” before colonisation to “fully fledged human beings.”

Anchored by case studies, the film shows us past and present practices of Indigenous farming, animal trapping and baking. We learn how fish were caught using rock formations in lakes, and how crops were winnowed into seeds, then flour, then paste and cooked over fire to make bread. Acknowledgement of these practices “makes me proud of who I am and where I am from”, says Gomeroi bush tucker expert Kerrie Saunders.

The film doesn’t shy away from the controversy and culture wars that followed Dark Emu’s publication and success. As Pascoe’s book scored him government grants and literary prizes, including categories reserved for Indigenous writers, his heritage was called into question.

In 2020, Aboriginal lawyer Josephine Cashman made a complaint to the then-home affairs minister Peter Dutton, who requested the Australian federal police investigate Pascoe’s Indigenous ancestry on the grounds that he was potentially benefiting financially from falsely claiming the identity. The request was rejected by the AFP. But the move called Pascoe, and in turn his research, into question. Criticism and suspicion replaced the celebration of a groundbreaking book. It also greatly impacted Pascoe’s personal life: in 2017 he and his wife, the author Lyn Harwood, separated.

“I just feel very tired in my spirit,” he says in the documentary. “It’d be nice if someone else had written it. But I did write it, and I did become the seeker of a debate, and it did cost my family … I’m not as happy as I was.”

In 2021, an academic rebuttal to Dark Emu was published: Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate by anthropologist Peter Sutton and archeologist Keryn Walshe. Both authors appear in the documentary, arguing Pascoe ignored evidence that did not fit his case while over-emphasising evidence that did. Pascoe and Sutton come head-to-head in the film, debating definitions such as of the word “sophistication”.

“What’s wrong with being unsophisticated?” Sutton asks. “Why do you hold up a battle of sophistication as a kind of a solution to people, filling their racism?”

Pascoe challenges this relentlessly. “What Aboriginal people were doing was very unusual in the world,” he says. “I want Aboriginal kids to know these things, so they have more pride in their ancestors. The more we learn about our country, the better they will look after it.”

In a Q&A following the documentary’s launch at the Sydney film festival in June, Pascoe admitted these were moments he hadn’t been keen to revisit. “All of that is peripheral. It’s unnecessary,” he said. “From my point of view, I want to talk about Mithaka … and the positives in our culture, but also the positives as a nation of people, a diverse community.”

Though Dark Emu took its toll on its author, the documentary positions Pascoe’s work as a successful challenge to the way Australia once understood Indigenous people and cultures.

“We are still standing here. That’s the important thing,” Grant says in the documentary. “I think what Bruce did is he spoke into that void. Closed his eyes, stood in the silence, in the land, and said, ‘Close your eyes, imagine this country again and then open.’ Magic.”

• The Dark Emu Story screens on the ABC at 8.30pm 18 July, and will stream on iView