Dark Emu ~ Dark Lager
When we first read Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu we suddenly felt that we were seeing the true Australian landscape first time. Over the last 200 years we have been cloaking the environment with layers in our own image, to make us feel safer and more comfortable in what can sometimes be an unfamiliar land. We have since been on a sometimes deeply personal journey ‘looking over our shoulder at the past’ and as Bruce says so eloquently “you can’t eat our food until you can swallow our history”.
Over the last 6 months we have been working with Uncle Bruce and the team at Black Duck Foods to bring Dark Emu ~ Dark Lager to life, Using the addition of roasted mamadyang ngalluk and burru ngalluk grass seed from the Far East harvested by Yuin people on the banks of the Wallagaraugh River.
Dark Emu ~ Dark Lager will be brewed whenever enough grain can be gathered to make the beer, but the beer itself will be an evolving story reflecting the seasons and the the availability of the grain. In the future grain will potentially be sourced from other regions and communities, which is just the way we like it at Sailors Grave, we’re not making a commodity we’re telling a story about place, people and time.
The beautiful art on the can depicts the giant creator emu, baiame, after it left earth and rose into the sky, becoming the huge dark space in the Milky Way. It was created by Yuin man Terry Hayes who also harvested the grain used in Dark Emu.
We thank Uncle Bruce Pascoe & family for entrusting us with this project and we pay our respects to ancestors and Elders past and present of the lands in which we dream, learn and live.
We’re privileged to share and walk this special country together, the worlds oldest continuous culture and we’re committed to honouring this history and knowledge through our work at Sailors Grave.
A percentage of the proceeds from the sales of Dark Emu will go to support the studies of local Aboriginal students at Orbost, Mallacoota and Eden.
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