How Bruce Pascoe Fattens his Black Duck

To be honest with you, Black Duck Foods is currently living hand to mouth.
–Fund-raising email from Bruce Pascoe, 26/6/24

If you wander to the Nova Cinema, Carlton, you might cross paths with an old bearded ratbag across the road in Lygon Street by Readings.  Claiming to be Aboriginal, he’d appreciate a donation to provide some bread because he’s living hand to mouth. He’s one of Melbourne University’s iconic Enterprise Professors.[1] No, he’s not Enterprise Professor and global CEO John Pollaers, or Enterprise Professor Hugh Williams, an ex-boss at Google, eBay and Microsoft US.

He’s actually Bruce Pascoe, Enterprise Professor in Indigenous Agriculture, who uses “ratbag” as a term of endearment. He writes Dark Emu pseudo-histories and runs a little ‘roo-grass farmlet at Gipsy Point just below the NSW-Vic border. Well, no, I mis-speak. He’s the landlord at Gipsy Point and his tenant farmer is an arm’s length Aboriginal-run charity. Called Black Duck Foods, and with Bruce as a director, it has run the farm since 2021.

Bruce emailed his fan-base on June 26 under the headers

Help us build a sustainable future for Black Duck Foods”  and “Yes I [reader] want to help Black Duck Foods keep going — Donate now.

It’s beautifully illustrated with a drone-shot colour pic of his farmlet, and others of mist rising over his riverfront with grass seeds in silhouette. (Someone there is a whizz at layout). The body text goes

Walawaani. Warmest greetings from Yumburra Farm…

 I write to you now after 100mm of good rain as we head into burning season because we urgently need your support…

To be honest with you Black Duck Foods is currently living hand to mouth. Farming is hard work and whilst we’ve had many successes in this last while, we need your help to keep going. We need your support to grow Aboriginal jobs and careers on the farm, to build our capability and capacity, so we can plan into the next season, and the seasons beyond that… 

Thank you so much for your continuing support. Together we can re-centre Indigenous knowledges and agricultural practices at Australia’s heart to secure a strong, resilient and sustainable future. 

Remember that every donation you make is tax deductible.

Yours sincerely,
Bruce Pascoe and the Black Duck Foods team.

An early and enthusiastic donor was the Murdoch family, through the Eve Kantor’s Dara Foundation, which stumped up $300,000 in Black Duck’s first two years. Pascoe enjoys dissing the right-wing sector of the Murdoch clan, which might now earn him brownie points and maybe even cash from the leftist Kantor wing. Pascoe in his new memoir writes:

While reading [the Australian] that morning, however, I discovered more racial slurs against me, so I rang the editor to withdraw the recipe [for Pascoe native bread – add 50% Woollies’ baking flour]. I was happy to promote Indigenous food but not in a paper where some of the writing owes more to the Rottweiler than to true journalism.[2]

 He also dissed the Murdoch media as “abusers” over the Referendum.[3]

Bruce’s email includes news that Black Duck’s shop — which has had little product available to on-line shoppers – has now got Mamadyan ngalluk (Dancing Grass, $45 per 100gm), Burru ngalluk (Kangaroo Grass), Myamba (Wattle Seed, $35) and Mitchell and Button Grass flours for sale ($45 per 250gm). As of July 5, however, the shop had “sold out” on the Mitchell and Button Grass blends ($35 per 100gm). His letter explains,

It wasn’t easy, there was a lot of grunt work and a lot of challenges, but we did it … Bakers are baking bread with our native grains, chefs are cooking with it in their restaurants, and everyday Australians are using it to make food for their families. But our success is more than that, it’s about bringing economic benefit to Aboriginal peoples and Country, something that all Australians can be proud of… For a long time traditional agriculture was buried. But it is no longer. We and many of our fellow Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander friends are leading the charge – getting traditional food with traditional methods back in the kitchen, onto farms and into supermarkets.

As always, Bruce is light on numbers about the farm’s output (the dollar value will surface in the next accounts around January). But I suspect each time the team cooks a loaf from ‘roo-grass flour there’s celebration, high fives and excited chatter around the steaming crust. That’s not how things go mornings at a commercial bakery.[4]

There’s no Pascoe bread yet at my Moonee Ponds supermarket.

There’s no Pascoe bread yet at my Moonee Ponds supermarket. In any event, with grass-seed flour at $45 per 250gm, I suspect the “everyday Australians” he refers to might find his loaves to be wallet-busters. Still, bakers bake it and chefs serve it, he says. Could it be that ex-Lib staffer Bruce Lehrmann ordered Pascoe’s bread with his $361 Tomahawk steak at Chophouse Restaurant? That would help explain the final bill of $504.

Bruce has foreseen New Age native farming as a “joyous revolution” harking back to pre-colonial society, where everyone would have a house, and when old everyone would be looked after and, at night after the meal, everyone would dance and sing together as described by early explorers. This nation-changing revolution could return with implementation of the Ulluru Statement,  “the most gentle document ever written in world history because it’s full of love.”

Asked by the ABC fixture, purported comedian and climate hysteric Craig Reucassel if native farming “could make a buck”, Pascoe said his ideal was a small, modest but efficient production of seasonal food by the basket, not the truckload. A smaller population than now would enjoy mixed salad greens with fish and less meat after we “get rid of our hard-hoofed herds around the world.” He continued,

And working with the energy, the engine of Mother Earth and not against her. Not demanding, ‘Mum, you’ve said we were going to have wheat forever’, ‘No, I didn’t.’ We’ve just got to be really flexible and kind, kind to the Earth.

Black Duck’s accounts

Since Bruce wants donations (I’ve chipped in $5), inspection of Black Duck accounts at the Charities Commission is rewarding. In four years with its tax-friendly status, it raised $2.2 million from donations ($1.001m) and taxpayer-funded grants ($1.206m) by June 2023. To date it has spent most or all of it on Bruce’s “old buggered-up farm” (his description). That includes $1.215 milliom wages for the 3-5 farm workers, a rather startling $149,000 rent paid to Bruce ($140,000 in 2022 alone), $82,000 buying Bruce’s farm machinery and stuff, $61,000 in fees to ritzy accountants and lawyers. Plus the usual  expense bibs and bobs that other cockies pay resentfully out of their harvest and stockyard proceeds.

Bruce’s obliging charity, from its $2.2 million outlay, has achieved farm sales of $38,000. There’s also been some trifling tourist farm-stays, and Bruce telling tourists yarns about pelicans coaching him in Yuin vocabulary, fee $300 an hour.[5] There was $153,000 for outbound consulting sales, offset by a prodigious $310,000 for inbound paid consulting ($223,000 in 2022 alone). Still, I suppose all small cockies pay like that for technical consultants.

At June 30 last year, Black Duck Foods had a liquid $148,000 in the kitty (down from the previous $419,000), with net losses running at $236,000 that year (previous loss: $181,000). Those figures are after donations and grants of $317,000 (previous $660,000). I predicted by simple arithmetic last February that without further fund-raising[6] and draconian belt-tightening/redundancies, Black Duck would be shot down in a flurry of feathers by June 30, 2024. If not a dead duck already, it’s certainly duck-shooting season.[7] (The auditor’s 2023 report says, “The members of the association believe that the going concern assumption is appropriate”).

What would happen next? Is Black Duck Foods too small to fail? Perhaps green rich-listers, Aboriginal Industry entities with their bottomless cash, and profligate Labor governments will bail it out. Maybe ABC Friends could crowd-fund a million dollars, seeing the credibility of the ABC is riding on ABC Education’s giant 15-part love-letter to “native farmer” Bruce. Suck it up, schoolkids!

Or will gentleman farmer Bruce simply evict his no-good tenant, buy back his written-off Case tractor and stuff, and re-hire its team of Aboriginal farmhands out of his own pocket? That would be a feat, as his income seems largely from book royalties, the speaker circuit and, pro rata, about $50,000 for his Melbourne Uni professorship (one day per week). His farm sales are minor and farm-stay tourist revenue are slow, he says, “but you can help”. He has got a new novel out, Imperial Harvest, but it ain’t likely to be another Dark Emu and chalk up sales of 400,000-plus.

Because of Gipsy Point’s remoteness, getting to any paid speaker gig (he does heaps[8]) involves several away-days from the farm. At his book launch at Readings in Carlton last month, he might have grossed $100 in royalties from the audience of about 25, myself included, squatting on Readings kindergarten-height wooden stools. Some of his admirers arrived straight from river-to-sea demos after blocking Spring Street, but I’m pleased to say that Bruce refused invitations to endorse pro-Hamas “genocide” statements. We learnt that he’s working on an epic novel series called Great Dividing Range or maybe East, West, North, South. Its plotline involves escapees from an American slave ship walking from Perth to Mallacoota. I asked how he found time in a farm day for so much authorship and he answered, “I work bloody hard and don’t believe in writer’s block!”

I asked how he found time in a farm day for so much authorship and he answered, “I work bloody hard and don’t believe in writer’s block!”

Farming history

It’s also rewarding to look over Bruce’s history as a businessman/farmer. He started his yam daisy growing venture about 2012 (Dark Emu, p212), predicting widespread product sales “soon”.  In 2015 he followed up by creating a business called Gurundgi Munjie Back to Country Pty Ltd, which, in his Dark Emu is described as

…a Yuin company on the New South Wales south coast [which] is planning harvests of a number of grains, and early trials of flour production have had spectacular results. ( p214)

The “spectacular” result for Gurundgi was that, on January 12, 2020, ASIC deregistered it.

Gurundgi got free money from other people, drawn from Pascoe’s Dark Emu fan base. He targeted $42,000 in two crowd fundings in 2015 and 2016. These over-fulfilled by raising $59,000. His pitch was to revive native farming, lower the planetary temperature by cutting CO2 emissions, improve soil and “start Australia on a whole new agricultural journey”.

The first fundraising financed two greenhouses, two pasture blocks, irrigation, and two workers for six months ($50,000) plus volunteers, total budget $58,500, with the shortfall to be patched by the Local Land Services seed fund. The second raising was for a “Bandicoot Native” grass harvester to take on the broad acres and “achieve financial independence”. Plus “our own cool-plate flour mill” to deal with impending “truckload” of seeds. Sites included his farm plus land lent by other farmers. His cash donors enthused:

Richard Cornish: “This is the start of something amazing!”

Juliet Bradford: “I am so happy that this project is doing well . I absolutely love the book Dark Emu, and wish that it was part of the school reading lists and in environmental studies. I am looking forward to keeping up to date with the progress of this inspiring project.”

Gregory Day: “We’ve got murnong growing here in the backyard in Mangowak. It’s struggling a bit to be honest but we’ll stay with it.”

In the many Pascoe transcripts I’ve accessed, I found no update on Gurundgi Munjie Back to Country P/L. I’m left scratching my head about the seed and flour volumes and financial success.

He’s had two goes at personal farming. The first was a 300ha mixed farm out Gippsland way, which he had to sell “because my [teaching] work got in the way”. He and his mother bought a shack near the Cape Otway lighthouse, which gained in value from Great Ocean Road tourism, and he sold that (over his daughter’s objections) and just managed to afford the “old buggered up” Gipsy Point farm. The 49ha river-front block was originally granted by King George V in 1922 to a Clement Arthur Baker, regardless of any Aboriginal claimants — we’d shot most of them anyway, according to Bruce. The title passed down to a Diane Johnson, who sold the block to Pascoe in 2018 for $600,000. He mentions that the farm, now owned by Pascoe Publishing P/L, involved “an enormous physical and financial drain” , according to partner Lyn Harwood (p20).[9]

His native-seeds project cost buckets for several Aboriginal workers on full pay. He’s said several times that he spent his books’ royalties on such outgoings. So in 2019 he pivoted to his free-money model. As he put it,

Unfortunately, in a world that we have, we sometimes have to appeal to the rich, the people who have enormous influence over us. And that’s what we’re doing… And to the credit of those people, many of them do. There are some who think they’re God’s gift to Aboriginal people, and are doing it for their own sake, not ours [isn’t that looking a gift horse in the mouth?]… eventually we will have Australia eating Aboriginal food.[10]

Pascoe’s memoir

Pascoe has won acclaim this year for his memoir, Black Duck – A year at Yumburra, with input from Lyn Harwood. Note that it’s not about Black Duck Foods P/L. The memoir’s a cert to add to Pascoe’s swag of literary prizes. The year in the title is mostly 2022 and it’s instructive to read how Pascoe writes of his tenant.

Black Duck Foods gets only eight mentions in 320 pages, and never as his charity-funded farmer/tenant. Instead it’s described somewhat as if financed by Bruce himself:

Black Duck Foods was established as a basis for this social enterprise. It was purchased and established with the funds raised from selling an old house and the income from book sales of Dark Emu.(p32).

On page 47 Pascoe refers indirectly to Black Duck’s charity millions:

We [who is this “we”?] are supported by a few philanthropic organisations but we need Australians to buy Aboriginal food from Aboriginal companies. That is why we started Black Duck Foods, to make a difference to Aboriginal communities and our economy.

On page 70, he mentions Black Duck Foods as being under attack over its employment of Aborigines. Quadrant has never made such criticism and I know of no other media complaint to that effect. Pascoe writes,

We have had a difficult twelve months defending Black Duck Foods from people unsympathetic to our Aboriginal employment policy. It made us wonder at the depth of cynicism within parts of the Australian heart. We were supported by an Aboriginal legal company whom we will never forget, but it was our board who stood strong and united.

Was the attack from within the Aboriginal diaspora? It’s unclear.

Was the attack from within the Aboriginal diaspora? It’s unclear.

There is only one reference (p171) to Bruce himself fund-raising for the charity, where he mentions “doing a gig on food sovereignty at the local [Mosman, Sydney] church. Were they Presbyterians? But we raised some money for Black Duck Foods thanks to the enthusiasts at the Fairlight Butcher.” Fairlight is 6km from Mosman. The charity’s $152,000 revenues from consulting suggest Bruce is doing good work for it.

The Yumburra business/charity structure is certainly curious. Bruce wears three hats:

Hat one: private landlord to Black Duck charity
Hat two: director of Black Duck charity, and
Hat three: hands-on farm operator and labour-force boss.

To illustrate, Pascoe, wearing Hat 2, decides the farm needs a new car/SUV/ute. In 2021-22 the charity buys the vehicle with $40,416 of  donors’ money (it spends another $22,702 on vehicles next year). Bruce as 1. and 2. would get the keys to the vehicle. The vehicle serves for uses 1, 2 and 3.

Bruce’s memoir (p188) mentions himself buying a new Subaru around that time. His son Jack’s old vehicle claps out and Bruce sells his new Subaru immediately to Jack. Bruce then sets about buying another new car but this involves a six months’ wait. The paragraph reads as if this vehicle is not a Black Duck vehicle, in which case the 49ha farm is carrying two new vehicles. I’d say the book’s less a tell-all (as advertised) than a tell-not-much if he’s talking about his farm business.

However, the acclaimed memoir goes to great lengths to burnish Bruce’s credentials as an Aborigine. He lards the text with 66 Yuin-language words (as per glossary), all strangely being nouns or proper nouns. I’m sure the Yuin tongue has at least a few verbs.[11]

At 77, Bruce’s health and stamina are fading, partly as a result of more than 500 footie games — just depressing the tractor’s clutch hurts his broken foot and knee. A succession plan seems needed at Yumburra. He writes,

“It’s heavy work and I find it frustrating how my stamina has dwindled over the last few years (p275) … I think my skin is paper thin these days. The slightest abrasion and I bleed (p306) … These last years have worn me down. I don’t experience happiness in the same way as I did before (p308) … The cold gets into my bones more easily these days, and I was morose as I trudged back through the sodden bush (p221)”.

Professor Bruce

With his enterprises not looking flash[12], Bruce’s Enterprise Professorship needs fleshing out. Incoming Melbourne University Vice-Chancellor Duncan Maskell, on succeeding Glyn Davis, was entranced with Pascoe and Dark Emu. At the Garma Festival in East Arnhem Land in August 2019, Maskell was apologising that his university was a “guilty party”, having been too slow to atone for wronging Aborigines and not pumping their national recognition. His goal was to “shake up the apathy in institutions up and down the country.”

V-C Maskell swung immediately to lauding Pascoe, in his naivete calling him a “Kulin writer”. Pascoe has never claimed to be Kulin, only a  descendent of the Yuins, Bunurongs, Tasmanians, Wiradjuri, Punniler Panner, Koori,   Ballarat and Geelong Aboriginal communities, and from a tribe bordering the Wathaurong of Geelong and Colac Victoria, along with a South Australian Aboriginal connection. The Kulin, however, don’t get a look-in

The hopelessly gullible Maskell also quotes Pascoe as saying “a legion of professors and other academics at our universities decided it would be unnecessary for our golden youth to know what the explorers witnessed of Aboriginal excellence.”

I don’t know whether Maskell was aware of Bruce’s agricultural pronouncements the same month, including

♦ Harvesting native seeds by hand rather than machinery would put a stop to unemployment

♦ “Capitalism is the destroyer of the world” — perhaps a good motto for Melbourne University?

♦”There are far too many people in the world. There must be a better solution but we never talk about that.”

♦ “We have to govern population by [Aboriginal] lore again, not by religion or capitalism.”

♦ “If we convert just 5 per cent of our agricultural lands to these environmentally friendly grains, we could help save Mother Earth from warming and wash away our colonial guilt.” [5 per cent of Australia’s land area is not far off matching the size of Victoria].

Garma-friendly Maskell & Co appointed Bruce, Australia’s premier fauxborigine, to the Enterprise Professorship in Indigenous Agriculture one year later, the stated objective being to “grow research activities”.[13]

Two years later, those in the dreaming spires of the University-by-the-Zoo decided their Enterprise Professor was not so Aboriginal after all and his official uni page now describes him merely as a “writer and farmer”.

Two years later, those in the dreaming spires of the University-by-the-Zoo decided their Enterprise Professor was not so Aboriginal after all and his official uni page now describes him merely as a “writer and farmer”. When I emailed the media crew asking if Professor Pascoe was to be defrocked, a reply came next day from the PR Amelia Swinburne:

His extensive knowledge and experience is extending our teaching, research and engagement in Indigenous agriculture. Bruce is a respected member of our Faculty and makes a valuable contribution to our academic community, and we will not be reviewing his appointment.

The university’s other Garma initiative, its new-born Knowledge Institute,  in May 2021 provided $20,000 research funding for Black Duck Foods to develop an innovative “food safety roadmap” for commercialising Cumbungi (‘cat’s tail’) plants.[14] I don’t know what outputs resulted, but I can inform Quadrant Online readers that it was one of five grants that year from the Institute, the others including “Aboriginal astronomy” and dance. This dance motif might have followed-up Bangarra’s 70-minute “major new dance work Dark Emu“, which world-premiered with its “impeccable aesthetic” in 2018 with the warning: “contains strobe/bright lighting, theatrical smoke and haze and gunshots.”

Bangarra’s massive 22 pages of Notes for Teachers talk about “the beauty that Bruce Pascoe’s vision urges us to leave to the children.” It’s an excellent Exhibit A in any case study examining how schoolkids are brainwashed with Pascoe’s palaver. His imaginings of pre-colonial towns of a thousand are foisted on classes by Bangarra as fact

… in the diaries of the early explorers there are numerous descriptions of clusters of huts and permanent settlements across many areas of Australia, both coastal and inland. Large villages consisting of permanent dwellings that would have supported around 800 to 1000 people were reported by British explorer Charles Sturt… [no he didn’t]. [15]

 As European forms of farming took over the land… Aboriginal farming collapsed under this assault, and the villages that the explorers described in their journals were abandoned.

Bangarra’s final dance segments include “Whales of Fortune — the pinnacle of reciprocity, trust is shared with the cetaceans”, and “Smashed by Colonisation — a final, climatic massacre, an uncomprehending destruction.”

Bruce means well with his farmlet’s would-be demonstration that everything in his Dark Emu book is kosher. We, too, could be growing our own native seeds for flour if we had $2.2 million in other people’s money and 49 hectares sown with Pascoe-style fantasies, myths and sucker bait.

Tony Thomas’s latest book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 from Connor Court here

[1] Melbourne Uni introduced its “Enterprise Professors” category in 2015.

Criteria for appointment:

2.1. “In order to be appointed to the position of ‘Melbourne Enterprise Professor’ or ‘Honorary Melbourne Enterprise Professor’, individuals must:

♦ Have an eminent and sustained record of peak level leadership, entrepreneurship and influence;

♦ Be widely recognised for their outstanding achievements in industry, business, professions and/or government; and

♦ Demonstrate specialist expertise and a highly developed industry/business knowledge base that matches in breadth and depth what is expected of all professors of the University”.

[2] Black Duck, Yumburra, p275.

[3] Pascoe: “More than 60% of Australians were hiding behind figures of straw to cast their no vote, having been provided the perfect camouflage. The Murdoch media enlisted, and then propped up, the straw figures and probably think their input was crucial, but if we think that and believe that the campaigns for either yes or no were significant we are crediting Australia with too much innocence, we are allowing them the defence of the abuser: Look what you made me do! I didn’t want to do it but you provoked me!”

[4][4] Mallacoota has 1300 year-round residents and an 8,000 peak-summer population. To swing just Mallacoota over to his grass-seed breads, Bruce would need annual output of close to 100,000 loaves.

[5] Pascoe of the pelican: “He’s like my speaking coach, if you live in country, this happens.” [here at 44.30 mins] He talks in Yuin to other animals as well, “in a culturally appropriate way because they’re my cousins”.

[6] Black Duck told the Charities Commission it wouldn’t be fund-raising in 2023-24 but necessity could easily have reversed that idea.

[7] The 2023-24 accounts are unlikely to surface before early 2025 but Bruce reckons sales are doing okay.

[8] e.g. Melbourne Writers Festival, 11/5/24; Sydney Writers Festival 25/5/24; ANU Meet the Author 22/5/24; Byron Writers Festival, August 2024, etc.

[9] In 2001 Pascoe and Harwood also bought the waterfront freehold of the Gipsy Point pub when it was demolished.

[10] I notice (on p12) a $25,263 federal government grant to “Bruce Pascoe, a Yuin man” via Pascoe Publishing in January 2019 for Black Duck Foods’ “native grains and tubers for the food industry which is already desperate for the product … This project will oversee the early stages of the farms shift away from annual pasture and over stocking.” Total donations and grants to Black Duck for 2019-20 were $378,500.

[11] Bruce is also a director of the charity First Languages Australia Ltd, lavishly funded last year with $2 million in grants.

[12] At the Twofold Aboriginal Corporation charity, where he’s a director, the going-concern accounts have been qualified for the past four years.

[13] On the university’s Find An Expert page, headed “Science”, five grammar errors remain in Pascoe’s six- line “Short Profile”, after another three in the original were eventually cleaned out, namely, “He has published 36 book (sic) including Dark Emu which won the NSW Premier’s Award for Literatur (sic) in 206 (sic)…”

[14] The actual cumbungi research brief says the project would check whether cumbungi-eating is safe for the wider population concerning toxins, allergens etc. Professor Bruce’s son Dr Jack Pascoe was named as a project co-researcher along with Associate Professor Dr Kate Howell.

[15] Professor Geoffrey Blainey: …the famous explorer Thomas Mitchell…never once used the word ‘thousand’. The word thousand seems to have been made up. It’s a terrible mistake and it ruins an important part of his [Pascoe’s] argument. There’s no evidence that there are Aboriginal townships with permanent houses, dependent for most of their food on agriculture. There’s just no evidence for it.’ — Blainey,  August 19, 2020. Listen here from 2:57