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The Bruce Pascoe fiasco is a different sort of hoax, all the more troubling for “its fundamental disregard for Indigenous Culture”, as Henry Ergas put it in The Australian. A hoax, to cite one definition, is a falsehood deliberately fabricated to masquerade as the truth. It is distinguishable from errors in observation or judgement, rumors, urban legends, pseudosciences, and April Fools’ Day events that are passed along in good faith by believers or as jokes. A hoax is “a humorous or malicious deception”.
Ern Malley, Australia’s most famous literary hoax, saw poets James McCaulay and Harold Stewart gull Max Harris, the literary editor of the modernist magazine Angry Penguins, for quite some time before revealing that they had written the poems using snatches from army maintenance manuals, newspapers and random books. Although Harris’ reputation never really recovered the hoax was at its heart a humorous deception, one whose intent was to highlight the random, uncrafted and deceptive nature of modernist poetry.
Bruce Pascoe has now out-hoaxed Ern Malley, but his is a malicious deception. Pascoe has misappropriated and misquoted existing history to so fundamentally re-imagine Aboriginal society as to call the scholarship of 200 years of anthropology and history into question. He paints Australia as such a racist society that we pretended the Aboriginal people were mere ‘flora and fauna’, rather than, as he would have it, the inventors of bread, democracy and, indeed, human organisation itself.
Pascoe has dismissed and completely ignored any input or objections from traditional tribal people, brazenly demanding that Australian and Aboriginal histories be re-taught, re-imagined and re-constructed in schools and universities — Behold, our new national story! — with Aborigines depicted as “advanced” agriculturalists who lived in villages of a thousand citizens with crops and fenced animals. He has manipulated information from settlers and explorers’ diaries to support his hypothesis whilst all the time knowing the story he was constructing to be false. How could he not know they were false given he bowdlerised explorers’ quotes and presented his own embellishments as the genuine article. His book’s title proudly alludes to the Dark Emu constellation recognised by indigenous ‘astronomers’, which can be made out against the dark places around a group of stars. Thus it is with the book, which seeks and revels in the dark places around the truth. Dark emus are hard to see, but once you accept the picture Pascoe is peddling you will fancy you are smarter than everyone else, more observant, more attuned to recognising historic injustice, more virtuous.
Yet this hoax is particularly malicious because it feeds off the manipulation of a particular race and group of people who are not able, with records, to refute the implication that nomads are less admirable than farmers. They are being given another fake story in order to develop a stronger claim to sovereignty and stoke the fires of resentment on the strength of lies about white ‘invaders’. This will surely fuel even more dissatisfaction and disillusionment. His target and the butt of his malevolent joke are the innocent and mostly naive. His book is, essentially, a racist cultural Marxist whitefella hoax which aims, amongst its other bent goals, to convince today’s blackfellas that the white ancestors of their fellow countrymen wanted only to kill them and destroy any and all records of their forefathers’ achievements.
Pascoe has the temerity to tell traditional people what ‘their’ culture ‘really’ was. Fancy being so arrogant as to tell an entire people its culture must be redefined. Imagine telling the French what their culture really is! but Pascoe reckons he can do that to the same people of which he ludicrously claims to be a member! It’s not often a writer comes along who can nudge a nation to see itself in a completely new and different light: TS Elliot, Patrick White, Camus, Dostoyevsky. In Australia we have been short-changed by the charlatan Pascoe and his lucrative lies.
Aborigines have been the subject of constant leftist hoaxes since the late 1960s. The Stolen Generation is a hoax developed by left-wing academic Peter Read to accuse Australia of genocide for saving the Aboriginal children of white fathers who had been abandoned by tribal patrilineal traditions. The Massacre Map developed by Lyndall Ryan is another highly exaggerated and contested version of frontier conflict (compiled with government grants by the daughter of a famous Australian Communist family) which clouds Aboriginal history with the untruth that whitefellas massacred Aboriginals all over the country without law or pity. That, too, is falsehood. Even the policy of self-determination was a government sponsored hoax, promising far more than could ever be achieved or delivered. The whole Rouseauean ‘romanticisation’ of Aboriginal culture as the Garden of Eden was another hoax, foisted on Aboriginal people by academics with ambitions and endorsed by overwhelmingly bourgeois white Australians with little or no knowledge other than a warm and fuzzy appreciation of how nice Aboriginal art looks on the livingroom wall. A disingenuous Australian literati has inundated Aboriginal literature with gongs and awards that pretend that Indigenous literature has achieved some sort of renaissance. Another hoax, this one underwritten by the Australia Council and other arts bodies.
Pascoe claims his book has delivered ‘a new way of seeing’, just as James Agee claimed his Let Us Now Praise Famous Men would bring home the reality of the plight of sharecroppers in America’s South during the years of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression. Agee achieved his goal with the great help of Walker Evans’ photographs, visual proof of the rural poverty of which most Americans had little idea and were shocked to see documented in images and words. But where are Pascoe’s photos, where is his proof, his evidence to make the case he does? Some sharpened stones he claims were used to till the earth? Others identify them as having been used to work wood and harvest bark. Fake history, manufactured from the whole cloth of its author’s schemes and scams is not a ‘new way of seeing’. It is just one more huge and deliberately promoted distraction from the truth.
Pascoe is the new Ern Malley with a twist. He has made fools of the prize-awarders, the media sycophants, the writers festivals and Melbourne University, which recently appointed the fauxborigine a professor. Now, as Dark Emu continues to be taught in schools, how will we ever convince kids that, regardless of what idiot teachers tell them, he is a deceiver and his book a blotting paper for soaking up every lie he could manufacture? How do we inform them that Aborigines were nomadic peoples and everything that is precious to indigenous culture is dependent on that fact? How now to rehabilitate the likes of Geoffrey Blainey and persuade the deliberately mis-educated young that he told no lie when writing that an agricultural revolution reached the Torres Strait and New Zealand but made no mark on Australia?
This is Pascoe’s true legacy, the damage he has sown.
The main point here is that Pascoe’s fantasies are promoted as truth by leftist politicians, by the leftists in the universities and school systems, and by leftists in the mainstream media and legal systems.
That’s the main point. Sure, expose Pascoe as a fantasist. But the main point is that Pascoe’s fantasies are being legitimised as fact, truth, reality by the neo-marxist, anti-Europeanists who dominate all of our institutions. The next main point is that there appears to be no remedy, within the groupthink idiocies of Australian mainstream culture, nor even within the law as controlled by the fatally weak Australian Constitution, to our enslavement by these anti-empiricist, anti-Europeanist Big Statists.
Bruce Pascoe has now out-hoaxed Helen Darville/Demidenko/Dale. The effect of the Ern Malley hoax was restricted within a niche arena.
The Emperor has been shown to have no clothes – so nudity will have to be made mainstream.
I think that Pascoe has done us all a great favour, albeit inadvertently. What he has done is to flush out the gullible fools and other more consciously complicit charlatans among the chattering classes. Little can be done to prevent the ignorant falling for this sort of nonsense other than to identify and mock the purveyors, particularly those media “celebrities” who so stupidly add their voices to the chorus.
Pascoe must have shat himself when Dark Emu became popular, because he would have known he was a better than even chance of being exposed, no matter how many suckers were desperate to fall for his schtick.
You mean he won’t be disclosing the site of the indigenous space facility with all its warning signs written in The Aboriginal Language and script? I mean you would have to be stupid to think the stuff he wrote was anywhere near honest and “the truth”. Thsw woud include but not be limited to: school curiculum content administrators, teachers, university lecturers, public servants, politicians, lefties, luvvies, snowflakes, SJWs and those with their trotters in the public moneys trough
Patrick, thank you for so clearly making the point that I have been arguing viz that Dark Emu goes well beyond peddling a false feel-good narrative about Aborigines. At its heart, it is propaganda designed to pit one Australian against the other and to underpin the demand for Aboriginal sovereignty. That is why smart people such as Marcia Langton and Megan Davis have effusively support it even though they must know it is utter crap.
Chris Kenny had a story in The Australian today about Pascoe and other fantasies promoted by the ABC. I made this comment….
“I can understand how the ABC and other virtue signalers fell for Pascoe’s baloney, but how on earth did so many aboriginals fall for it? Is it because they know so little about their own culture?”
REJECTED.
Yes, marxist-drilled people in high places endorse Pacoe’s fantasies as truth, and spray around tax-funded resources to promote this idiocy. Yes, it’s bad eh. Now consider the broader scene: The marxist-inspired greenism and anti-free enterprise tax system that is driving the Australian economy into oblivion. And the marxist-informed criminal justice system that returns persons-of-violence to streets and homes just as soon as the marxist-inspired judges, magistrates, lawyers and law clerks can manage it. And the fully dumbed-down anti-Westernist education systems, Kindi to Uni. And “multiculturalism”, that started as an anti-Englandism and is now a full-blown institution of total anti-Westernism. And the entire affirmative action/inclusion/diversity industry that promotes Persons-of Identity into roles for which they have no technical competence whatsoever. Oh, and the ABC and SBS, our very own tax-payer-funded, marxist, anti-Westernist channels of propaganda. And that none of this remediable within Australian law. Comprehension of the Big Picture urgently required.
@Patrick – what Peter says below.
Does Pascoe even know that he has been used by the aboriginal political elite?
I don’t believe so.
He has enjoyed the limelight and adulation.
Sad that the ones to really suffer was Pascoe’s genocide of the longest living culture.
@Peter – YES
“Patrick, thank you for so clearly making the point that I have been arguing viz that Dark Emu goes well beyond peddling a false feel-good narrative about Aborigines. At its heart, it is propaganda designed to pit one Australian against the other and to underpin the demand for Aboriginal sovereignty. ”
Thank you again Patrick for your very considered article.
Love the positioning of Pascoe’s Dark Emu as part of the hoax genre. Look on the light side of life. A hoaxer, who showed us who, and what, the left establishment including the ABC etc, really are. Gullible ideologues. The kind of people who take April Fool’s jokes seriously. Gotcha!
Where are those talented and much awarded ‘investigative journalists’ on 4 Corners when you need them? I for one will start watching again if they take up the Pascoe Hoax. Pigs might fly. Their ABC is studiously ignoring the issue. And the Indigenous Industry. And the bureaucrats in the Education Departments. And the politicians, ‘conservatives’ included. No doubt they figure that if they ignore it, it will go away. Tragically, for history and truth, they’re probably right.
“Pascoe is the new Ern Malley with a twist. He has made fools of the prize-awarders, the media sycophants, the writers festivals and Melbourne University,” – I don’t think Pascoe has made fools of many of his cheer leaders – I don’t think Professor Marcia Langton is a fool or has been made a fool by Pascoe. Her statement that all the references in Dark Emu are correct suggests to me that she has no interest in truth and will ruthlessly use him to push whatever her agenda is – aboriginal sovereignty, treaties or something else. O’Brien’s Bitter Harvest can be ignored by Langton and all now invested in Pascoe. The new book by Sutton and Walshe will be harder to ignore by Pascoe’s supporters and those content to use him for their own purposes in the universities, in the prize-giving and education bureaucracies, in the ABC and the Guardian etc . Pascoe’s own response to Sutton and Walshe shows he cannot be underestimated: he is positioning himself as a disinterested scholar concerned only with the truth. He says he “welcome(s) the discussion and difference of opinion as it should further this important examination of our history”. His more intelligent supporters will follow his guide and so avoid challenging two established and reputable scholars.
Pascoe is a nobody. But look at the people and institutions who support and promote Pascoe.
That’s where The Danger is. This focus on Pascoe as a fantasist and fraud plays into the hands of the anti-Westernists, parasites, and power-mongers who puppeteer him.
I think we should appoint a commission headed by Professor Lysenko (no matter that he is dead) and the Victorian quarantine investigators to find the truth. They can use the investigative services of the ABC Masters and the ADF cultural warrior to assist.
What could go wrong …?
Like the proverbial late night ads for those 82 piece knife sets – “Wait there’s more” – Bruce Pascoe has just been awarded the Australian Humanist Award for 2021 (joint winner with a Transgender Activist). I kid you not!. You couldn’t make this stuff up!! https://www.medianet.com.au/releases/202730/
“ Humanism considers human being (s) as the starting point for serious moral and philosophical enquiry”. Furthermore it is anchored in progressive freedoms, examples of which include Abortion -(late), EUTHANASIA and gay marriage , to name but a few.
Incidentally to be hypocritically progressive is to embrace the idea of civil liberties without limit.The key word here is civil , the Merriam Webster dictionary defines civility as civilised conduct, polite acts and or expressions, so by my reckoning the preservation of conduct that is civilised, make no mistake everything must have foundations , be it housing , knowledge or truth- the very act of learning is the foundation of known and unknown knowledge ,feelings or even emotion and emotional investment.
So basically Humanism is pure subjective thought -as such is devoid of any objective moral currency, that at I see it , as regard truth ,as it relates to God ( being nice) or wisdom.
The fact that Bruce Pascoe has shown a complete contempt for truthfulness is an indication in a psychiatric sense , that he has a mental block that is subjective in nature and lacks objectivity.
Recognition of ones failings, can be considered a revelation of sorts leading to redemptive (objective) thought.
To lie or deceive for advantage is to be in receipt of subjective instincts, this is how wild animals behave.
The parables of Jesus of Nazareth to my mind are essentially a solvent to man’s instinctual state- being born again has an instinctual meaning, however to the civilised mind it has more meaning ,this leads us from a state of subjective poverty to one of objective wealth/ expanse – greater access to truth – which is true, and as such is an indicator that the God given truths, are not only Just and civilised, but really are at the level of creativity truly good , therefore progressive, actually more and really progressive in comparison to that of the stunted intellect of animals and animal behaviours.
By the way Aborigines ,prior to the introduction of Western civilisation, lived a maximum of 30- 40 years. Furthermore death from being murdered by the uncivilised act of being speared or clubbed came to a halt when civilisation was introduced or not long after. And the sedentary lifestyle diseases of civilisation such as insulin intolerance, diabetes and kidney disease obesity and alcoholism and laziness only presented themselves with the onset of agricultural practices and welfare ,that provided the ability for greater caloric intake and less energy expenditure.
For Bruce Pascoe to misquote the inference and intent of documented work of early explorers is defamatory ,post Mortem (in a spirited sense ) as is his intent to deny Aboriginal existence prior to the domesticating effects of Western man.
Gary, Helen Darville’s book never purported to be anything other than fiction! The “hoax” was her purported ancestry (many authors have used pen names: Mark Twain; Lewis Carrol; George Eliot to name a few). I mean surely she wouldn’t have been granted that award because they thought she was a “wog”!!!!! She certainly wrote the book, so no “hoax” worthy of the name.
Pascoe, well his book purports to be a “truer history”. In fact I think “hoax” isn’t a strong enough word for it.
He may have a point about regarding Aboriginal people as mere ‘fauna’. Australian decimal coins incorporated seven animals peculiar to Australia—the marsupial feather‐tail glider, the frilled neck lizard, the spiny anteater, the lyrebird, the platypus and, in the Australian coat of arms, the kangaroo and the emu. The kangaroo appeared again on the dollar coin, and an aboriginal elder on the two dollar coin.
Personally I’d rather see the aboriginal elder replace the queen on the obverse of each coin; and aboriginal artistic depictions of native wildlife on the reverse, like the 1988 one dollar coin.
loweprof -first, present to us an Aboriginal elder who has anything wise and useful to say about how to save Aboriginal kids from neglect, abuse, violence, some unto death.
Replacing William Farrer on our $2 currency (banknote) with an Aboriginal Elder (on the new coin) says it all about the direction of our society and how we are just living off the hard work and wealth of our past. Farrer was famous for what he DID – a lifetimes dedication to painstakingly discovering new wheat varieties – the Father of the Australian wheat industry. The Aboriginal Elder is famous for simply who he IS – a handsome man wistfully looking off into the distance. Our society has rejected substance and achievement and instead rewards celebrity. I suggest we all encourage our grandkids to start learning Chinese so that they can at least get jobs in the service industries once our new masters arrive.
@MungoMann – now my blood is BOILING!
A good read:
https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/opinion/piers-akerman-dark-emu-debate-proves-abc-deserves-scrutiny/news-story/440ae4b48f40bd86e717dd8e5804ff56
Bravo Piers Akerman, and thank you.
Loweprof, personally I’m all for loyalty ,let’s keep the Queen, simple really ,coinage is minted by the crown and was a very real contribution and has had a civilising effect on and in Australian culture- after all this civilisation is an English construct whether others acknowledge or like that truth(fact) – the mint – Macquarie street.
Aboriginal (1901)not Chinese were and could enrol to vote as their want in state elections prior to the 1967 referendum ( be mindful of numeracy and literacy skills and the educational reason for institutionalised formative schooling – al la stolen generation garbage)which then gave them the ability to vote in federal elections. Being able to vote in state elections prior to 1967, enrolment to vote became compulsory in 1983, therefore they actually weren’t considered as fauna but as Australians, all be it of Aboriginal lineage, therefore having indigenous status.
From memory Aboriginals being the first ,of the original inhabitants (people in this scenario) of this continent prior to being called Australia were managed in a discriminating way, called humanitarian welfare ,under the legislated umbrella of the Aboriginal state protectorates and that management was situated in the flora and fauna act of the Australian state, because Aboriginal people formed part and were but one of the original inhabitants alongside native animals ,fish and plant life and therefore had special consideration in the legislated foundation of Australia, they were never considered to be animals in that sense.
Just like other human species such as Chinese, Indonesians Africans or the English, the Aboriginal is only considered part of the animal nomenclature, when looking at evolution through the prism of Charles Darwin – the collective evolutionary ( not revolutionary ) DNA of all the animals in the human species can be tracked and traced to Chimpanzees- so in effect we are all considered part of that arm of evolutionary animal kingdom..
Skin colour ,eye shape, stature, height , leanness ,strength and lifespan ,to name but a few , all result from physiological ,environmental and environmental adaptation, nutrition and circumstance – there is absolutely nothing unusual about that .
Even the ABC itself ,in its fact check facility refutes the claim made by others in ABC interviews or reports, that Aboriginal people are considered mere fauna. That impression peddled by the likes of Stanley Grant, and Linda Burney in her maiden speech in parliament-is just like Mr Bruce Pascoe’s ‘Dark Emu ‘ exploratory distortion of the facts.
Ps the Aboriginal protectorate came into being in 1838 by order of the British government of the day, therefore under the oversight of the Crown . Its creation at that point in time, was protection and civilisation of Aboriginal people living in the Port Phillip region of Victoria.
Harry Lee – Gwoja Tjungurrayi (c. 1895 – 28 March 1965). In addition to the $2 coin, he was the first Aboriginal person to be featured on an Australian postage stamp and a Northern Territory Legislative Assembly electorate is named after him. He had much to say that was wise and useful about how to improve the lives of Aboriginal people.
Neville Bonner was another great Australian, a great example of humility and good old fashioned Australian non- left wing Marxist common sense.
Harry all their interested in, is change- change for change’s sake- change the Head of state- ah(R) -that’s better a Republic.
“ ep”, great idea ,that should get to the bottom of things.
@STD
That aborigines were managed – quote:
‘discriminating way, called humanitarian welfare ,under the legislated umbrella of the Aboriginal state protectorates and that management was situated in the flora and fauna act of the Australian state, ‘
You need to explain this please!
Accuracy is important, including accuracy in regard to Australia’s ‘indigenous people.’ Australia does not have an indigenous people, unless you count every Australian who was born here, the true meaning of indigenous.
However, when indigenous is used for Australians with Aboriginal ancestry, we need to talk in the plural, not the singular. There is no one group of Australians with Aboriginal ancestry in any unified sense. The group of roughly 700,000 ranges from 100% Aboriginal ancestry, very few of those, to less than 1% Aboriginal ancestry, lots of those, with most minimally Aboriginal in ancestry and thereby not Aboriginal in any true sense.
Neither were the peoples here in 1788 one race. In fact modern genetics debunks the entire concept of racial groupings because there is less than 1% difference between these categories. In other words, no difference. The British noted the physical differences, after centuries of experience, amongst the many different tribal groups and clans they found in Australia. The fact that they did not have a common language and often no common language source, also indicates they were descended from different peoples.
These Australians, today, are descended from hundreds of different groups here in 1788 – some say 350, others say 500 – without a common language, descended from different and earlier waves of migration and colonisation. They were not one people in 1788 and today, with so much intermixing, there are thousands of variations on this theme who also are not one unified group.
Someone 100% Aboriginal from one tribe, living in a remote community in WA has little in common with someone 100% Aboriginal from another tribe, living in Far North Queensland. Neither have anything remotely in common with someone minimally Aboriginal in ancestry, living in a city, with a part-Aboriginal distant ancestor.
@STD,
Australia never had a Flora and Fauna Act and no humans were ever classified under it. This myth is thought to have developed in WA where the Aboriginal Protector shared floor space with other departments, including one which dealt with Flora and Fauna. Since Aborigines were English subjects it would be impossible for them to be classified under Flora and Fauna, even if such an Act existed, which it did not. After all, Kangaroos and Wattle were not English subjects.
To quote Helen Irving on the matter:
• Helen Irving was appointed Professor Emerita at Sydney Law School in 2021. Her research includes Australian and United States constitutional law and history; constitutional citizenship; comparative constitutional design and gender; the use of history in constitutional interpretation, and models of judicial review.
“Flora and fauna”
The myth that the Constitution included a reference to the Aboriginal people under a “flora and fauna” section is entirely erroneous. The words “flora and fauna” do not appear anywhere in the Constitution, nor did they prior to 1967. There was no “Flora and Fauna Act” either. No legislation referred to or classified the Aboriginal people in such terms.
PT – The antisemitic lies in “The Hand That Signed the Paper” were promoted by the author as based on true events told to her by her relatives. She received a number of awards for her use of fiction to tell “honest” tales based on historical events. I care nothing about her fake name and fake heritage except her use of them to support her fake “history” – nothing like the usual use of a literary pen name. Her lies and the literary industry that willingly lapped it up and promoted it in the public arena is much more a parallel than the Ern Malley affair. That’s my point. It’s also much more in today’s readers’ personal recollection than Ern Malley.
“I mean surely she wouldn’t have been granted that award because they thought she was a “wog”!!!!!”
Wrong. She received awards for telling a tale that only a wog with that heritage could know.
Great Article.
So Dark Emu is a hoax and Pascoe has profited largely from it. But he is not alone, the fantasy began with HC “Nugget” Coombs, was embroidered into a tapestry by Henry Reynolds and others. It has since been promoted by Minister Wyatt and his cronies on co-design committees.
Bruce Pascoe deserves the scorn being heaped recently but he is not alone and he should not be scape-goated so that the perversion of the history of the Aboriginal achievements continues to be taught.
The history of Australian Aboriginal people is a gallant one in which individual tribes survived and sometimes prospered in the unique environment in which the tribe found itself.
The actual history is a noble story of people who adapted to what Nature threw at them and they are just as capable of meeting the challenges of the 21st Century if they are not deflected from that target by power-hungry people.
In 1837 laws were passed to prevent the sale of alcoholic beverages to Aboriginal Australians, as binge drinking became a problem in indigenous communities. Aboriginal people were given the right to drink alcohol in the various states and territories between 1957 and 1975, a right which, for many aborigines, became a symbol of equality, citizenship and status. Unfortunately, it also contributed to the problems suffered by aboriginal communities today.
loweprof, yes re Gwoja T. And we note that his ilk comprises a very, very tiny minority. Sure, Jacinta Price has several Aboriginal allies. But today we note the great force of Aboriginal ideology is animated by resentment and fantasies presented as truth. And by refusal to accept the best offer that Aborigines have ever had, in all the time before and after their ancestors walked out of Africa, namely: the arrival on these shores of the British.
It is clear, if one makes the merest effort to be empirical, that almost all support of human flourishing today in Australia is sourced/based in our British founding and in subsequent British nurturance. Now, I have some non-British forebears, along with my British ones. And my non-British forebears contributed mightily as pioneers in the Bush, and sacrificed terribly in the Big Wars. But it is to Britain that we must correctly express our gratitude.
This sentimentality about the long Aboriginal occupation of this continent is misplaced and is bereft of proper comprehension about what is required for proper human flourishing.
This is realism. And sure, realism is way out of fashion, today, here in our post-British Wasteland.
(Multiculturalism started as anti-Englandism, per ALP malice and power-mongering. It has become fully-fledged anti-Europeanism.)
I’m afraid the sad truth is that the Pascoe fiasco reveals more about the sorry state of the Australian people than about the Aborigines or even the deluded author himself. Australians are advancing rapidly down the road to serfdom. Unless people of decency and intellect respond collectively and forcefully to the mindless morons who currently control the country we are going to be in deep trouble.
Quadrant readers must understand that Australia can no longer rely on the philosophy of ‘common sense will prevail in the end’. Indeed, the end is nigh, unless a concerted effort is made to drive the Left out of political office, out of the education system, and out of the public service bureaucracy. The major institutions of our society are infested with Bruce Pascoes from the top down. The kind of duplicity and cunning exhibited by Pascoe is standard fare in every national institution.
@NFriar, @rosross,yes I do need to explain this.
Firstly as noted by rosross Australia has never had a flora and fauna act, I’m not sure why I said it did, it’s seems counterintuitive because in regard to my reference of Stan Grant and Linda Burney – the info on line ,and this is backed up by the ABC and whole host of other sources , that Australia never had a flora or fauna act – the ABC was politely refuting the idea that both these people felt as though they were classified as fauna under that act, but an act of parliament under that name has never existed. I am sorry I’m not sure how or why I drew that conclusion, strange ,even more strange as I hadn’t even been drinking.
As for the first half of your query- I agree that is a really poor choice of wording, it lacks real clarity.
As I see it the Government, used the Aboriginal protectorate as a conduit to deliver a modern day version of community care services, however the protectorate was care oversight for Aboriginal people’s exclusively. Basically it ensured that people’s basic needs were being met. I think from memory it included , as required ,it ensured the necessities of food ,shelter and warmth and on occasions fishing equipment, and even a small dinghy on one occasion if my memory serves me correctly , from an article written in Quadrant a few years ago.
It also oversaw the welfare of Aboriginal children, and could and did have power to remove or advise- not sure-children if needed- either on a temp or permanent basis as the situation warranted.
After reading that Quadrant piece on Aboriginal protectorates- I think South Australia specifically , I was really impressed for two reasons,
1)I had no idea that such a service ever existed,
2) This service really shows White Australia really making a genuine and concerted effort to give these people a leg up- it really did benefit and endeavoured to help these people.
Lastly, I did read online that some people of the day, referred to the Aboriginal protectorate as the flora and fauna act – not sure why, or whether the comment was political motivated or even malicious – not sure ,hope that explains my honest mistake. Will take that on board in future prior to submitting- sorry guys!
@rosross.
There is Victorian State Act, called the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act (1988). Aboriginal people do not fall under this Act. “It is designed to protect species and genetic material and habitats ,to prevent extinction and allow maximum genetic diversity within the Australian state of Victoria for perpetuity “.
museum.gov.au- Right Wrongs. In the flora and fauna section it does shed light on the subject…… in regard to the misunderstanding-some government departments who administered native flora and fauna also were charged with task of looking after Aboriginal people.
Hey, when you peddle crap at a readership the suffers Confirmation Bias AND Cognitive Dissonance then you are on a sure winner. At least the good burghers in the “Emperor’s New Clothes listened to the little boy when he saw through the hoax, but not the entrenched Left.
http://www.museum.wa.gov.au
When is the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney going to make a statement about this hoax? As Australia’s first Department of Anthropology it was the source some excellent ethnography stemming from the days when giants such as Bronislaw Malinowski and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown passed through its doors in the Quad. Aboriginal Australia was well-recorded and well-served by careful work on kinship, economy, food practices, and ritual life in various field studies. None of it supported Bruce Pascoe’s bowdlerised pastiche. But silence fell upon Pascoe’s work and still reigns there on it in those hallowed halls of yore?
Dear me.
@STD – thanks for the clarification.