The Fork In The Road - Did it Start and End in Canberra For Bruce Pascoe?
As each of us travels through life, we are inevitably confronted one day with a fork in the road.
A fork where we have to make a choice, a very important, internal, moral choice.
One fork leads to an immediate gain, and maybe ultimately, fame and fortune as well. But it requires that we will forever have to carry a secret, a secret that has the power to ruin us.
The second path is nondescript. We can’t see where it will ultimately take us. Although this path looks poor and we may not have that much to gain, it does at least look like an honest track. A track along which we can sleep peacefully each night.
Did Bruce Pascoe face a literary fork in the road in Canberra?
Writer Bruce Pascoe in 1988
Professor Bruce Pascoe in 2019
Yuin Aboriginal man Bruce Pascoe ca2020
The Canberra Times of July 23rd 1988 reviews Bruce Pascoe’s latest book at that time, Fox.
‘One is conscious that the ideas, fears and longings of Fox are, as here, described for him, from the outside, and with an overlay of a white author's interpretation. Pascoe is, after all, imagining the psyche of an Aboriginal person; and it is not possible for him to convey all that the concept of "my people" would mean to, say, Colin Johnson or Sally Morgan. He writes as a humane, informed liberal, but as a white man as well.’
- Veronica Sen, Canberra Times Reviewer
A Dark Emu is born in Canberra
…Pascoe was best known as a writer of fiction and a publisher, pursuits he had subsidised over many decades by working variously as a tourist guide, dairy farmer and fencer. His broadsides against the history profession, he recalls, came to the attention of a group of academics in Canberra who were sufficiently concerned to invite him to an off-campus meeting at one of their homes. Pascoe remembers arriving there in his second-hand ute, having driven to the nation’s capital from his home four hours away in the remote Victorian town of Gipsy Point in East Gippsland. “They said, ‘Look, we don’t want you talking to our students about this stuff, because it’s wrong, it didn’t happen’,” he says. “‘You’re talking about agriculture, but that didn’t happen. Aboriginal people were hunter-gatherers’.”
Pascoe is hazy on the identity of these eminent professors, but remembers that they slapped him over the wrist with utmost civility. “Cup of tea, lovely conversation — nice people, actually. But when I left that meeting, I got in my old beaten-up ute, and I was furious.” He says he drove straight to a second-hand bookstore and plonked down $8 for a copy of the journals of 19th-century explorer Sir Thomas Mitchell, which he cracked open while sitting in the driver’s seat. There his eyes fell on Mitchell’s eyewitness account of Aboriginal villages in Queensland housing more than a thousand people, and “haycocks” of harvested seed-grass stretching for miles, drying in the sun to make flour for native bread. It was then he knew he had his next book. “I have to thank that group of academics,” he says wryly. Because without their intervention, he might never have written his one and only bestseller’
- Richard Guilliatt, The Australian - Turning history on its head. Academic conflict accidentally turned Bruce Pascoe into our most influential indigenous historian - May 25th 2019
Has the Bruce Pascoe story suddenly found itself back in Canberra, 33 years later?
‘In his review in Inside Story, published in print in The Canberra Times on Friday, Professor Tim Rowse declares that [academics] Sutton and Walshe "chip away at so many parts of Pascoe's thesis that it is, in my opinion, demolished".
-Sally Pryor, The Canberra Times June 18th 2021
The Canberra Times of July 3rd 2021.
‘Readers, the blush you see on my cheek is put there by how Bruce Pascoe's fabulously popular book Dark Emu (it has sold 260,000 copies and has attracted prizes and influencers' influential gushings galore) is now revealed to be a very, very bad book.
I am one of those who, alerted by the public gushings (a lot of it from Pascoe-besotted ABC radio luminaries) bought and read it and imagined it to be a very, very importantly good book, a book that righted wrongs…
The scholars, horrified, say that the First Australians were never farmers, that they were always hunter-gatherers, but that there has never been anything "mere'' or primitive about hunter-gatherers, their way of life requiring sophistications and spiritual attunements to their world of which Pascoe is totally ignorant. The scholars' case is evidence-based. Pascoe's is largely made up…
Yes, many of us may be buying it, praising it, recommending it (state governments have even prescribed it for reading in schools and one university has made its author a professor) because we feel it is a book that urges a new respect for a shamefully downtrodden and disrespected people. Buying, admiring and gushing about the book has given us a kind of illusory moral comfort. Yes, we've been muddle-headed, but we meant well and showed naive goodwill.’
- Ian Warden, Opinion piece - “The blushes of the gullible literati”
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