In a further blow to the already-shredded credibility of Bruce Pascoe, Australia’s wokest state has added a scholarly rebuttal of his pseudo-history, Dark Emu to school reading lists. Of course, Victoria being Victoria, they couldn’t just dump Pascoe’s work of imaginative fiction from school reading lists entirely, but at least students can read actual historians using actual history to demolish Pascoe’s ludicrous fantasies.
Pascoe’s claims to be Aboriginal have likewise been shredded. Genealogists have traced every branch of his ancestry back to England. Pascoe, on the other hand, evades answering just who his supposed Aboriginal ancestors really were. Two of the three Aboriginal groups he claims descent from have publicly repudiated his claims.
And now comes another blow to the whitest Aborigine this side of Lydia Thorpe.
First, some (real) history: in the 60s, the Menzies government established the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, AIATSIS. It includes a publishing subsidiary, Aboriginal Studies Press (ASP).
Back to Pascoe and his claims of “history”. Pascoe has long maintained that the spur to write Dark Emu was a supposed meeting with an unnamed “group of academics in Canberra”, who, he says, rubbished his claims about Aborigines inventing agriculture and democracy, and building large settlements and hydro-engineering projects.
Pascoe has always been characteristically evasive about just who these academics were. But, in a 2014 ABC radio interview, he may have let slip more than he intended.
Aboriginal Studies Press […] had the option on this new book that I’m working on, on Aboriginal agriculture called Dark Emu, and they knocked it back because the professors on the board couldn’t bear for me to use the word agriculture […]
So there you have it – the ‘professors’ who rejected Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu manuscript were none other than some of Australia’s most qualified scholars on Indigenous Knowledge at the AIATSIS and its publishing arm, Aboriginal Studies Press. These professors are the curators and custodians of the world’s largest single repository of artifacts, writings, research reports, films and audio of the Australian Aboriginal peoples. But according to Bruce they are wrong and he is right – after all he bought a second-hand copy of the journal of Thomas Mitchell for 8 bucks that he says turned out to be some sort of Holy Book of Revelations on Aboriginal agriculture.
Dark Emu Exposed
So, what, exactly did these eminent professors of Aboriginal culture and history have to say about Pascoe’s Dark Emu manuscript? Enter, FOI. Thanks to an FOI request, academic critics of Pascoe have obtained the ASP’s internal correspondence evaluating the manuscript’s worth (or lack).
Notably, the publishers seemed to struggle to find anyone to take on the task of assessing the manuscript. But those that they could were “critical of the research effort, the structure and the writing style”. “The discussions [in the book] were discursive and unsystematic… the writing style was emotive and old-fashioned in some cases (e.g. ‘Dear Reader’), which wasn’t suitable for the project.”
In response, Pascoe, they said, “became quite critical of the assessor”. Pascoe eventually calmed down and submitted a revised manuscript, which still failed to impress.
“His arguments… remain largely unsubstantiated”. The lack of proper references was also noted. All in all, the publishers concluded, “The manuscript is not a well-credentialed response to current knowledge about Indigenous ‘agriculture’”.
Other assessments noted that Pascoe seemed to be cherry-picking explorers’ logs without context “to suit the writer’s argument and therefore it is not a satisfying critique”, which “often generalises without giving any evidence of specific examples”.
It should surprise no one, then, that the most eminent body of Aboriginal scholarship in Australia ticked the “Reject the manuscript” box on Dark Emu.
If only all publishers had such rigorous standards.