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Well, well, well. The University of Melbourne seems to have had taken a marvellous lunge towards reality. It no longer describes would-be Aboriginal Bruce Pascoe, its Enterprise Professor in Indigenous Agriculture, as a member of our First Nations. (Fact check: his First Nation is England, there is no Aboriginal line of descent in any of Pascoe’s forebears).
Professor Pascoe now seems to be just another colonial settler who ought to be feeling guilty towards Aborigines because of his white privilege. Here’s the Professor Pascoe story, for what it’s worth.
Pascoe, the Dark Emu fabricator, is responsible for the faux history bought by 250,000 credulous adults, and Young Dark Emu – a Truer (sic) History (60,000 sales), the latter used in schools to brainwash kids to back a two-class heirarchy for Australian citizens. Pascoe’s dodgy “history” converts pre-settlement nomadic Aboriginals to dwellers in stone-built towns of one to two thousand. He writes of Indigenous farmers sowing, harvesting and storing their crops. We are to believe they kept their livestock (wallabies? wombats?) secured in pens. Colorful, it is. History, it ain’t.[1]
The Dark Emu nonsense has been demolished first by Quadrant writer Peter O’Brien’s Bitter Harvest in 2019 and belatedly last June by credentialled leftist academics Professor Peter Sutton and Dr Keryn Walshe.[2]
Melbourne University has a “Find an Expert” service, where you check out the university’s brainiacs. Tap to find that Melbourne University now describes Professor Pascoe merely as “a writer and farmer”.
Yet on his appointment as Enterprise Professor, the very first words of the announcement stressed his Aboriginality:
Indigenous author and advocate Bruce Pascoe has joined the University of Melbourne as Melbourne Enterprise Professor in Indigenous Agriculture in the Faculty of Veterinary and Agricultural Sciences (FVAS).
The role, which will sit within the School of Agriculture and Food, has been designed to build knowledge and understanding of Indigenous agriculture within the Faculty and to grow engagement and research activities in this area.
The university’s link on “Bruce Pascoe” takes you to his publisher, Magabala Books, which says, “Bruce is a Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian man, and currently lives on his farm in Gippsland, Victoria.” Actually Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian men – and women – reject his claim.
The Find an Expert body text reads, semi-literately
He has published 36 book (sic) including Dark Emu which won the NSW Premier’s Award for Literatur (sic) in 206 (sic)…He has published numerous essays and journalism (sic) both in Australia and overseas. he (sic) is also a farmer and grows Australian Aboriginal Grains (sic) and tubers…
Find an Expert paints Professor Pascoe as the most unusual professor ever to haunt the cloisters and dreaming spires of the university-by-the-Zoo. The institution credits Bruce with 16 “scholarly works”. Its definition of “scholarly” has become elastic, sadly for its alumni and authentic scholars. Pascoe’s Scholarly Works list includes (with my elaborations)
♦ “Fog a Dox” ($19.95). “Albert Cutts is a tree feller. A fella who cuts down trees. Fog is a fox cub raised by a dingo. He’s called a dox because people are suspicious of foxes and Albert Cutts owns the dingo and now the dox. Albert is a bushman and lives a remote life surrounded by animals and birds. All goes well until Albert has an accident.”
♦ Seahorse ($16.95). “Jack and his family escape to Seahorse Bay whenever they can. They spend idyllic days exploring the waters of the bay, diving, fishing and cooking up feasts on the beach. Jack cannot believe his luck when he discovers a sunken boat not far off the coast. He shows his father and they decide to salvage it. But what is the story behind this mysterious boat?
♦ Found. ($24.95). “This gentle story set in the rugged Australian bush is about a small calf who becomes separated from his family.” Keep in mind that Pascoe is a Professor in the VETERINARY and Agricultural Sciences Faculty. His agriculture-and-food colleagues will find much erudition to respect in Pascoe’s scholarly calf studies.
♦ Salt: Selected essays and stories ($26.95) –“…showcasing his shimmering genius across a lifetime of work.” A further blurb says, “The title speaks to memories and ghosts triggered by the smell of salt; its ability to clean, to render flesh and skin from bone, to preserve evidence, to signal cumulative impacts on Country”. For Melbourne University scholarly scientific purposes I think this book should be retitled “NaCl: Selected essays and stories.”
♦ Dark Emu and its derivatives. More fiction, enough said.
Pascoe’s Find an Expert web page also has a category “Projects” with a zero total. In my scrupulous way I sent the following inquiries to Melbourne University:
On your “Find an Expert” website, you describe Professor Bruce Pascoe as a “writer and farmer”. There is no statement that he is Indigenous. When appointed, you described him as “Indigenous”.
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- Does Melbourne University no longer assert that Professor Pascoe is Indigenous?
- Does Melbourne University no longer assert that Professor Pascoe is Indigenous?
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- On the Find an Expert site, there is listed 16 “Scholarly Works” by Professor Pascoe.
Of the ten works cited, five are fiction books for adults and children. Is it appropriate for Melbourne University to refer to them as “scholarly works”?
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- Is Professor Pascoe’s appointment to Melbourne University full or part time? Is he tenured? Or is it in the nature of an “adjunct” professorship? To be specific, what Academic Level is Professor Pascoe’s appointment, as per Enterprise Agreement
2.14.3. An Academic is appointed or promoted by the University, at its discretion, to a particular classification level. Appointment and promotion are based on: 2.14.3.1. merit as determined by the University; and 2.14.3.2. the Academic or candidate demonstrating, to the satisfaction of the University, potential capability and competency to advance through the academic levels.
With commendable efficiency but faint relevance, a reply came a day later from a uni PR Amelia Swinburne:
Here is our statement, which is attributable to a University of Melbourne spokesperson.
The Faculty of Veterinary and Agricultural Sciences appointed Bruce Pascoe as an Enterprise Professor in Indigenous Agriculture to further our work in this area. His extensive knowledge and experience is extending our teaching, research and engagement in Indigenous agriculture. Bruce is a respected member of our Faculty and makes a valuable contribution to our academic community, and we will not be reviewing his appointment.
This reply manages to sidestep every one of my questions. I suspect ambitious uni staff as well as Quadrant readers would be interested in pink-cheeked Pascoe’s precise particulars. Crikey! claims that Pascoe’s weird Melbourne University professorship is at Level E, which according to the university’s enterprise bargaining agreement, yields $200,000 a year if full-time.
The “newsy” element of the university reply is that the university “will not be reviewing his appointment” an obvious question I hadn’t asked. Freudian slip there, perhaps?
Melbourne Uni introduced its “Enterprise Professors” category in 2015.
Criteria for appointment:
2.1. “In order to be appointed to the position of ‘Melbourne Enterprise Professor’ or ‘Honorary Melbourne Enterprise Professor’, individuals must:
♦ Have an eminent and sustained record of peak level leadership, entrepreneurship and influence;
♦ Be widely recognised for their outstanding achievements in industry, business, professions and/or government; and
♦ Demonstrate specialist expertise and a highly developed industry/business knowledge base that matches in breadth and depth what is expected of all professors of the University”.
As a retired Associate Professor of History Les Louis puts it, “However loosely interpreted, Bruce Pascoe does not meet these criteria.”
Roger Karge runs the Dark Emu Exposed website with its wealth of debunking research on Pascoe. Karge graduated from Melbourne University with an honors degree in organic chemistry and has built a highly-successful industrial chemistry business. Karge took up Pascoe-debunking for no other reasons than respect for science and indignation at Pascoe’s blather.
Karge says Melbourne University was formerly populated with “old school” agricultural scientists appointed and promoted by their success in unlocking beneficial secrets of nature, not on the basis of identity and woke politics. These olden-day academics studied and respected Indigenous plant and insect knowledge, and from their findings global industries developed. He instances his 1970s mentor Professor of Organic Chemistry Don Cameron (tenure 1968-2000) MA ScD (Camb) MSc (Qld) PhD (Manc) FRACI. Karge’s own Honours work with Cameron was studying the pigment chemistry of the Australia’s indigenous Lac insects.
The university’s Media Statement says (author’s emphasis),
Mr Pascoe also sees an opportunity to open the door to greater collaboration with Yorta Yorta people at the Faculty’s Dookie agricultural campus in the Goulburn Valley region. ‘Let’s put our food science there … we’re going to need land and we’re going to need a research facility that is Aboriginal-owned or has Aboriginal management.‘
A lot hangs on who Pascoe means by “we”. Is “we” Pascoe’s private business enterprise or the university or the Australian community? Roger Karge asks why Melbourne University is comfortable with a new professor’s apparent agenda to organise an Aboriginal takeover of Dookie’s public campus on 2440ha, with its venerable history since 1886.
Karge next dissects Pascoe’s record as an entrepreneur, which hypothetically might justify his appointment despite his zero scientific credentials.
In Dark Emu, Pascoe says his yam daisy growing venture started about 2012 (p212), and predicts widespread commercial dissemination “soon”. Nine years later, Karge notes that there is little yam daisy seed to purchase, and those seeds can cost 20c to $1 apiece. Even Pascoe’s own business, Black Duck Foods has nothing under “Shop” except for a sign, “Coming soon.”
Karge also notes Professor Pascoe’s previous business ‘enterprise’ was called Gurundgi Munjie Pty Ltd, which, in Pascoe’s Dark Emu is described as
…a Yuin company on the New South Wales south coast [which] is planning harvests of a number of grains, and early trials of flour production have had spectacular results. ( p214)
Karge: “The results could not have been that ‘spectacular’ given that the company, which was started in 2015 was by 2019 in the process of being ‘struck-off’ the ASIC companies register, for what ‘business’ reason we can only guess.” (The ASIC page is unchanged at October 2021).
Professor Pascoe’s most recent business ‘enterprise’, Black Duck Foods Ltd is an ‘Unlisted Public Company – Non-Profit Company’.[3] Karge writes:
If Melbourne University wish to appoint an ‘Enterprise Professor’, one would expect that they would choose a candidate with a commercially proven background in running an ‘enterprise’ profitably to generate the funds needed to invest in its business, research and development program.
It would be nice to know if Professor Pascoe submitted a business plan to justify the substantial university funds that will be needed to achieve his goals.
With all due respect to Professor Pascoe, he is 74 years old, an age at which most people have retired and yet the University believes he is in a position to head up a multi-decade, difficult project such as this.
The whole indigenous grass-seed-to-bread theory is just a New-Age fantasy of the ‘vory Tower academics of sustainability at the University of Melbourne.
A large scale grain-to-flour industry cannot be developed in Australia using indigenous grasses with their poor protein output. Yields are about 50kg per hectare compared with 2000kg per acre for best wheat, which has much lower unit cost. Another indigenous seed producer, after 25 years’ work, sold seed at hundreds of dollars per kilogram, which makes for a pretty expensive loaf of bread. Melbourne University’s hopes for Pascoe to foster sustainable and low-emission food crops seem chimerical. Apart from the economics, kangaroo-grass cropping requires copious sprays of Roundup and other chemical herbicides.
Pascoe in Dark Emu sets himself up as a pioneer user of Aboriginal plant knowledge, leaving his hugely more successful predecessors unmentioned.
Karge says Melbourne University must be “unbelievably naïve” to swallow such Pascoe’s claims. Leonard J. Webb (CSIRO) half a century ago repeatedly surveyed Aborigines all over Australia on medicinal plants and identified 124 useful ones. The most famous was a fish poison from the bush Duboisia myoporoides. This created the anti-seasickness drug hyoscine (scopolamine), which was given to all D-Day troops to help them fight on the Normandy beaches. Australia today is the world’s largest supplier of hyoscine, an ingredient of Travacalm tablets.
Karge tracks Pascoe’s media presence and finds it has fallen off markedly since the leftist academics Sutton and Walshe, following Peter O’Brien, demolished Dark Emu. However, state education authorities continue to support schools indoctrinating kids with Dark Emu nonsense, and this year Pascoe even became joint winner[4] of the Australian Humanist Award of 2021. CEO of Humanists Australia, Dr Heidi Nicholl explained, “Humanism is a framework for living an ethical, meaningful and compassionate life without relying on supernatural forces.” She cites Pascoe for his outstanding achievements ‘through a First Nations lens’ — as if Aborigines were uninterested in the supernatural.
Amazon last month released a movie “Burning” blaming 2019-20 bushfires on 1degC of warming since 1910, as distinct from sub-standard forest management, and starring Pascoe and iconic climate hysteric Tim Flannery.
It’s good to see that Bruce at Melbourne University is not letting the (kangaroo) grass grow under his feet. I’ll check with the PR people in a few months to see if they’re still “not reviewing his appointment”.
Tony Thomas’s just-published “Foot Soldier in the Culture Wars” ($29.95) is available from author at tthomas061@gmail.com or publisher Connor Court.
[1] Professor Geoffrey Blainey: …the famous explorer Thomas Mitchell…never once used the word thousand. The word thousand seems to have been made up. It’s a terrible mistake and it ruins an important part of his [Pascoe’s] argument. There’s no evidence that there are Aboriginal townships with permanent houses, dependent for most of their food on agriculture. There’s just no evidence for it.’ — Blainey 19th August 2020 – listen here from 2:57
[2][2] Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers, the Dark Emu Debate. MUP.
[3] Black Duck plans to assist Indigenous people on a journey towards ‘food sovereignty’. Peter O’Brien quotes Pascoe:
Central to First Nations sovereignty is food sovereignty – the right to define one’s own food system. The right to produce our own cultural food.
[4] With transgender activist Georgie Stone
I feel like we have all been transported to a bizarre unreal world in which ideas no matter how wrong, stupid or contradicted by facts cannot die. The Climategate emails should have debunked tat con instantly, yet our politicians continue to support the cult at huge waste to Oz. 60,000+ people died of heart diseases in the same period that the Wuhan Sniffle contributed to to 1,600 deaths in the same period, yet laws are enacted to oppress us …. for which: heart or sniffle?
So, when a faux-aborigine writes rubbish, it fits the pattern of ensuring that we are entering a New Dark Age.
I am so glad that I stopped wasting my time and never completed my university degree, but went on to do many much more useful and productive things
It is enough to wish it were true to say that it is. And sadly that means including in academia that opinion is believed to be the equal of facts.
I believe it is incumbent on Melbourne University and the Minister for Indigenous Australians to take positive steps to undo the damage they have done. Their reckless promotion of Mr Pascoe as an Aboriginal author and the implication that the work “Dark Emu” had their unqualified endorsement probably played more than a small role in the book being used in the education of children.
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How is the untruth of Pascoe not of a kind with the untruths over ‘genocide’ , so-called ‘stolen generations and mainstream academics falsifying their sources for anticolonial claims?
I had a senior PS person claim at a party among our peers that the Aboriginals used to be legislatively under the Flora and Fauna Act.. I told her that had never been true, and she should check her sources.
Later that party she came by and told me she googled and found out I was right. That claim had been part of the antiracist public service training she had paid for in her department, from the Aboriginal trainer.
To john.singer I can say that the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Ken Wyatt, has already been asked for his comment on the suggestion that Bruce Pascoe is making false claims of his indigenous heritage. The minister declined to examine the charge!
Great write up and exposure Tony – thank you Roger Karge for all your research.
It is long overdue for a scientific based DNA gene testing for determining aboriginality. The current determination of aboriginality where white people are deemed aboriginal is pathetically unsound and in need of review; intelligent logic dictates you cannot be deemed of different race just because you identify with them and they accept such — that defies intelligent analysis and logic — you are what you are born, you can change allegiance — but not race or genetics.
Legislation needs to determine the fact, you are what you are born — you cannot change your genetic base; a pig can never be a parrot, nor a cat a cow.
The University has touched up its wording, but real remedy is still lacking and needed.
Pascoe attempts to set up the Aboriginal as the proprietor of the soil. And if they cultivated the soil and had villages it becomes a stain on the British for not recognising them as owners. This idea of the cultivator and the ownership of specific land was a prime consideration in Mabo2 and Murray Island. Mainland Aboriginals were possibly thousands of years away from this (if ever)
This goes with Quadrant’s prior article which dealt with the activists view that Cook’s claim to Australia was in breach of his orders and therefore invalid.
The British took over on its own terms and for its own benefit and if there was any resistance it was puerile and ineffective. The British tried to integrate, civilise and Christianise the Aboriginal. The British made enormous and expensive efforts to assist a people’s locked in the Stone Age.
There isn’t much more to it. The activist rhetoric is absurd … but still it goes on.
Hi Tony,
You make it clear that the person(s) who authorised the Professor status for him ought to be asked to resign, for it is becoming ever clearer that a lack of due diligence (an administrative, not racial, matter) was involved. But, a more important target is to get nonsense off school curricula particularly when the weight of conventional evidence highlights false claims.
Even more important is study of the effects of the United Nations World Heritage scheme, by which rather large areas of Australian land are encumbered, some in favour of disproportionate aboriginal involvement and virtually all, with Federal government connivance, in favour of locking out productive industry like mining and farming. (By farming, I mean the usual Australian way, not the mythical Pascoe aboriginal way.)
Finally, the biggest target of relevance here would be to disconnect Australians from as many United Nations schemes as possible. The cost:benefit ratio of most schemes fails by a long way. Those sub-schemes with positive, continuing value -there are some – can easily be identified and kept by political decision. Geoff S
@gilmay97,
You said: It is long overdue for a scientific based DNA gene testing for determining aboriginality.
With less than 1% difference between what were once called races this is simply not possible. In 1788 when the British arrived there were estimated to be, in the following decades, around 350 or so different Aboriginal groups or clans. Some were big enough to be tribes but most were not. The British and Europeans noted physical differences , i.e. Negroid, Malay, New Guinea, Polynesian, Indian as some of the characteristics mentioned. They were not one people.
And while DNA can be useful in identifying relatively close connections, it is useless for going back into the distant past. In the past 240 plus years the original 350 (some say 500) groups have diversified into thousands of variations on the theme of those original tribal connections with most of those claiming Aboriginality now more Anglo-European in ancestry than anything else with an increasing mix of Asians and others. Modern genome studies say that every human live on the planet today is descended from the same distant group of ancestors – we are one. Go back a thousand years and we have millions of ancestors so identifying which lot of Homo Sapiens got to Australia in the first place and which of the claimants were really descended from them, would be a real hunt for a flea in a haystack.
So, what are we identifying with DNA? Since there never was an Aboriginality per se: and certainly is not much of it today, the DNA approach would not work. A more sensible approach is that taken by the British: someone half Aboriginal, of any tribe and half European is European. Someone fully Aboriginal of this or that tribe is however not the problem. The problem is with the Aborigine Lites who are less than 50% Aboriginal in ancestry, often less than 10%, but who still claim Aboriginality. That should not be allowed.
In most other countries one needs to be 50%, some allow 25%, to claim ‘native’ connections. However, back to the ever-sensible British who said, someone 50% Aboriginal could register as Aboriginal if they opted to lead a traditional life where they were subject to different regulations and greater support.
If we made benefits needs-based it would solve the problem. Aboriginality would become a personal issue and nothing more. We would still face the issue of elective benefits which can arise from waving one’s Aboriginality flag but if the money is taken out of the equation it would be a good start to dismantling the entire farce of Aboriginality.
I wonder if there was an unsuccessful applicant (or even more than one) for Pascoe’s Enterprise Professorship – if so, they might gave a very legitimate grievance about the serious want of due diligence prior to the appointment.
“gave” – typo for have
To repeatedly and publicly make dubious or provably false claims which would almost certainly invite ridicule and to attribute such claims to an ethnic group would seem to constitute a form of racial vilification. To do this while also making personal claim to such ethnicity must surely compound the harm. To do this with no supporting evidence or even any similarity of appearance, and against denial of any tribal relationship by other members of the groups, has displayed an ultimate disregard of any concern for truth.
That any credibility might be accorded to all this would have been hard to imagine. That it would be enthusiastically swallowed whole by both the educational establishment and academia is beyond imagining. That it has taken almost a decade for academia to even begin to question the most blatant of these absurdities can only reflect a deep, perhaps terminal, disregard for any notion of truth now endemic in academia.
If Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act has any justifiable purpose in a democracy it should be applied here.
Melbourne Uni graduates must be rosy red with embarrassment over the whole sorry affair. When I arrived in Australia, I was told that Melbourne Uni was a good university. Was I being lied to or did people just have a different definition of “good”?
The Pascoe farrago is the shambles that keeps on giving. Now MU is doing textbook PR: quietly walking back – skulking back – their Pascoe blunder while dodging blame and hoping to avoid liability. You’d like to think Tony’s, Keith’s, Peter’s and Roger’s illuminating, precise and entertaining dissections of the Pascoe farce will lead to a cleaning out of Pascoe’s grubby little corner of the agora, but I concede that’s not how the swamp rolls.
DNA gene testing for determining aboriginality.
Indian researcher Dr Satish Kumar led the extraction and analysis of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from 966 individuals from 26 ancient relic populations of India, the Baiga and Birho tribes identifying seven individuals from central Dravidian, and Austro-Asiatic tribes whose data had already been analyzed and published by colleagues that share two basal synonymous mtDNA polymorphisms G8251A and A9156T with the M42 haplogroup, which is specific to Australian Aborigines; showing a shared mtDNA lineage between Indians and Australian Aborigines. These particular mutations do not exist anywhere else in the world; they are shared exclusively between a few isolated ancient tribes in India and Australian aboriginals. They are the same people.
In fact, Mark Stoneking & Allan Wilson of the University of California, Berkeley, US (now at Leipzig University, Germany), said their work showed that at least 15 different mtDNA lineages colonized Australia. They said this confirmed an earlier study of Aboriginal Australians done in 1987 with a smaller sample, which found seven different mtDNA lineages. The authors acknowledged the smallness of their sample but argued that a bigger size would only increase the number of different lineages to be found.
in 1999 further research was conducted by Professor Mark Stoneking, now at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology at Leipzig, and Dr Alan Redd, an anthropologist from Pennsylvanian State University. This time, their mtDNA analysis was done on a larger population of 319. Samples were taken from Australian Aborigines and people from the highlands and coastal regions of Papua New Guinea. The Aborigines comprised 105 individuals from northwest Australia (Great Sandy Desert and Kimberley regions) and 95 from Arnhem Land.
@gilmay97,
We know some of the peoples here when the British arrived were descended from waves of migration from India. But that does not make for Aboriginality in any identified sense. It just means some descendants can be linked to some ancestors who were themselves descended from the Indian migrants.
I lived in India for some years and was quickly struck by how Dravidian (southern) Indians looked like some Aborigines and their native dog was the spitting image of the Dingo. It appears to have now been established that the Indian native dog became the Dingo after Indians migrated to Australia, around 4,000 years ago.
The point was, there is no DNA identification which would or could apply to every Australian with Aboriginal ancestry just as there was not in 1788. They were different peoples.
It is also important to hold in mind that genetics like carbon dating, remains a field with many claims but little expertise or true knowledge. In other words, neither is as accurate as some might believe. The sheer weight of numbers going back 1,000 years let alone 4,000 or 40,000 raises questions about accuracy.
Quote: Imagine counting all your ancestors as you trace your family tree back in time. In the nth generation before the present, your family tree has 2n slots: two for parents, four for grandparents, eight for great-grandparents, and so on. The number of slots grows exponentially. By the 33rd generation—about 800 to 1,000 years ago—you have more than eight billion of them.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-are-all-more-closely-related-than-we-commonly-think/
Quote: The Aborigines comprised 105 individuals from northwest Australia (Great Sandy Desert and Kimberley regions) and 95 from Arnhem Land.
These are connected areas and it would not be surprising if Indian migrations and colonisations eventually inhabited all of these areas. And given the high rates of intermarriage in Aboriginal clans, and the practice of kidnapping and raping women from nearby tribes/clans/groups, it would hardly be surprising to find some shared connections between north-west Australia and Arnhem land.
If the same indicators were found in thousands of people, descended from the 350-500 different groups called Aborigines, from across the entire island continent it would be a different matter.
I continue to maintain there is no Aboriginal DNA even if there are some DNA connections in certain tribal groups or between descendants of tribal groups inhabiting areas close enough to allow interbreeding.
Huge amounts of human effort and money are being spent in ways that keep Aborigines stuck in highly dependent, infantile, passive states -in which they look backward to an imagined fake/false past of cornucopia.
And in this way, they are diverted from dealing with Actual Reality, here and now.
Rosross you wrote: “The British and Europeans noted physical differences , i.e. Negroid, Malay, New Guinea, Polynesian, Indian as some of the characteristics mentioned. They were not one people.”
Quotes and other details about this topic would make a great Quadrant paper … is it possible or probable that the Dravidian Aboriginal only arrived 4,000 years ago with dingoes and took over the country. They obviously couldn’t take over Tasmania which were negros???
@restt,
I read a lot but am an amateur. The references could be found I am sure. If the Negroid peoples got to Tasmania before the land bridge disappeared, 12,000 years ago, they could have been driven south by later arrivals. However, since the Dravidians (Indians) are thought to have arrived about 4,000 years ago, with their dog, it was not likely to be them. That presupposes accuracy of dates for the Dravidians, the landbridge and there being no other way some tribal groups could have gotten to Tasmania.
Given reports of physical differences one would presume that there were a number of migratory waves coming into and through Australia, which, given the time-frames posited, would make sense. The British certainly had experience of different peoples in terms of physical/facial differences. And for that matter language.
I say to Minister Ken Wyatt, you have a duty to all Australians and a Special duty for all Aboriginal People and that includes a duty to correct mistakes. If special benefits are conferred on a citizen because of a status you have afforded him or confirmed him in that status, in error, you are duty bound to correct that error. Under the Westminster system of Government if you fail in that duty it is incumbent on you to resign.
My maternal great grandmother was Aboriginal. Other lineages that my geanological research have recovered so far include: Celtic (Irish and Scots), Ashkenazi Jew, Finnish and Dutch. So what does that make me? Human perhaps? I am not a “proud member of XX Nation” etc that is often highligted in CVs. It is incredibly disrespecful to do this failure to acknowlege the entire family tree. Having said the above, I oppose identication of self in terms of racial origins
Pardon the expression but good ‘ol’ seemingly uncomplicated Australian slang- why create a sentence when a word will seemingly suffice- UNI with a d in it.
Recent studies regarding Ancient DNA and populations settled away from the equatorial regions suggest that if Aboriginal Agriculture existed for the time periods Pascoe suggests there would be evidence that those tribes would have been developing lighter skin pigmentations because of the weaker solar radiation and the lack of vitamin D in their food production.