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In an earlier life I was for some years a salesman selling mainframe computer systems to government departments and agencies. Here’s one lesson I absorbed very quickly, one I was happy to pass on to junior reps: once you’ve made the sale, stop selling.
I wonder if Bruce Pascoe has fallen into this trap. Certainly, he has been very successful at making his big sale, reputedly 200,000 copies of his fabulous book Dark Emu. (Of course, I use the term fabulous in its older, stricter meaning — ‘pertaining to fable‘.) Now, no matter what Pascoe says, those gullible fools who parted with upwards of $25 for this epic fraud will never get their money back and Pascoe will never be brought to account in any financial sense for his manifest duplicity.
But the other beneficiaries of Pascoe’s charlatanism – those Aboriginal activists who are relying on Dark Emu’s false claim that Aborigines were a sedentary agricultural society — to prop up their claim that Australia was not settled but invaded and that, therefore, sovereignty over this continent resides with them, must be wishing he would shut the hell up.
Pascoe’s thesis never relied upon him being Aboriginal, which of course he isn’t or anything like it. His book should stand on its own merits, for want of a better word. As far as Bitter Harvest, my expose of Dark Emu, is concerned, I could not care less whether or not Pascoe is Aboriginal.
I used to think that concentrating on Pascoe’s false claim to be Aboriginal was counter-productive as it gave him cover to claim criticism of his book was based on the inherent racism of his critics and detractors. But with every incoherent word Pascoe now utters in his increasingly incoherent efforts to support his fatuous claim to be a member of this tribe or that one, more doubt is cast on his veracity — and more doubt must also necessarily accrue to Dark Emu. Guilt by association, as it were. Thus far people have been content to accept his assurances on the Aboriginality front while ignoring the mounting evidence against Dark Emu. I now wonder if Pascoe’s false claim to Aboriginality might actually be the keystone holding up the fragile edifice of Dark Emu‘s house of cards.
Recently, Andrew Bolt showed part of an interview between Pascoe and Kerry O’Brien (below) wherein O’Brien invited Pascoe to clear up the questions about his purported Aboriginality. As Bolt observed, the answer was hardly convincing, being no better than silver-tongued waffle. Watch from the 33.30 mark, when O’Brien notes Pascoe’s claim of Aboriginality has been rejected by Burnurong and Tasmanian elders, then asks about the Yuin connection. Pascoe is having none of that and re-iterates his insistence that he does indeed have both Burnurong and Tasmanian connections. But, as usual, he names no one, which is a consistent feature of his defence. Nonetheless, as far as these two groups are concerned Pascoe has failed 66 per cent of the three-tribe test.
It’s odd that Tasmanian and Burnurong elders would so emphatically reject Pascoe but not the Yuin. Could it be that word has gone down that ‘we need Bruce to be Aboriginal, so please don’t rock the boat’.
How long will it take, I wonder, before someone in authority, possibly Alan Tudge, the federal education minister, says ‘enough is enough’ and punches the first breach in the wall. But what evidence is likely to induce the minister, or anyone in authority, to take that step?
If he or she can’t be bothered reading the written evidence that is before them, such as the excellent Dark Emu Exposed website, or my own humble effort, then we can only rely on Pascoe’s increasingly inconsistent and self-evidently false public utterances.
Here are some of the latest, courtesy of a speech he recently gave in Mackay.
Right at the start, Pascoe tells his audience he approached ‘the old people’ to tell him the story of his family, but they refused and said he had to learn the story of the land first:
When I was learning that story I was so ignorant. That’s what offended the old people.
So, it seems that, at this time, Pascoe knew nothing of his Aboriginal connections – that was, apparently, a closely guarded secret of these nameless ‘old people’. He doesn’t actually say whether or not, having learnt the story of the land and propagated it via Dark Emu, he is ever let into those secrets.
What he does tell us is that
Within 100 metres of where I lived, up to 70 Aboriginal people of Cape Otway had been killed there. And I knew nothing about it but by walking 300 metres and having a different look at the country, the evidence was everywhere.
Really, Bruce? And what was that ‘evidence’?
I found in the sand dunes a little stone, only this big and it had notches all the way down one side and in the middle it had holes. Different shaped holes right down from a big one to a tiny one and beside that there were these lines. I looked at it and looked at it for a long time and I eventually realized it was a seamstresses kit. The lines were for sharpening those old ladies needles. The holes were for helping sharpen the points and the notches were for cutting thread. It was a seamstress kit and none of us in this country, black or white, learnt about our people being seamstresses.
I knew the lady who started making possum skin cloaks in Victoria. Vicki Couzens. She started sewing cloaks because one day in the museum she was surprised by finding a possum skin cloak and she recognized all the rivers, all the lakes and all the ridges because that was her grandmother’s cloak. She had been buried in that cloak. So how did it end up in a museum: They dug her up!
Hang on a minute. In what way is this evidence of a massacre? Nobody thought, or was given the opportunity, to ask this question, so let’s take a closer look. The massacre in question is listed on the University of Newcastle massacre map. This was a punitive expedition in response to the murder of James Conroy who had been clubbed to death with a tomahawk. According to the website:
In July 1846, surveyor George Smythe was hired to conduct a coastal survey of the Otway Ranges. Having established a base camp on the eastern shore of Cape Otway at Blanket Bay, Smythe and four others in the party marched westward towards the Aire river and when they returned to Blanket Bay six days later, they found that another member of the party, James Conroy, had been ‘barbarously murdered’ with a tomahawk’ about 200 yards from the tent, where he had gone to cut wood’. Conroy had been visited by some Gadubanud people earlier in the day and it appears he had tried to abduct an Aboriginal woman, and had been killed for his efforts.
The website doe not specify if Conroy had been left on his own. One assumes that was the case, since there is no record of a witness statement as to what happened, which leaves one to wonder to whom did it ‘appear’ that Conroy had tried to abduct a woman? Be that as it may, a punitive expedition was mounted against the offending tribe and the website tells us reports of the numbers killed range from eight to twenty. Not seventy, as glibly claimed by Pascoe in his usual mendacious way.
But back to the “seamstress kit”. Pascoe indicated the size of the kit to be no more than a couple of inches, which suggest the ‘old ladies’ must have been using pretty fine needles and thread, not suitable I would have thought for sewing tough possum skins — admittedly, a nitpicking point. Which brings us to Vicki Couzens. If you Google her, you will find that she was inspired by a possum skin cloak held by Museums Victoria. It is known as the Lake Condah Cloak and is one of two held in the collection, where it has been since 1872, so it is highly unlikely to be that of Vicki Couzens’ grandmother and, as far as I can tell, Vicki makes no such claim. I believe she claims her great grandfather was one of those who helped make the cloak. Nor does she claim that ‘they dug up’ her grandmother to get it. Here is the cloak, which suggests that Vicki must be extraordinarily perceptive if she could ‘recognize all the rivers, all the lakes and all the ridges’.
Needless to say, Vicki has not, as far as I can tell, made that claim either. I wonder if she knows she is, apparently, being verballed by Pascoe? And I wonder what happened to the ‘seamstress kit’? Did Pascoe replace it– reverently, of course — where he found it so as not to offend the ‘old people’.
Pascoe then tells his audience:
Everybody had their craft. I wish I had known that as a child when my uncle was trying to tell me about our people and I was so shocked by what he was telling me that, at his stage, I couldn’t believe it. I wish he was here now.
I wish he was too because then we could ask him to give us the name of the elusive Aboriginal ancestor. But I digress. Pascoe goes on to talk about writing his other juiced-up ‘history’, Convincing Ground, which deals with massacres. He continues:
I then started collecting material for Dark Emu because while I was researching Convincing Ground, I was finding out all this information. I just couldn’t understand about our people harvesting grain and it really shocked me.
He must be a pretty sensitive soul to be shocked by the idea that a hunter/gatherer people harvested their food, rather than just having it fall onto their plates. The key question, of course: did they cultivate before the harvesting. The answer: only in Pascoe’s lucratively fertile imagination.
I started talking to other people about this and I remember one afternoon, I was taken aside by some professors at ANU in Canberra and they said ‘Look, tomorrow you have to come along to a house in Canberra because we’ve got to talk to you’. And I knew I was in trouble. Like a kid in school who’s been told to wait for the headmaster.
As usual these professors are nameless. And Bruce doesn’t tell us the forum in which he was airing his apparently heretical views. And why was he in trouble? Was he a lecturer or tutor?
They took me aside for that morning tea – they called it a morning tea – the tea was real good, the cake was pretty good – but they said ‘We don’t want you talking about this any more, ahh, because it didn’t happen. Your people didn’t build houses, they didn’t have crops, they didn’t have fish traps’ And I said, ‘What are you saying?’ ‘Well we don’t want you talking to our students about these things’.
So I left there and I had a very bad car at that stage and I remember getting in that car and steam was comin’ out of my head.
If that story sounds improbable that’s because it’s pure invention. However, Pascoe went straight to a second-hand book tore and bought a copy of Thomas Mitchell’s Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia. There on page 89 he found a reference to aborigines harvesting native grain – his infamous ‘nine miles of stooped grain’:
They knew the grain had been harvested by this lathe (presumably he means scythe) with a fur handle so it was comfortable for the harvester.
Let me stop you at this point, Bruce. Mitchell’s journal makes no mention of a scythe, fur handled or otherwise. That is another of your lies, but do go on:
I was shocked. But I said I can sell this story because I’m telling it from the white man’s point of view. The thing that shocks you – I hope it shocks you – is that hundreds of Australian professors had read that and never thought to tell their children or anyone else’s children, this exciting piece of information about Australia’s history.
Again, I must intervene. The fact that Mitchell undertook an expedition is a piece of history. What he observed about the activities of the natives during that expedition is anthropology. From a historical point of view, that they harvested grain is hardly an exciting event. But:
When I went to uni, I wanted to study history – ‘cause I was in the middle of this search for country and family.
I thought that phase happened much later, but never mind.
The professors there said ‘We don’t teach Australian history here’ and I said ‘Why not?’ They said ‘Well, nothing happened, y’know. We didn’t have Guy Fawkes, we didn’t have queens cutting off their sisters’ heads, we didn’t have kings cutting off their wives’ heads, so there was no history.’ So that just drove me to want to know more and more and more.
If those unnamed ‘professors’ viewed history as nothing more than a catalogue of monarchical outrages, Pascoe was well advised to avoid history and study education instead, as he, in fact, did.
Pascoe goes on to tell one of his favourite stories about how a tribe of friendly Aborigines thriving in the desert rescued Charles Sturt and his party from almost certain death – ‘Sturt’s Saviours’ he calls them. Except they didn’t. To find out about this deception you’ll have to read Bitter Harvest.
Eventually, and almost inevitably, we come to Hitler (watch from the 22.52 mark):
You know we talk about Hitler as if he’s the devil, which he was. How did he organise all the Germans to do what they did to the Jewish people of Europe? And yet here all our professors – our mild-mannered professors living in Canberra, grassy lawns, lovely deciduous trees, silver spoons, forks and knives on the table, cloth napkins, lovely food for dinner – those people never wanted our people to know these stories. All the stuff in Dark Emu – always been there but all those old white men – and they were old and they were white and they were men …
Remind you of anyone, dear reader?
… decided that you and your children didn’t need this knowledge because if you had that knowledge you would start to wonder how Australia was able to take this land. Because what they did tell us at school – what I learned on King Island – was that our people were so stupid, so slow, so lazy, so inhuman that we didn’t deserve the land. That’s why they were measuring our heads, to see how much brain we had and as soon as they discovered Aboriginal people had slightly more brain than a white man, they stopped doing it. But this is what they were trying to prove – that our people weren’t human.
Now, you might expect gasps of horror from the audience at this atrocity. No, I’m not talking about white men trying to prove the inhumanity of Aborigines but the atrocity of Pascoe making this outrageous claim. But not a murmur from his mindless admirers.
Keeping track of Pascoe’s lies is exhausting work, a labour worthy of Hercules. We’re only one third of the way into this masterclass of bulldust. I’m not sure how much more you can take, so, I’ll leave it there for now.
But before I conclude, let me return to the O’Brien interview. Pascoe’s main technique to deflect his critics is to ignore that they exist or to ignore their arguments. Kerry O’Brien (no relation, by the way), to his credit, confronts Pascoe with one of those critics – possibly the only time it’s ever been done. Watch from 56.10 – it seems to go on forever, but here is a transcript of most of the exchange:
It’s not just your cultural enemies who question Dark Emu at one level or another. Lawyer and author Russell Marks, who seems to be broadly supportive of the central thrust of your argument has asserted, in a critique in the Monthly magazine, that you regularly exaggerate and embellish the facts in Dark Emu. He gives examples of what he says, by themselves, are just splitting hairs but they are all the way through the book and I quote ‘Such selective quoting creates an impression of societies with a sturdiness, permanence, sedentism and technical sophistication that is not supported by the source material.’ Now do you think that is fair criticism?
Well, that’s a pretty straightforward question, although Marks’ level of cognitive dissonance must be off the planet for him to be broadly support of the central thrust of Dark Emu, given his critique. Anyway, let’s see how Pascoe responds:
Look I’ve read that and I’ve read others of course which are intelligent arguments but when I’m looking at those things I’m then going from one fact, to another fact to another fact and I’m trying to get a global view of what our world looked like back then. And y’know, world civilizations last less than 1,000 years – many of them last 200 years. Um, the pyramids of Egypt 2,000 years old. Y’know these are short-lived civilizations. There was a law that bound people for 120,000 years, and we know that the law did bind people because people stayed where the law told them to stay. There wasn’t imperial war. Y’know Aboriginal people woke up angry, they still do. We still fight each other as evidenced by last November. Because we’re human. But there was no land war. There are people who challenge that too. Part of the Northern Territory where 300 miles of the coastline disappeared under water and there was enormous pressure on people for the land. Yeah, I think that requires a really good investigation but largely people stayed on the land their ancestors gave them and didn’t invade other people’s land even when they could, and I think that is an incredible moment in history and we should examine that. We should study it and we should apply our best minds and our best hearts to this idea that people could live in harmony together without going to war …
O’Brien must have known he was being snowed but let all this claptrap go through to the keeper. He did allow Pascoe to end on a high note:
O’Brien: I’ve got one last question which requires a very short answer, I think. What happened to the sales of Dark Emu after the attacks by Andrew Bolt and others?
Pascoe: Ha ha ha, well they doubled.
Dorothy Dixer? How long before Pascoe is in Parliament do you think? He’s mastered all the tricks of the trade — although, to be fair, he has yet to master the art of silence which education minister Tudge has made his forte in avoiding comment on the noxious nonsense being taught in schools. In this he has company, as his NSW counterpart, Sarah Mitchell, is similarly ill-disposed to speak up in defence of truth.
In this essay I have shown that Pascoe is incapable, even in the face of a friendly interlocutor, of defending his two main claims to fame – his aboriginality and his Dark Emu thesis.
With the exception of archeological digs and the study of artefacts, pretty much all we know about Aboriginal history and culture comes from the verbal record. Elders tell us these things and we take them on trust. That’s fair enough, but do these genuine Aborigines realise that every lie Pascoe peddles makes it much harder to accept anything we are told.
As I said at the start, if Pascoe has any genuine concern for genuine Aborigines, he should shut up. That fabulist’s gob of his is is doing their cause no favours.
You can order the new edition of Peter O’Brien’s Bitter Harvest by clicking here
It is a limited, indeed badly conceived proposition that Pascoe and ilk are independent agents, lone wolves.
Pascoe and Co. exist within the larger system of anti-Westernist group-think comprising people who are animated by fantasy, resentment, pointless rebellion, and the lusts for power, celebrity, and sense of virtue/self-righteousness, and the nett tax-payer funded resources/cash that comes with that package. Regard the people/groups who are promoting Pascoe and ilk -in the universities, the school systems, and many public service departments, the ABC and commercial media, the human rights lawyers and judges/magistrates, and in the ALP and Greens.
Best to see things whole, if we are to comprehend the causes of collapse of Western Civ, if not save it.
Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.
Peter, can you organize a delegation to the Federal and State Ministers for Education, etc, to explain in strong and definite terms the dangers of allowing Pascoe’s writings to be taught in schools?
Thanks, Peter.
Mr Pascoe was appointed Enterprise Professor in Indigenous Agriculture at the University of Melbourne last year.
Has anyone questioned his appointment using the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research?
ACRCR (2018)”articulates the broad principles and responsibilities that underpin the conduct of Australian research”, stressing “honesty, rigour and accountability in the development, undertaking and reporting of research”.
https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/about-us/publications/australian-code-responsible-conduct-research-2018
“..those gullible fools who parted with upwards of $25 for this epic fraud..”
.
.I’d hazard a guess many, likely a majority, of the 200,000 books were bought by people with access to taxpayer money, thus parting with $0 personally – public schools, ABC sinecures, public libraries…
Excellent work and scholarly work as usual Peter O’Brien … but let us (also) relax into that shadow which falls between the revelation of the truth and the slow illumination of the borders of the lie. In this space the enemy reveals itself in many forms and not just the usual suspects but also those who remain silent and the equivocators. If the present government does not ditch the book and the National Curriculum – it will be revealed as traitor to the academic scholarly scientific truth and will have to get into bed with all the vast array of lies and exaggerations imbedded in the entire Aboriginal historical narrative. We need not protest too much now that the work has been done – we need not waste energy persuading those who will not see. Now that the sale has been made we can stop selling.
Sydney harbour bridge replaced the previous 30,000 year old songline span built in iron that had been traded between tribes of the Hamersley region with Eora tribes in return for their yellow ochre and fish that had been preserved in the traditional way with salt from Lake Eyre as described by Pascoe in his next series of publications revealing the true history of Indigenous civilisation.
The Pascoe thing is, as I think I have mentioned before, a perfect example of the socialist subversion technique practised by Soviet Russia. The aim is to take attention away from the study of Western Civ. so that everything people know is false.
Pascoe writes:
“When I went to uni, I wanted to study history – ‘cause I was in the middle of this search for country and family… The professors there said ‘We don’t teach Australian history here’ and I said ‘Why not?’ They said ‘Well, nothing happened, y’know.”
Pascoe went to Melbourne Uni (presumably around the late 60s) and started studying commerce but dropped out and went to Melbourne Teachers College. I guess that search for country and family didn’t wend its way from the commerce faculty to the history faculty. The Australian History faculty. The storied Australian History faculty:
“History has been taught at the University since it opened in 1854. Under Sir Ernest Scott, Professor of History from 1913 to 1936, the History Department pioneered teaching and research in Australian history.
Successor Professor Max Crawford made the Melbourne department the most influential in the country. Melbourne historians helped pioneer the teaching and research of Australian history in particular and staff members, such as Manning Clark, Hugh Stretton, Geoffrey Blainey, Margaret Kiddle, Lloyd Robson and Geoffrey Serle, left a lasting impact on our understanding of the Australian past.”
As Joe Biden would say to Pascoe: “You ain’t black, man”.
Regarding the number of copies sold, the Geelong Regional Library has helped, with fifteen copies of Young Dark Emu, eighteen copies of Dark Emu, 1 ebook and 1 audiobook.
To balance this they have a copy of Bitter Harvest. I requested it.
They also lost/mislaid the only copy of The Persecution of George Pell for four months (I’d requested it) but after about eight weeks of pestering, managed to track it down.
Very disappointing.
I wasted half an hour of my life a few days ago, by watching Q&A. A Labor politician, Ed Husic, I think, said that he had been reading Dark Emu, which had made a profound impression on him, he had never realised that Aborigines had a civilisation, which the white invaders had destroyed. I switched off.
Husic has said in public that he is not sure that Western Civ is much good. He hails from elsewhere.
Just me, but I would not trust Husic with any matter regarding the protection of anything Western.
Well, the ALP sees our future under CCP control, so Husic might have a few problems when that happens.
Tony Tea, thanks for the detail on teaching of Australian history.
Lo, thanks for promoting Bitter Harvest. Incidentally, I don’t, for a minute, believe Bolt’s intervention doubled book sales nor, given Pascoe’s gift for lying, that 200,000 copies have been sold.
Tony Tea, do you know what subjects he taught as a school teacher? Commerce maybe?
In news yet to be released for fear of undermining the narrative of Black superiority, Neil Armstrong apparently came across the remnants of an aboriginal lunar landing craft shortly after disembarking from the Apollo 11 lunar vehicle. He carefully removed a didgeridoo from the wreckage which was subsequently brought back by the crew and has been kept under wraps ever since. This priceless artefact will be presented to Professor Pascoe in a token of good will at the footy grand final this year by Elvis Presley.
I belong to an association of specialist seafarers. It’s not to say our numbers are very small but the community and specialisation is limited relative to the seafaring world. About 8 years ago there suddenly appeared a new President of the association, somebody I didn’t know but more importantly in such a small community I had never heard of him. It’s not to say I know all the younger members, but I am of an age to have been around when this new President should have been active at work or had at least been discussed. With a bit of research it turned out he was a completer liar; not only for his alleged ability to be a member, but also with regard to his so called qualifications. Others had been doing the same thing and he was eventually unmasked.
The Point? Here was a complete and utter fraud who had convinced enough to vote for him, despite his not being known and his qualifications, both to have been a member of the community and academically, a fraud who used the gullibility of others to profit. This is what I call The Mulder Affect, ie I want to believe. People want to believe something for whatever their reasons and will always do so; just look at the Wuhan Virus con, it’s a classic example of the Mulder Affect on the sheeple.
Arthur B – Ed Husic is a muslim. Nuff Said.
The SMH is hardly reliable, but maybe Nielsen BookScan is more so, and maybe the SMH accurately reported 10/2/2020:
.
Mark Rubbo, managing director of the leading independent chain Readings in Melbourne, says: “I’m hoping it’s a blip. It wasn’t a great publishing cycle. There wasn’t one book that everyone had to have.” Readings’ top book at Christmas was Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe, a 2014 book on Aboriginal agriculture that sold **115,300 copies in 2019**, possibly fanned by an attack from conservative commentator Andrew Bolt.
.
The sales overview comes from Nielsen BookScan’s analysis of the print book industry for the year to December 31, as do figures on individual books such as Dark Emu. Readings’ Rubbo says: “I am very proud of its sales; it’s an important book, but I have never experienced a five-year-old book as my Christmas bestseller before.
@Tony Tea @Lo
‘Pascoe went to Melbourne Uni (presumably around the late 60s) and started studying commerce but dropped out and went to Melbourne Teachers College.”
@Lo .Teachers Colleges in the 60’s were for Primary School teachers – not secondary.
So he wouldn’t not have been teaching Commerce.
I am basing this on Teachers Colleges in NSW in the 60’s.
High School teachers did their study – 3-4 years at Universities and received a Bach Education.
Thanks, NFriar. Primary school teacher – explains a lot.
I’m waiting impatiently for Bruce to reveal the jewel in the crown of our ancient Aboriginal culture recently discovered by him – the Aboriginal equivalent of The Illiad, written on possum skin, all those millennia ago, but deliberately suppressed by the white invaders and even now, by all those mild-mannered professors living in Canberra, all those old white men.
Some statistics from Queensland – the Brisbane City Council library has 53 copies of Dark Emu, all out on loan. It also has 8 copies of Bitter Harvest, all currently out on loan. A glimmer of hope only – the Labor govt here is pressing ahead with a treaty and legislation embedding “Truth Telling” which will acknowledge – without any qualification – that “First Nations cultures and knowledge is an enormous
resource for Queensland”. Our Labor politicians solemnly tell us treaty will achieve reconcilation. They don’t explain how we will know when that has been achieved.
Thanks for your tireless work Peter. Ironically it is your work not Pascoe’s that showcases what academic rigour looks like.
I think the fiction Pascoe paints with the mythical ANU professors is perhaps the most revealing;
They took me aside for that morning tea – they called it a morning tea – the tea was real good, the cake was pretty good – but they said ‘We don’t want you talking about this any more, ahh, because it didn’t happen. Your people didn’t build houses, they didn’t have crops, they didn’t have fish traps’ And I said, ‘What are you saying?’ ‘Well we don’t want you talking to our students about these things’.
So I left there and I had a very bad car at that stage and I remember getting in that car and steam was comin’ out of my head.
Nothing underscores the corrupted faculty of reasoning that exists at the centre of most post modernist narratives than the sheer sense of incredulity Pascoe invokes in response to the said professors exercising nothing short of a ethical peer review. Such a conversation would be, in fact, a polite way of informing a colleague that their body of work was unscientific and unscholarly in the face of the absence of any persuasive hard evidence and worse still, be it a fallacious corruption of the available evidence. Instead, Pascoe’s diminished intellect clashes with his inflated ego and we are told that the manifestation of this, is Pascoe’s is steaming rage. Followed by the typical childish dummy spit of the left followed by the requisite bigoted name callingi.e. male, white etc etc etc yawn!
Essentially that story is totemic of the post modernist world view.
Peanut
Ed Husic is Muslim- they don’t like us . Someone might like to let the idiot politicians know, some of us actually liked the feeling of being safe and secure in a an Australia that was once free .Those fair dinkum Australians who fought for this Country, could , and would also be rolling in their graves
Pascoe is a typical con artist. People are taken in by the performance. He presents as somebody who is a simple soul, loving and kind, but one who has been deeply hurt by some nameless betrayer. The state of being permanently offended is reminiscent of the image projected by a person who has lost his life savings in a failed investment scheme. Surprised and deeply troubled by the injustice inflicted upon him, he now struggles in his honest, simple-minded way, to tell his story for the benefit of others. Children, who have a natural sympathy for those who are suffering, are easily taken in by this type of deception.
In different ways Helen Demidenko, Belle Gibson and Norma Khouri come to mind when considering Pascoe’s blatant duplicity. The extraordinary effrontery of Pascoe, who persists with his claims of Aboriginal descent in the face of widely publicised proof to the contrary, surely attests to the remarkable willingness of otherwise intelligent people to believe something simply because of its emotional appeal. His elevation to the status of professor in a prestigious university is a testimony both to the deficiencies of the modern intellectual elites and to Pascoe’s ability as an actor and storyteller.
Right on the money ,Stephen. Pascoe would make a great second hand car salesmen. What one is being told and what one is getting are two completely different truths. It reeks of the leftist stench – the rotting of truth. Who in their right mind would let these creeps near the minds of children.
Stephen, I recently listened to a podcast interview on liberal arts, that involved the academic and President of Campion College , Dr Paul Morrissey and the media advisor Anna Hitchings ,both being Christian , scrupulously honest and brilliant in their respective roles.. Interestingly Dr Paul Morrissey home schools his children- I think that tells us all we need to know about the parlous state of the education system from top to toe , and the efficacy of the content of left wing indoctrination.
Ps, I trust my gut instinct, you are right.
NFriar, there’s a chance Pascoe enrolled in Commerce but dropped out without making any progress. If that’s the case he may have taught economics at a secondary, but not at a school that dotted its teeth and crossed its eyes. I read somewhere he was a primary teacher, but I can’t confirm that.
And when I read “When I went to uni, I wanted to study history – ‘cause I was in the middle of this search for country and family… The professors there said ‘We don’t teach Australian history here’ and I said ‘Why not?’ They said ‘Well, nothing happened, y’know.” my bullshit detector almost pings off the scale.
I suppose Kerry O’Brien had to maintain some courtesy, in view of who was paying him, but I would suggest that even he would have been looking forward to a long hot shower to scrub that bullshit off.
Adelagado, just goes to show that when needed , Kerry O’Brien can act with the best of them- was that NIDA or the Fabian school of the arts I hear you say!?
As for courtesy, if that had been Tony Abbott- may I suggest dog on a bone interview.
It’s a shame OB doesn’t show the same courtesy to employed right of centre taxpayers- the absolute truth wouldn’t have insulted anyone’s intelligence and wouldn’t have reeked of bias.There in lies the truth.
Can Pascoe tell us what material was used to make the Sutherland blade and the sewing needles ? How were those holes made in that sewing kit stone ?
Clearly ‘ the guy is not a competent liar.
Can anybody say exactly what academic qualifications Pascoe has and which institutions granted them?
joe.moharich , the material used was a ‘well’ woven socialist fabric or social fabric to borrow a term from hawkey . Basically subjective thought which is always contained in one’s self delusional state of mind (mine), self imposed selfishness if you will.
As for competency in lying ,I concur, on account that his lying lacks any semblance of moral gravity, therefore is in a negative sense totally in competent.
And regarding quolls(qualifications), the best women in a position to ascertain whether what was found or chanced upon ,is a seamstress not a Scottish taylor!
The Pascoe Fiasco should have this result:
Tax-payer funded university research units and tax-payer-funded news/opinion media (the ABC and SBS) should now search for and put on display old men who can perceive reality and deal with it effectively. That is, old men who, over the course of their lives have put in the necessary work to ensure that their emotional and intellectual functioning is the best that is possible. Rare men, to be sure.