The Expanding Fictional World of Bruce Pascoe

Before Bruce Pascoe was Aboriginal he was Jewish, but it didn’t take. In 1999, the year he was fifty-two, he came out as Leopold Glass. It was a pseudonym chosen for his self-published novel Ribcage—a book of crime, money and race. A mock bio of Leopold Glass described a man who had mislaid his family: “He is currently researching the life of his paternal grandmother who grew up in a New South Wales orphanage with no clear records.” Unlike Glass, the real author had two grandmothers with very clear records.

Ribcage is short, 144 pages, and the hero, David Bourke, is a mundane psychopath. He kills and maims to achieve a comfortable life, for himself: “all you need is $800,000 … quickly”. With that amount—and the directions are detailed—you buy rental properties and shares. It was a simple life plan in the late 1990s for an intelligent criminal who doesn’t want to get caught. The bodies along the way were of no importance.

The advice Bourke gives to other crims and frauds is sensible: “my fundamental safety rule. No partners. No loose lips. No slip ups.” But then he meets dark Gail Smith. She wins his stained white heart: “Well I’m an Abo, my mother’s a Koori,” she says. “Bullshit,” he says. Monochrome love at first sight. They take off for a Queensland tropic resort. He admires her swimming: “And I watched her arse rolling deliciously with each wet stroke.” Did I mention this was published the year Bruce Pascoe was fifty-two and still an unsuccessful author?

There are no emus in Ribcage but there are other far north birds and Aboriginal characters whohave wandered over from the film set for Gone with the Wind to announce that Gail is pregnant.

“Missus reckon baby spirit bird cryin’ out for that Gail,” says a black neighbour. The “baby spirit bird” is a bush curlew whose blood-freezing night call is more reminiscent of Herod and the massacre of the innocents than newborn gurgles. It is only second-rate fiction but an abuse of Aboriginal culture.

Bill Harney, in Life among the Aborigines, also spoke of curlews. Telling, and preserving, a mythic story of the Tiwi people, he recounted how the legendary Purakapali discovered “his mother Bima was ever in the arms of his younger brother Japara. The legend records how Bima was transformed into ‘Whya’ the curlew, as the old man beat her with a stick in his wrath, and as she fled she called then, as the curlew calls each night in the bush, ‘Bilingea tingatea’ (I am bad).”

On the television news there is a story from distant Victoria. A young man has been arrested for Bourke’s crimes. Gail notices the obvious, “That boy was black.” Instantly the criminal predator turns into a guardian angel intent in saving the young man from prison—only because of race. He leaps into action. More bullets down south and a policeman shot in the groin, the usual sort of thing. The novel ends with Bourke needing to buy new shoulders after being shot by the confused and drugged black boy in a pub toilet. Don’t ask.

Now it’s 2024 and Bruce Pascoe marks his seventy-seventh year with a book, Black Duck: A Year at Yumburra. Yumburrra is the name of his hobby farm in East Gippsland; it means black duck. The bird is a totem of the local Yuin Aborigines. Elder Max Dulumunmun Harrison in My People’s Dreaming spelt the word as umbarra—possibly the Aboriginal pronunciation is not quite what Pascoe suggests. The unoffending bird has also been used by Pascoe for the agricultural company he set up, Black Duck Foods. Early in the book Pascoe throws out a comment about “self-serving white entrepreneurs”— I see what he means.

Black Duck, attractively produced by Thames & Hudson, is credited to Bruce Pascoe “with Lyn Harwood”, his wife and business partner. Some of the attractive illustrations are her work. The year being described is 2022. It is the year he bought a new Subaru.

After Ribcage, Bruce Pascoe attempted new forms of fiction. In Ocean (2002) his storytelling technique mashed up fiction, real history and fake history: “I’ve gently skewed the placement of islands, meddled with the elasticity of time a little, changed names, gender, generally played merry hell as novelists do. Not for their own entertainment, but for the sake of the story and the grieving.”

He also used the careless writing technique in his historical studies Convincing Ground (2007) and Dark Emu (2014). With the new writing came a new persona to sell the books. He didn’t use another pseudonym, he adopted a pseudo-race. After his mother’s death in 2004 he took on an ever-changing Aboriginal identity. With Old Testament wild hair and beard he hit the publicity trail. It was very successful. In the year he is writing about, supposedly passed on country on his farm, much of the time was actually spent travelling about Australia offering paid publicity “gigs”. Whoever is responsible for doing his bookings is doing a very good job. In 1999 the protagonist of Ribcage set out to obtain $800,000 by violent means. From 2014 Dark Emu began laying golden eggs for its proprietor.

The Black Duck saga opens with the author encountering an owlet-nightjar on a country road near the property he was about to buy in East Gippsland at the beginning of the century. Its faux Aboriginality echoes the curlew wisdom in Ribcage: “Our people [sic] say they are the woman spirit.” Aborigines associate the bird and its night calls with death and evil spirits. Curlews, dark emus, owlet-nightjars and black ducks: in Bruce Pascoe’s literary output these are the moneybirds. Ahead of the Black Duck reader are another 285 pages and here on the first page is an allegation that completely destroys any credibility. Bruce Pascoe has made many claims to be of Aboriginal descent but has never produced any evidence. The “our people” he writes of are not his people. Race appropriation is offensive. Page after page the book continues onwards and downwards.

The misappropriated Aboriginality is used clumsily. When his Yuin language skills are questioned he tersely rounds on his critics to complain “that some [real] local Aboriginal people want to argue the toss on the language”.

The Aboriginal folklore he uses suffers from modern invention. He tells what he says is a Yuin story about a hill which is “the giant damper [sic] that two greedy brothers tried to hide in the trees so that they could have it all to themselves”. The moral he attaches to this story is pure Dark Emu preaching and fantasy: “Many of our legends are about the sin of greed, but they also remind us that the story of breadmaking is attached to our soil, that we are following a tradition so ancient that it has its own story etched in the land.” If the greedy brothers bought their damper flour from Black Duck Foods it would have cost them $180 a kilo, plus postage. If they mixed it with water and baked it in a campfire the result would have been tasteless and hard and would have looked nothing like a modern damper or a hill. Their unleavened bread would have resembled an unpalatable pancake or a flat bread—similar to the one Pascoe produced when he disastrously demonstrated his baking skills on live television. Modern damper recipes resemble loaves (and hills) because they are made from plain flour and baking powder or self-raising flour plus oil or butter and salt.

In that busy year Pascoe picks up not only a new car but also the Australian Humanist of the Year Award and the Australian Society of Authors Medal. He is invited to give the Annual Address for the History Council of New South Wales, and carelessly refers to his benefactors as the New South Wales History Society. The podcast and transcript of the History Council event suggest Pascoe’s reception among the believers was akin to a fired-up religious revival meeting. From Mallacoota the Prophet comes. The following year their honoured speaker was Thomas Mayo. We live in a sad and credulous Australia.

Pascoe was also invited to the Byron Bay Writers Festival and the Adelaide Festival, where “on one panel I had a gent who was damning with faint praise”. Perhaps a reference to historian Tom Griffiths?

The writing style in Black Duck is cloyingly good-natured and friendly. It reads like a prospectus for a Ponzi investment—and isn’t that what Dark Emu really is? A monumental fraud that has been built up and up on the self-interested reactions of historians and activists who contributed in the beginning by accepting the writer and his work and promoting it to others. They have invested their names and careers in an entirely phoney edifice that they are now too afraid to criticise, for fear of being cancelled, even as the flaws are more and more obvious. A Ponzi scheme needs more and more investors and each Pascoe gig brings in new credulous victims: true believers in an historical hoax.

Pascoe presents himself as fair and open-minded: “Talking with those who disagree with us is the hard slog. It is only those uncomfortable conversations that can bring change. To both sides.” Nowhere in Black Duck does he deal with the detailed criticisms that have been made of Dark Emu. The year before he is writing, in 2021, Left academics Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe had torn apart his faulty work in their book Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? Languishing in their footnotes is a pugnacious polemical assessment of Peter O’Brien’s Bitter Harvest (order your copy here), the earlier demolishing of the Pascoe fantasy, calling it “a pugnacious polemical assessment of Dark Emu”. Pascoe himself does not name either of these critical works but tells of taking part in a staged meeting with Peter Sutton in the Mitchell Library for an ABC television documentary and offers his own pugnacious polemical assessment of his critic: “I found it hard to believe how rude he was and how resistant to the idea of Aboriginal achievement.” That’s it. No conversation, no discussion.

Other insults are simply too vague to know who and what enemy had aroused him. On holiday on Lord Howe Island he is swimming and sees a double-header wrasse: “I couldn’t help but think of a very vague professor whose brain is too big for his head.” Later he refers to the “great Penny Wong”. Throughout the book there are references to conflicts in the background with no indication what he is talking about.

Pascoe exhibits a small-minded nastiness to ordinary folk. It is a trait he had given his earlier Ribcage heroes.

Remembering visits to Western District libraries, museums and historical associations with Aunty Zelda (Couzens) over twenty years ago, he tells how “She could sense in the first thirty seconds if the staff were going to be uninformed, uncooperative or downright racist. Sadly, more often the latter two.” A particular incident in the Colac Information Centre (more likely the Colac & District Historical Society) still annoys. He berates an unnamed volunteer as a “ruddy-cheeked RSL badge”, an “old silver-short-back-and-sides, a loyalist’s haircut”, and an “old short-back-and-sides”. The man had offended by questioning the reality of a “fort” Pascoe had discovered which the volunteer suggests is a Cobb & Co stables. While claiming to have photographed and measured the “gun embrasures”, Pascoe does not name the actual location or provide the photos.

Pascoe is easy to offend. Having grown marvellous produce (he says) he takes a box of munyang (vanilla lilies) to sell to a local Asian restaurant: “The owner hardly mentioned the lilies but asked me instead what percentage Aboriginal I was. The owner’s imperfect English made understanding each other difficult but even so, I was shattered by the persistence of Australia’s incomprehension of Aboriginal Australia.” The unnamed restaurant, with highly praised dumplings, is very probably Lucy’s in Mallacoota—worth trying.

His never-established race claims are the source of a tirade against SBS, who invited him to participate in a discussion on identity: “The ‘real’ blacks were on one side of the room and we were on the other.” In preparation for the event he claims to have given the producers what he berated the restaurant owner for asking about:

I also calculated the percentage of blood in my family and the difficulty this raises in community. These are important points to consider as more and more Australians find black relatives these issues have to be considered before we become a bunch of wannabes, but no, SBS chose a sensationalist and divisive path. Trumpist.

Neither does he like the Australian, “where some of the writing owes more to the Rottweiler than to true journalism”. When an adjacent property is sold, the outraged author discovers his new neighbour is “the son of News Corp’s New York director. After a decade of being hammered by that climate denying, Trump loving, black hating scandal rag they move in next door. What are the chances?”

When Tony Thomas looked at the annual returns for business entities with which Pascoe is connected, he discovered that Black Duck Foods had received a $300,000 donation from Rupert Murdoch’s sister, Eve Kantor, and her philanthropic Dara Foundation. Tony’s essay is a remarkable and enjoyable back-stage view of Pascoe Inc. Going through the statements made Tony a happy man: “I’m feasting on these just-out 2022-23 accounts like a seagull at a packet of chips.” Among the hot crisp chips is the revelation that Australia’s highest-selling author had followed the advice given in Ribcage and become a capitalist landlord: “He leased his farm to Black Duck Foods for a modest $140,000 paid in 2021-22, dubbed by Pitcher Partners as ‘Occupancy Expense’. He had earlier sold Black Duck $82,000 worth of his above-mentioned used farm gear including, I guess, his tractor.” Directors of Black Duck Foods include Pascoe, his wife Lyn Harwood and their son Jack Pascoe (described as a Yuin man).

Tony’s seagull moment suggests a further link back to Ribcage. The scavenging seabirds were present in the novel as David Bourke sat in a park planning robberies, with a group of them “brawling over a piece of foccacia [sic] bread”. They fly into the psychopath’s rambling fantasy of money and violence as he makes what is the best ever short review of the then unwritten Dark Emu (emphasis added): No-one’s ever made $800,000 out of seagulls, except that bloke who wrote a book about one [Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach], but it must have been a mistake, the book was mush, tele-evangelism on drugs, no more depth than a late night ad for kitchen appliances and pocket knives.

Ribcage
by Leopold Glass
Pascoe Publishing, 1999, 144 pages

Black Duck
by Bruce Pascoe with Lyn Harwood
Thames & Hudson, 2024, 304 pages, $34.99