Dark Emu Gets a Gentle Whitewashing

Well, the much-anticipated Dark Emu documentary (first announced in 2019) has finally burst onto our screens, courtesy of Blackfella Films and Their ABC.  This not the film they would have originally planned, given that it was not until late 2019 that any serious criticism of Dark Emu, courtesy of the Dark Emu Exposed website and my book Bitter Harvest, had surfaced.

It soon becomes clear that this falls a fair way short of a balanced or objective assessment of Bruce Pascoe’s fatally flawed book.  It is, in fact, a rescue mission which, while it canvasses the critical views of Drs Peter Sutton and Kerryn Walshe – and gives Sutton, at least, a fair bit of air-time – overall it awards the book a clean bill of health.  Although to be fair, the film does not purport to be a debate over the merits of the book, rather than an account of its phenomenon – The Dark Emu Story.  It is clear, though, that its primary purpose is to rehabilitate the book.

I was asked by the producers for permission to reproduce some footage of an address I gave to the University of New South Wales Conservative Club, which I was more than happy to give.  As it turns out, my contribution was restricted to an audio clip in which my unattributed voice can be heard proclaiming that ‘Bruce Pascoe is probably Australia’s most successful con man – of all time.’ Which is true but nothing was heard of any of my detailed criticisms.  Roger Karge of Dark Emu Exposed also gets a short video cameo (damn him!) later in the film.  But his contribution relates only to Pascoe’s fake Aboriginality and, again, includes none of the Dark Emu Exposed revelations of Pascoe’s Dark Emu falsehoods.

The film starts, predictably, with questions over Pascoe’s Aboriginality, one guesses because that is the best defensive weapon they have against accusations of a shoddy scholarship.  The logic seems to be that if he were Aboriginal, his views on this topic would be unassailable. Therefore, in order to discredit his theory, we proto-fascists, as the increasingly shrill Dr Marcia Langton labels us, must discredit the man.  And what better way than to attack his increasingly tenuous claims to Aboriginality.   Sutton himself makes this point later in the film.

Incidentally, we Quadrant writers and Sky News contributors might be getting a bit long in the tooth, but we could hardly be described as proto-facists, all of us having been born well after the rise of Hitler and Mussolini. 

But back to the beginning.  We are treated to a scene of Pascoe at the NSW State Library, suitably adorned with blue gloves, reverentially reading the original handwritten version of one of explorer Thomas Mitchell’s journals.  This cameo should have been labelled ‘re-enactment’ because, as Pascoe claimed some years ago:

You have to read them in the original form, without the editing, because in some of them, there was a severe edit before they became public documents, and often the only stuff missing was the observations about Aboriginal use of land.

Yet calling it a re-enactment would be a lie.  As I observed in Bitter Harvest:

Alas, we will never know the wealth of information excised by those unscrupulous London publishers determined to conceal anything flattering to Aboriginal achievement, because, in Dark Emu, all the citations from the explorers, particularly Sturt and Mitchell, are to their published works – not the original diaries. Pascoe’s claim to have based his book on the original diaries, not the published versions, is a fabrication.

We then get to the fatuous claim, repeated ad nauseam by Pascoe and his acolytes, that Aborigines invented baking 30,000 years ago, nearly 15,000 years before the next known bakers, the Egyptians.  We are shown a demonstration of the preparation of what turns out to be a most unappealing wedge of unleavened bread.  What we are not shown is what advances in bread-making Aborigines managed to achieve in the intervening 30,000 years. 

Unfortunately for the theory of Aborigines as the inventors of baking, the Australian Museum begs to differ. Its website has an entry that points out that starch grains have been found on 30,000-year old grinding stones at paleolithic sites in Italy, Russia and the Czech Republic.   

Dr Marcia Langton then makes her first appearance, telling us that Pascoe had grown up under an education system that taught him the ideology of the British Empire which, by her account, postulated that there are superior races and inferior races.  Funny, I was educated at the same time as Pascoe, and I don’t ever remember this sort of teaching. 

We are then shown some Movietone footage of many years ago describing Aboriginal people as primitive and nomadic.  I have to say, after looking at this clip, that the nomadism was not evident but that these were primitive people seems pretty obvious to me.  Shock, horror!  How can you say such a thing, Peter, you might ask.  Why can’t I say ‘primitive’ instead?  This seems a good time to discuss the meaning and value of words.  (Sutton also addresses this point later, in relation to terms such as ‘farming’, ‘agriculture’ and so on.)  The word primitive has no moral connotation.  It is simply a comparative adjective which is used to differentiate between different levels of societal, material and technological development.  If you were to say to me that my Irish ancestors in the 1600s were primitive, that would mean they were primitive by today’s standards, and I could hardly object to that.  When I started school in Darwin in 1953, we lived in an unlined corrugated house with an outdoor dunny.  I would call that pretty primitive accommodation.  Shielding Aboriginal people from the reality of their recent past – which includes revenge killing, infanticide and cannibalism – to promote the idea of some Rousseauian utopia does them no favours. We whites are always being urged to face up to the unpalatable facts in our history. To excuse Aborigines from doing the same just infantilizes them.

But Langton then goes on to say that Dark Emu:

shifts the paradigm from savage to fully-fledged human being.

Well, that’s a great leap forward and, apparently, thanks to the efforts of just one man.  Bravo, Bruce Pascoe!

We are next treated to a discourse on how the Bangarra Dance Company’s production of Dark Emu has changed the perceptions of the 55,000 Australians who saw it.  All very edifying but it doesn’t really go to the heart of the matter.  Still, this is The Dark Emu Story – an account of the phenomenon of Dark Emu, so I have to grant them some artistic latitude.

And now we get the first of a number of appearances by Stan Grant, who introduces his segment by referring to the alleged abuse heaped upon AFL star and former Australian of the Year Adam Goodes.  Readers will have their own views on this episode so let me take up Stan’s narrative from here. His theory is that Australians are embracing Dark Emu because of their own insecurity:

And now that made us confront ourselves again as a nation, looking into the dark heart, the dark soul of the nation. The one that we know.  The one that blackfellas know all too well. The ones that Australians like to turn away from. They don’t know us.  Most Australians have never met us.  They don’t have us to their homes.  We’re seen as being a people apart. There’s an unease around that.  There is a sense that they are illegitimate in this country that they call Australia, that they call their own, but they know that they are interlopers.  They know it is not theirs.  I think it is so much more about white Australians and how they see themselves, and how they want to see themselves.  To feel as if this can be there place too.  That’s what drew white Australians to this book.

Does Stan think he was the token Aborigine at all those Fitzsimons/Wilkinson bashes he attended before their falling out?   As little time as I have for that pair, I doubt their invitations were quite that cynical.   Earlier, there is a claim that 360,000 copies of Dark Emu have been sold.  Like everything to do with Pascoe, I take that with a grain of salt, but even if true, there might be some proportion of that readership who feel as Grant claims.  But I’m betting the vast majority of Australians would feel that this rather miniscule cohort are deluded fools.  But even if he is correct, I am at a loss to understand how suddenly accepting that Aborigines were sophisticated farmers who invented democracy, lived in houses in large towns and established a system of pan-continental government, would make them feel better about stealing Aboriginal land.

Now we come to one of the two irrefutable examples of Aboriginal ingenuity that are said to demonstrate beyond doubt why Aborigines were not a primitive people – the Brewarrina fish traps.  The other one is the Lake Condah eel traps in south-western Victoria but, strangely, they don’t get a guernsey in this film.  The claim is made that the Brewarrina fish traps are marvels of engineering and ecological management and they are the oldest human structures on the planet.  Well, they probably are the oldest surviving human structures.  Almost certainly there would have other similar constructions all over the world at various times which are now lost due to human advancement.  As to them being an example of Aboriginal ‘engineering’, this is another case where words are deliberately misused to create a false impression, a technique that pervades Dark Emu.  We read of houses, towns, farming, astronomy and so on.  The term ‘engineering’ connotes a planned and reasonably substantial structure based on the application of understood scientific principles.  The Brewarrina fish traps certainly demonstrate that Aborigines possessed some agency in finding means to facilitate their hunter/gatherer lifestyle.  They weren’t, after all, cavemen, but none of us colonialists ever claimed they were.  The fish traps look like a conglomeration of individual traps constructed over a long period of time as, for example, earlier ones were washed away by floods.  By the way, beavers constructed a 850-metre dam in Alberta, Canada.  Would we call them engineers in other than a whimsical sense?

So far, we haven’t touched on the evidence for Pascoe’s central theme, viz., that Aborigines were agriculturalists, but we now come to coverage of the first serious criticism of Dark Emu – well, the first apart from Bitter Harvest and Dark Emu Exposed, but, no doubt, being proto-fascists, we could be safely ignored – The Dark Emu Debate by Peter Sutton and Kerryn Walshe.   The narrator introduces the book and notes that “it is sharply critical of Dark Emu, suggesting there is no evidence for many of its claims”. 

Well, now we’re getting somewhere.  Let’s hear about these apparently conflicting accounts between, say, Mitchell and Sturt, on one hand, and Sutton on the other.  The fact is that I have demonstrated comprehensively in Bitter Harvest, as have the folks at Dark Emu Exposed, that Pascoe does not misunderstand his sources.  He deliberately and consistently misrepresents them.  I know that Sutton, too, knows this, although he is rather more forgiving than I am.  But if he did enumerate any examples of Pascoe’s many fabrications – such as that both Sturt and Mitchell frequently encountered towns of more than 1,000 inhabitants – then the film’s directors have edited them out.  The impression, fostered throughout the remainder of the film, is left that Sutton and Pascoe disagree on semantic issues only – that this is an anthropological debate.  For the next little while I am going to rely on the transcript appropriately annotated with my response.

We start with historian Dr Tom Griffiths:

One of the criticisms of the book and I’ve made it myself is that it focusses on agriculture. Were the Aboriginal people farmers in a western sense?  That’s a really interesting debate, and it’s one that’s been taken up very impressively by Peter Sutton.

Well, considering that Pascoe’s central ‘thesis’ (for want of a better word) is that Aborigines were not nomadic hunter/gatherers but sedentary sophisticated agriculturalists, that does not seem to be a valid criticism.  What else would he focus on?  But, in fact, Pascoe does not just address agriculture.  His other chapters include Aquaculture, Population and Housing, Storage and Preservation as well discourses on, inter alia, trade, law, languages and the depredations of colonists.

Sutton goes on the attack:

I bought some journals by a man called Mitchell, and they’re [the traditional anthropologists] all wrong and I’m right.  A lot of people would rather have a messianic informer than some dullard wearing spectacles.  This is obviously the work of an untutored scholar.  There’s a lot of hoopla in Dark Emu.  Things are presented with a kind of ‘wow’, like isn’t that clever? Isn’t that ingenious? Isn’t that creative?  Well, these are the underlying values of California society in the seventies. They are not the underlying values of traditional Aborigines in my experience in listening to people.

There is an implication here that the journals support Pascoe’s position.  I don’t know if Sutton has read the journals but if he has, he must know that they overwhelmingly support the traditional view.  Pascoe may be a scholar in some areas, even this one, but here he is not writing a scholarly work but a piece of propaganda.  To say that he is an ‘untutored scholar’ reinforces the claim of his supports that this is just an argument about the interpretation of facts.

Professor Griffiths resumes:

This isn’t a conversation between an Indigenous man, Bruce, and a white anthropologist, so much as a conversation between the white explorer sources which Bruce is representing and the old people, particularly the Wik people from northern Australia that Peter Sutton has worked with. He’s an outstanding scholar and anthropologist and the work glows with his respect for Aboriginal civilisation.

Griffiths, as a historian, if he has read Dark Emu and those explorer journals, must know that Pascoe could hardly be said to be representing those sources.  As I have revealed in Bitter Harvest, he consistently misrepresents them.

Why do we want hunter/gatherers to be agriculturalists, as if there is this need to make them into something that we understand and recognise?  As soon as you introduce a European term that has a really particular interpretation to understand, you’re already heading down the wrong path.

A good question. Sutton continues the theme:

The Dark Emu approach generally is to extol Western values of progressive development towards a higher stage of something, and this is how agriculture is drawn into the argument because Bruce Pascoe really believes the economist’s view that agriculture is a superior economy to hunting and gathering.

Well, I believe that too.  Not in a moral sense but in a practical sense. Aboriginal journalist and Dark Emu enthusiast Narelda (I fist pumped after each page) Jacobs, now enters the debate:

By focussing on the word ‘agriculture’ to try to tear down the concept of the book, you’re missing the point of the book.  I mean the book is to present another side of history that we haven’t been taught before.

As I said earlier, agriculture is central to Pascoe’s narrative, which is political. As inconvenient as it is for Jacobs, without agriculture the whole project makes no sense.  The study of history comprises two elements.  Recording what actually happened, and there are no two sides to that, and understanding why it happened.  What is at issue here is a denial of what, incontrovertibly, happened, i.e., that Aborigines were essentially nomadic hunter/gatherers as Pascoe’s own sources, notably Sturt, Mitchell and Giles, attest.

We next hear from anthropologist Dr Judith Field:

Agriculture is a really complex sort of term.  It’s always been used relative to the near East, you know the cradle of civilization.  It involves the domestication of plants and animals.

And as we know, the Aborigines domesticated nothing except, occasionally dingoes, which they used to help them hunt.  How ironic.

Pascoe comes to his own defence:

If you just go around picking a berry here opportunistically killing a kangaroo there, that is hunting and gathering.  But if you’re sowing seed directly onto a ground that you’ve prepared, you know what you’re doing, because you know that plant will send up a shoot and grow.  Then you come back at the right time and you harvest that, and you save some of the seed from the harvest to sow again, that’s not hunting and gathering, by definition.

That’s true, Bruce.  It’s a pity you weren’t able to provide a single example of Aboriginal people engaged, on any practical scale, in sowing seed. Sutton resumes:

This takes us back to the problem of words, tags and labels.  It’s not enough to say labels don’t matter.  If we operated like that life would be complete chaos because all human languages classify things.

That’s true. The narrator then takes Sutton to task:

In your book you use the term hunter/gatherer-plus as a way of trying to reinforce the sophistication of the skill set that Aboriginal peoples had.

That’s a segue for Langton to add her two cents worth:

I find it ridiculous to say hunter and gatherer plus. Plus what? They’re just a bit smarter than other hunter/gatherers?  They collect more than other hunter/gatherers?  I don’t now what he’s talking about, frankly. I find the argument, you know, gobbledygook.

Unfortunately, Sutton beats a retreat on this one:

Yeah, it was an experiment that has pretty much died a natural death.  I kind of regret having used that.  It really complicates the vocabulary. Obviously if you add the plus which is ecological management through selection and through burning and such, all of that is management of the resources.  In our book we use the term spiritual propagation because this is the way the life of the plants could be controlled and means doing the right rituals …

Not horticultural propagation it is spiritual cultivation, protecting their own way of life by not becoming gardeners at all.  And they will say, explicitly, that is not our way.  Those people over there, they do that. But we, our plants are reproduced spiritually.  So, it’s not all about imitating the actual seed process.  The power of this act goes right through the biological sphere.

Admittedly, I’m no anthropologist, but his explanation seems perfectly reasonable to me.  In Dark Emu, Pascoe asks ‘Could it be that the accepted view of Indigenous Australians simply wandering from plant to plant, kangaroo to kangaroo in a hapless opportunism, was incorrect?’

In my view that is a straw man argument.  I believe that both this and previous generations of Australians have believed that Aborigines had considerably more agency than this.  Here Sutton was using a refined terminology to refute the idea that the term ‘hunter/gatherer’ as applied to Aborigines meant that they existed in a world of ‘hapless opportunism’.  It seems a serviceable device to me, and he should not have backed away from it.  Perhaps he could have used the term ‘systematic hunters and harvesters’.

Here Langton gives her views on this:

Inasmuch as practices of Indigenous people across the country, and Torres Strait Islander peoples and knowledge systems about the seasons –the sun, the moon, tides – all of these are tangled with religious ideas, and this is why Sutton and Walshe are wrong.  It’s not simply spiritual.  It’s an entanglement of economic systems and religious systems.

Well, that’s a rigorous rebuttal, not!  Can Pascoe do any better:

Aboriginal people celebrated everything with song, dance and philosophy.  Everything. There is a spiritual element to everything but it didn’t mean they didn’t know how plants grew.  And spiritual propagation.  What’s the inference there?  That Aboriginal people were appealing to the Gods, please give us more of this, give us more of that. You know like the first woman who discovered she could make flour, they were saying ‘I reckon we can plant this and I reckon that’s how we’re going to get more’.

Sutton never claimed that Aboriginal people didn’t know how plants grew. He maintains that they did know but chose not to sow seed. Presumably because they knew that, relying as they did on hardy well-adapted naturally occurring native species, rather than domesticated and cultivated species, other than in exceptional circumstances, nature would generally provide each season.  And on those occasions when it didn’t, they accepted that they would do it tough.  And that was the observation of every explorer and settler.

In the entirety of Dark Emu, upon which Langton sets such store, Pascoe is able to give only three – that’s right, only three – examples of Aborigines being observed sowing seed.  None of them appear in Sturt, Mitchell or Giles. They all occur in the twentieth century, they are all small-scale broadcast by hand and they are all, most likely, examples of “spiritual propagation”. This one certainly is: ‘Alice Duncan-Kemp, who grew up with Aboriginal people on her father’s station Mooraberry, near Bidourie, in Queensland around 1910 described the Katoora ceremony, where, from their woven dilly bags, the gins sprinkled seed food over the ground … Katoora or barley grass seed lay in little hillocks, already swelling and creeping to repeated applications of water which the gins sprinkled on them to make “wunjee aal the same walkabout”’.  Oops!

Another thoughtful contribution from Dr Langton:

I call it the ooga booga school of anthropology.  Y’know, an anthropologist goes off to the study the bongo bongo people who do the ooga booga. It is unbelievable that a scholar would refer to the vast variety of economic systems and practices across pre-colonial Australia as spiritual.  And that’s what Sutton and Walshe do.

So much for professional courtesy towards an eminent colleague.  Sutton, in his book, described me as a pugnacious polemicist (or words to that effect).  In a perverse way, I cherished that as a back-handed compliment.  On the basis of this diatribe, he might be tempted to describe Langton in the same way.  For the sake of my self-respect,  I beg you, Peter, please don’t.

Architect and anthropologist Paul Memmott:

The debate has brought on a better knowledge of Aboriginal society in its beauty and complexity, that wasn’t there before so, in a way, Bruce has done us a favour and Peter has done us a favour by engaging in this debate and bringing out a fuller understanding.  I think that’s the real value of the debate.

So, Pascoe is to be applauded for indoctrinating thousands of people with fake history on the grounds that he has started a debate?  That he has forced Peter Sutton and Kerryn Walshe to defend the work of countless serious anthropologists.  Real scholars who have done the hard yards working with traditional Aboriginal communities, not prancing around in a red nappy and daubed with white ochre, enacting some latter day ersatz ceremonies.

Here’s another pearl from Langton:

How can knowledge be dangerous? So you disagree with it. That is the point of knowledge.  Knowledge is created by the constant dialogue. Indigenous knowledge systems are now understood to be the equivalent of the Western knowledge systems.

Understood by whom?  This startling claim is supported by a rather confused account of a small rainforest community in North Queensland exchanging seeds on the occasion of a marriage.  Is this to be compared with, for example, Western medicine?  Or is she merely saying that because Aboriginal knowledge systems adequately served their communities for so long, they are as just as good as Western systems in a moral sense?

We now return to the evidence of Aboriginal cultivation, courtesy of Pascoe:

This sketch shows a line of women digging for yam daisy. The fact that explorers and settlers saw such activity in so many parts of the country is an indication that it wasn’t an isolated technique.  Cultivation was a feature of Aboriginal land use.  The area the women were working is clear because they made it so, in order to most efficiently harvest their crop.

I’ll let Sutton deal with that one:

But to say that the picture of two women with digging sticks a piece of grassland demonstrates agriculture or even horticulture is just pushing the evidence way beyond its capabilities. These are people who are extracting yam daisies in the most commonsense interpretation of that picture.  That picture’s been reproduced over and over again as if there were no other evidence relevant to the story.  So why have people picked on that and why do they think it indicates cultivation using yam stock from last year? There’s no evidence of that.

We now repair to the NSW State Library for a one-on-one fixture between Sutton and Pascoe.  Sutton kicks off:

Bruce has trimmed the evidence in a way that’s only been done to make the evidence conform more closely to his theory.  It has succeeded as a narrative rather than as an account of facts.

Good one, Peter, but I’d have gone with ‘manipulated and fabricated’ rather than ‘trimmed’. 

Pascoe responds with puzzled regret:

I was a bit bemused, actually, because I don’t think our views are very far apart.

Sutton counters with:

Bill Gammage suggested something like that too, but I don’t think it’s about terms only.  Because terms relate to categories of behaviour and behaviours like economic ones, harvesting storage, processing.  I think we interpret that quite differently because by portraying the old people and their economy as much more like ours than people thought before, ours being my European ancestry, I think it gave some people a feeing of being closer, of having something in common with us which was farming – I think you use that term.

Pascoe changes tack:

No, I think you misunderstand my book. I’ve got an ambition for Australian kids that they learn about this stuff. The sophistication of Aboriginal people.  I think the term hunters and gatherers has been used by people to reinforce terra nullius.  That’s a real shame because what I’m interested in is that Australians know that Aboriginal people had a sophisticated lifestyle and were doing pretty remarkable things.

Here we have a glimpse of Pascoe’s real agenda.  It is to use the putative sophistication of Aboriginal culture to undermine the legitimacy of colonization and ultimately to establish the basis for some form of co-sovereignty.  As I say, only a glimpse here, but the theme pervades Dark Emu and dominates the second half of the book.

Sutton on this question of sophistication:

Let’s go back to sophistication. I have a real problem with this.  What’s wrong with being unsophisticated?

Pascoe strikes back:

Well, you see I don’t think we were.

Sutton:

No that’s not the point.  Why do you hold up a god of sophistication as a kind of solution to people feeling bad about themselves?

Pascoe decides that this is not ground he wants to fight on and makes an interesting claim:

What Aboriginal people were doing was very unusual in the world. And I want Aboriginal kids to know these things, so they have more pride in the old ancestors and the more we learn about our country, the better we’ll look after it. That’s my view.

What Aboriginal people were doing in 1788 was certainly unusual in the world, because much of the planet had moved on from this type existence millennia ago.

Sutton decides to bring it to a close on a conciliatory note:

We agree to disagree and occasionally we agree to agree.

Bruce tries the old Pascoe homespun charm, which never fails:

I think we agree to agree on many things.

But Sutton is immune:

Well, we disagree on fundamentals here and there and we also disagree on facts.

Good on you, Peter Sutton.  This is all about facts not interpretations. A bit of collateral damage done there so we now get back to Pascoe’s aboriginality. Journalist Russell Marks:

It’s like a stone that’s been lobbed into the fault lines of these cultural history wars. He’s making a direct challenge to the way that conservatives prefer to see the relationship between settler Australia and indigenous people and cultures. Part of what settler Australia has understood for a very long time about indigenous people and cultures is that they were backward before the arrival of Europeans and that Europeans sort brought them into the modern age.

Yes, let’s not sugarcoat this. In the context of the modern world, they were backward.  As said in a recent piece, whether it was through colonization in 1788 or globalization in the 20th century, alcohol, drugs, sugar, money and technology were going to find their way into the continent of Australia.  Aboriginal society, if it had been left alone, was going to have to find a way to deal with this.  Does anyone imagine the results in this scenario would be anything but disastrous.  A non-traditional hierarchy would have emerged in which those who could manage these modern ‘threats’ would have supplanted the elder system and traditional law, but without any of the restraints of our Westminster system.

I will skip over the short segment referencing the stolen generations, which has nothing whatsoever to do with this topic except that Dr Marcia Langton uses it as a convenient segue to the ‘culture wars’:

The culture wars start under the Howard government regime. John Howard as prime minister encouraged the right-wing culture warriors to dismiss the evidence that was pouring in about the stolen generations.

Suffice to say that Keith Windschuttle has totally demolished that ‘evidence’.  But forgive my interruption, Marcia:

And Bruce Pascoe’s book ignited, y’know, the huddles of proto-fascists.  So we have a resurgence of the culture wars through attacks on Bruce Pascoe.  No, he didn’t claim to be an historian.  He didn’t claim to be an expert.  He read the records. As an ordinary person.

That’s true.  He didn’t claim to be an expert.  But he did claim to have read the records, so there is an onus on him to report them accurately.  He didn’t do that – as both I and the Dark Emu Exposed website so comprehensively proved – therefore he is liable to criticism. He does not escape scrutiny simply because he didn’t claim to be an historian. Let’s continue:

The racist attacks on him hinged on whether or not he was Aboriginal.

Is it racist to simply question someone’s Aboriginality?  Is Aboriginal academic Dr Suzanne Ingram, racist when she suggests as many as 300,000 of the reported 800,000 Aboriginal population may not be genuine?

Narelda Jacobs picks up the baton:

Going after Bruce Pascoe’s aboriginality was a cheap shot. It was designed to have maximum impact and I think it did.  It tore apart his work that was celebrated as being ground-breaking.  It was just incredibly unfortunate that people believed it.

The large bulk of the work refuting Dark Emu, including the publication of the first edition of Bitter Harvest, was complete before it was revealed that Pascoe’s aboriginality was questionable.  When that news broke, Andrew Bolt gave him ample opportunity to identify his Aboriginal ancestor.  To date, and despite the ongoing controversy, he has failed to do so.

But Langton is blind to this reality:

I find the attacks extremely racist in that they mostly are designed to humiliate him and insult him and, of course, are based on the myth, y’know, that everybody’s records are readily available and, of course, all of these proto-fascists are snooping into his family records and publishing them …

In a tedious diatribe she goes on to claim that she and other Aboriginal academics who support Pascoe are being attacked as well. Let me address her point.  In Pascoe’s case his entire official family record is readily available, and it shows an entirely British heritage.  That can only mean that his Aboriginality comes from some unofficial liaison.  No-one would go out of their way to highlight such a blemish.  So why would you suspect that, unless you had some serious evidence, i.e., the name of this dusky interloper?  For Pascoe to be so sure he is Aboriginal, and for people to so unquestioningly accept his claim, there must be a name.  What is it, Bruce?

But not to be deterred, Langton continues:

It’s very important to keep the natives in the category of, y’know, savage inferior race.

Sutton gives her the answer:

If he had been a white farmer in Mallacoota, they would have just said ‘how does he know?’  That there are people who believe that knowledge comes with your blood and from birth, that’s obviously bullshit.  So, the claim of aboriginality is a big deal.  And that’s why it’s humming at the moment.  People were more relaxed about the issue when the payoff was not big.  But now the payoff is big. You can get ahead in academia and the arts, the public service if you’ve got an Aboriginal identity.

So far as I am aware, Sutton has avoided being drawn into this question of Pascoe’s aboriginality.  That he is now prepared to speak like this tells you a lot. Bravo’ Peter Sutton.

Pascoe continues:

People of my skin colour have it questioned every day of their life, in one way or another, so it was no surprise.  And the amount of Aboriginal blood in our family is tiny. Y’know, I’ve always said to my kids, if you were in America, you’d be declared non-first nations because of the percentage they work on.

Not here though.  Regardless of how miniscule Bruce’s aboriginality is, he would still be able to vote for, and be elected or appointed to the Voice.  But that’s not the point:

But it wouldn’t change anything because my search for family created Dark Emu.

Well, that’s alright then.  But wait a minute, what the hell does that even mean?  Does the fact that you’ve yet to find your family mean we can expect another ground-breaking history?

Time for some more philosophy from Stan Grant:

I don’t look at Bruce Pascoe and see someone who is like me.  I grew up a Wiradujuri, Gomeroi, Dharawal person.  I grew up in my own mob.  My own culture.  My family, my stories connected to country, connected to family. I don’t identify as being an Aboriginal person.  I am one.

Rub it in, why don’t you, Stan?  But wait:

It’s different for Bruce. He enters this differently and it saddens me when I see people pull this apart.  Like pulling the wings off butterflies. Why do we do it?

Oh, please!  But he’s not finished yet:

Australians have always been the ones deciding who we are.  Measuring us, weighing us like they weighed wheat and wool.  Dividing us into fractions – full-bloods, half castes, quarter castes, octoroons.

We now come to the infamous AFP referral.  Lawyer and Aboriginal woman, Josephine Cashman had the temerity to ask then Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton to refer Pascoe to the AFP for fraudulently claiming benefits intended for Aboriginal people.  The referral was made but nothing came of it except that, for her pains, Cashman was unceremoniously dumped by the Aboriginal ruling class.   But it did have a profound effect on Bruce Pascoe and his wife Lyn Harwood:

Bruce has never received money from the government, but he was given a grant, a prize as an indigenous writer and so someone decided that could be fraudulent.  So Dutton decided to refer it to the Federal Police.

There follows another diatribe from Langton in which she compares the suggestion by Josephine Cashman – an Aboriginal woman – that, in order to avoid the type of fraud perpetrated by Pascoe, there should be a register of genuinely Aboriginal people, to the German Nazis compiling a record of Jews.  Yes, the similarity is striking.  The Nazis wanted to eliminate Jews.  Cashman wants to protect the integrity of the Aboriginal population.  Her suggestion is no more offensive than the fact that we maintain registers of voters, or that on virtually every government form we fill out, we are invited to register our Aboriginality.

Pascoe tells us:

Well, I thought that was a political manoeuvre just before an election. It was a bit of politics.

Yes, Pascoe loomed so large on the national stage, and was so associated with the ALP, that anything that would discredit him might just turn the tide in favour of the then Opposition.

Pascoe’s wife again goes in to bat for him:

Look it was an awfully traumatic time.  By rejecting the man, by calling hm into question, you call the story into question.

Cue melancholy music and a cri de coeur from Pascoe:

I just feel very tired in my spirit because, y’know, I’m 75. I can contemplate with confidence five years of coherence and I know what’s got to be done in the next five years and it’s not going out on the good old Madgee, going round the corner and sitting in the sun catching fish.

It would be nice if someone else had written it but I did write it and I did become the centre of a debate and it did cost me my family.  Lyn found it a real imposition on her life, understandably. Lyn and I separated for four years as a result. Still live in different houses, still share a dog.

According to his Wikipedia entry, Pascoe and Harwood separated in 2017, when Dark Emu was flying high, because of ‘his many absences and his late-life mission to pursue farming’.  Not because of the stress related to the AFP referral.

 I’m not as happy as I was.

Cheer up, Bruce. Think of the royalties for 360,000 copies of Dark Emu.  Think of the nearly $2 million in donations showered upon your Black Duck company and the many other benefices that have come your way all per medium of the Dark Emu phenomenon.

Back to his loyal wingman, Dr Marcia Langton:

Now the fact of his Aboriginality, that’s his personal family information and I have nothing to say about that.  Elders have said they know who he is, and they accept him as Aboriginal.  And so the book itself has had a very interesting impact. The colonial view has been severely disrupted by Bruce’s work by all the evidence that has been brought to light and continual research that shows us a very different world from the one that the colonists wanted us to see.  And the Mithaka people are a very good example of people who understood their own complex economic system.

Small problem, Marcia. Pascoe still claims to be a Yuin, Burnurong and Tasmanian man.  Yet the elders of the Burnurong and Tasmanian communities have rejected that claim.  And, as I understand it, the Yuin community is divided on him.

We next get a rather long exposition on the Mithaka people of south-west Queensland, which is being studied by archaeologist Dr Michael Westaway.  He postulates that at various times it had a large population:

Quite a few accounts refer to very large populations in villages.

But he doesn’t tell us who made these accounts.  Was it the local Mithaka people? Or explorers or settlers.  If the latter Pascoe must have missed them.  And:

One of the latest grants was called ‘Testing the Dark Emu Hypothesis’…

I wonder how much that was, and where it came from?

It seems the main Mithaka activity was mining grindstones which they produced in such abundance that they could use them for trade.  And I’m in no position, and have no wish, to suggest otherwise.  I merely note that whatever the accomplishment of the Mithaka people they appear to have little relevance to the thesis that Aborigines, on the whole were essentially sedentary agriculturalists  One thing I will note is that Dr Westaway is in the Pascoe camp, rather than the Sutton one, when it comes to terminology.  He tells us that in Mithaka country they have discovered two standing ‘houses’, possibly the oldest in the country, being carbon dated to the eighteenth century:

The interesting thing about the gunyahs is that a lot of the living and life, cooking, is done out the front of the house.

You don’t say?  Here’s a photograph of one of these ‘houses’, a real fixer-upper.

Mithaka country is also home to a number of stone circles and arrangements that are thought to have celestial significance, like Stonehenge.   From which we progress of course, to Aboriginal astronomy. Langton again:

There are quite a number of other astronomical phenomena that were discovered by western scientists only recently.  And these phenomena have long been known by Aboriginal people.

Unfortunately, she refrains from giving us even one example.

Indigenous astronomy provides information about seasons, weather changes.  Astronomical knowledge systems are also tied up with religious ideas.

Indigenous astronomy is another of those misleading tags that Dr Sutton abhors. Astronomy is defined as ‘a natural science that studies celestial objects and phenomena. It uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain their origin and evolution’.

The Australian Aborigines certainly studied celestial bodies and events – as all primitive peoples have done. They devised myths and legends based on these observations and even made practical use of their observations for, say, navigation or prediction of seasons – as all primitive peoples have done. But they did not use mathematics, physics or chemistry to explain their origin or evolution. I’m sorry to rain on Kirsten’s parade but Indigenous Astronomy is not astronomy but merely a branch of anthropology.  Let’s call it celestial anthropology.  It is no less a worthy field of study for that.

The scene then moves to Wurdi Yuang in Victoria for more of the same and then finally we repair to Pascoe’s farm at Gypsy Point, near Mallacoota, to hear about the future of Aboriginal grains.  Dr Tom Griffiths tells us:

I think we have to learn to understand that the great achievement of Australia’s indigenous peoples in the light footprint that they have had, and still have, on the landscape.  So lightly that people might not necessarily notice that you were there.  And you might be misled into thinking that you hadn’t managed this country so carefully.

Thanks Dr Griffiths. Might it be that Aborigines had such a light footprint on the landscape because they did not multiply in number as other civilizations have?  And the reason they did not multiply is because they did not domesticate animals or develop agriculture, or build houses or congregate in permanent towns.  Might it be that the much vaunted ‘land management systems’ were simply an unintended consequence of a lifestyle that kept them in the stone age?

So, this apologia starts with the world’s first bakers and highly nutritious native grasses as well as the wondrous Brewarrina fish traps and ends with the mighty Mithaka mine complex and Aboriginal astronomy and with Pascoe’s work in saving the planet.  The contentious part – the substantive criticism of Dark Emu – is tucked away conveniently in the middle to give the viewer sufficient time to put it out of their mind before the final triumphant denouement. 

Now that they’ve provided enough padding to give Dark Emu a soft landing it’s time to call it a day. Take it away, Stan Grant:

And all the noise, all of the ruckus, all of the blizzard of facts and headlines and what’s still standing.  Us.  We’re here. This country.  Who we are.  Go and stand out in our country as I love to do.  At dusk. Or at dawn.  Hear the water in the creek and the rivers and hear the animals. Now look at the trees and that beautiful golden light.  And then close your eyes and say ‘what’s changed?’.  We’re here.  We’re still here.  Those noises.  We’re still here.  That’s the important thing.  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 opened them. That’s it.

A dramatic click of the fingers and sudden darkness.  Clear as mud, Stan.  Beautifully recited, though.

Order Peter O’Brien’s Bitter Harvest here