Bruce Pascoe, Dumped Upon from a Great Height

In a very well researched paper titled ‘Foragers or Farmers: Dark Emu and the Controversy over Aboriginal Agriculture’ published in  Anthropological Forum, ANU academic Dr Ian Keen, has brought some academic rigour to the debate over Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu.

When I wrote Bitter Harvest, I did not do so as a purported historian or anthropologist.  I did it as an auditor.  My primary purpose was not to demolish the theory that Aborigines were sedentary agriculturalists but to show that Pascoe, recently appointed Enterprise Professor in Indigenous Agriculture at Melbourne University, had failed dismally to establish that theory in any meaningful way.  Not only that, but that he had advanced his case by means of egregious, comprehensive and deliberate deception. Keen says:

Many critiques of Dark Emu have come from the political right. They include the writings and broadcasts of Andrew Bolt; articles in, and a book published by Quadrant magazine, whose editor Keith Windschuttle…