Advice for Concerned Parents - How to Save Your Children from the Indoctrination of Young Dark Emu
Some parents have contacted us seeking advice on how to protect their child from being indoctrinated by the false history of Young Dark Emu, as is being promoted by some school teachers.
We have put together a list of the main reasons why studying Young Dark Emu is bad for your child, as well as some examples of the completely false ideas put forward by Mr Pascoe in his Young Dark Emu book.
We suggest that you inform your child’s teacher that you object to your child being exposed to, Young Dark Emu – A Truer History, as a study-text for the following reasons :
1. WARNINGS from the Publisher of Young Dark Emu - A Truer History
Even the publisher of Young Dark Emu – A Truer History , Magabala Books advises in its Teachers’ Guide to Young Dark Emu that :
“Some of the themes explored in Young Dark Emu are confronting and contested” - page 2 of the Teacher’s Guide
“Young Dark Emu contains language and concepts that may be challenging for students at the Year 4 and 5 levels [Ages 9-11].” – page 2
“Young Dark Emu contains many historical primary sources, some of which contain language and descriptions regarding First Nations People that are considered inappropriate today.” – page 4
“Some of the ideas and themes explored in Young Dark Emu, such as frontier conflict, may be distressing or challenging for some students. Students may not wish to be active participants in class discussions and this should be respected.”- page 4
“…warn students that they may find some content sad or confronting.” – page 5
In an age of rising mental depression, and given the stresses and anxieties that our young children are under today, many parents will not want to expose their children to even more distress by forcing them to study Young Dark Emu.
So dear parents, the easiest way to get your child an exemption from participating, and being indoctrinated with the false history of Young Dark Emu, is to claim that the book is too distressing for your child. You can point out to the teachers that even the publisher of Young Dark Emu advises, in their own teaching guide, that,
“Some of the ideas and themes explored in Young Dark Emu, such as frontier conflict, may be distressing or challenging for some students. Students may not wish to be active participants in class discussions and this should be respected.”
Other problems with Young Dark Emu you may want to make your child’s teachers aware of include the following :
2. THE HISTORY OF VIOLENCE ‘SCARES THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS’ OUT OF CHILDREN
Young Dark Emu – A Truer History has far too much emphasis on violence and massacres, which are totally inappropriate topics for our 9 to 11 year old children.
- Image of a massacre from Young Dark Emu - ‘Conflict on the Rufus’- page 12
Even the renowned Aboriginal academic, Professor Marcia Langton appears to agree that depictions of Colonial Settler-Aboriginal violence are of concern.
Distinguished academic Marcia Langton has warned against “scaring the living daylights” out of children when teaching the history of violence against indigenous people.
Professor Langton told the National Press Club it was important to be careful when teaching schoolchildren about Australia’s bloody colonial history. We must not “scare the living daylights” out of kids, she said.
- The Australian, Thursday, September 26, 2019. here
A ‘Massacre’ Project found in Young Dark Emu.
Children are asked to fill in the thought bubbles with words from the politically inspired list given to the children, which include the words :
‘Murderer’
‘Invader’
‘Thief’
‘Savage’
‘Resistance fighter’
This exercise does not promote goodwill between Aboriginal people and other Australians. The teachers pushing this are indoctrinating our children to create racial divisions within our society, which in our opinion is a form of child abuse.
A discussion of the ‘killings’ and ‘massacres’ which have occurred in Australia is far too a violent and complex issue for children of the ages of 9 to 11 to comprehend. These episodes in our history are part of a much wider story of mankind - how all of mankind has engaged in fighting, war and massacres since time immemorial. Indeed, Aboriginal people themselves have caused some of the largest massacres in Australian history against other Aboriginal people. For example, the inter-tribal Warrowen Massacre in Brighton, Melbourne around 1834, when 77 Aboriginal men women and children were massacred by another Aboriginal tribe, was especially brutal - see here. This part of our history is best left until students are mature enough to study these topics in late high school or University.
3. Is Young Dark Emu an Ideology from a Person who is the Wrong Role Model for our Children?
Rupert Gerritsen, who Mr Pascoe says, ‘should have got all the credit for Dark Emu,’ was a convicted terrorist bomber who was jailed in Western Australia.
The author of Young Dark Emu, Mr Bruce Pascoe, on the Acknowledgement page 74 of his book, says he is,
‘…deeply indebted to Rupert Gerritsen…’ , a writer who provided the basis of the Dark Emu story.
Mr Pascoe also admits in The Australian newspaper in May 2019, that “Rupert should have got all the credit for Dark Emu.”
Now, Rupert Gerritsen was a terrorist bomber who was convicted and jailed in Western Australia for planting a bomb in a Government building in Perth.
We do not think Mr Gerritsen is therefore a good role model for our children and we question whether our children should be studying his wacky theories about Aboriginal people being ‘farmers’ and living in ‘stone houses’ in ‘towns of 1000 peopl’ and keeping animals in ‘pens’ as Mr Pascoe claims in Dark Emu.
References on Rupert Gerritsen’s terrorist background are here : Ref 1 here, Ref 2 here and Ref 3 here.
4. Mr Pascoe Just Makes Stuff Up about Aboriginal Seed Gatherers and Modern Australian Farmers
Dr Norman Tindales’s original 1974 map based on where Aboriginal people had a high amount of grass seeds in their diet - it was not drawn as a ‘Grain Belt’ map where Aboriginal people planted and harvested grain crops. Dr Tindale believed Aboriginal people were hunter-gatherers, not farmers.
This is Mr Pascoe’s map, which he says is based on Dr Tindale’s Aboriginal Grain Belt Map. Note the hand-drawn expansion of the boundaries to include Victoria and more of Qld and WA.
The first map on the left is Dr Norman Tindale’s 1974 original map of where Aboriginal people had a high proportion of seed grains in their diet.
This is the map which Mr Pascoe references when he creates what he calls the ‘Aboriginal Grain Belt’ map.
Mr Pascoe then proceeds to rub out Dr Tindale’s boundaries and then crudely adds his own new boundaries in pen, greatly expanding the boundaries in the process. He publishes this new ‘doctored’ map in his book Dark Emu.
In Young Dark Emu Mr Pascoe then goes further and adds a much smaller modern, Contemporary Grain belt to trick our young children into believing that the Aboriginal Grain Belt is very much larger than the Grain Belt of modern Australian farmers (see below).
Mr Pascoe’s Grain belt map in Young Dark Emu shows a false Aboriginal Grain belt very much larger than Dr Tindale originally described above, and a modern, Contemporary Grain Belt very much smaller than it really is (see right)
The modern Contemporary Australian Grain belts of Australian farmers is very much larger than Mr Pascoe shows in his map.
5. Mr Pascoe Just Makes Stuff Up about 'Aboriginal Stone houses’
Caption in Young Dark Emu describes the ‘village hut’ drawing as ‘Reconstruction of a Gunditjimara Village, Victoria’, which implies that a scientific archaeologist has reconstructed accurately an Aboriginal site.
If we inspect the actual caption from Mr Pascoe’s source, it shows that Mr Pascoe incorrectly copies it, and leaves out the word ‘hypothetical’. That is, the source author of the book Mr Pascoe quotes from, just was guessing as to what the hut may have looked like - it was just a ‘hypothetical’.
And Mr Pascoes ‘stone village’ was really just the musings of a ‘volunteer field worker’ who was quoted in The Age newspaper in 1981. Even Mr Pascoe’s source for his sketch of the stone village (see below) says the hut ‘would be structurally impossible without a central post’, which it didn’t have. Aboriginal people just did not build huts like the ‘hypothetical’ drawings in Young Dark Emu.
6. Mr Pascoe Just Makes Stuff Up Again! - This time about ‘Dome” houses!
Mr Pascoe uses these two photographs as examples of Aboriginal houses in Young Dark Emu - but they are not Australian Aboriginal at all!
These huts are made by the Meriam people of eastern Torres Strait Islands near New Guinea.
They are NOT Australian Aboriginal at all, but are Torres Strait Islander with Melanesian and Polynesian influences.
Mr Pascoe is just making it all up that they are Australian Aboriginal ‘houses’.
Why would parents want their children to be told lies such as this during their classes on Young Dark Emu?
Actual text from the source Mr Pascoe uses for his photographs of his ‘dome’ houses - it says they are NOT Australian Aboriginal, but Torres Strait islander with Melanesian and Polynesian influences
7. Mr Pascoe ‘just makes stuff up’ about Sir Thomas Mitchells Journals - he just adds words which can mislead his readers
Page 90 of Mitchell’s ‘Tropical Australia’ Journal
In 2019, Mr Pascoe was interviewed by former ABC 4Corners presenter, Kerry O’Brien at the Byron Writer’s Festival. Mr Pascoe made the claim,
“I went to the first second hand book shop …and I came across Sir Thomas Mitchell’s Journal into Tropical Australia and I bought it…and I read it in the car, on page 90 it said that Mitchell rode through nine miles of stooked grain and that word ‘stooked’ stood out because I’d never heard it in all my years of education referred to Aboriginal people. So there it was.“ - Recorded on Soundcloud here at 5:50
Except no it wasn’t. There is no mention of the word ‘stooked’ - not on this page 90, nor anywhere else in the whole of Sir Thomas Mitchell’s Journal.
Mitchell only says,
‘I counted nine miles along the river, in which we rode through this grass only, reaching to our saddle-girths…’
Check page 90 on the left for yourself, and see how Mr Pascoe just makes it up. He says he has based all his research on the explorer’s journals, but even amateurs like us at Dark Emu Exposed can find errors in his claims.
This simple fact-checking must put the veracity of the rest of his book, Dark Emu into serious doubt.
8. Ten Questions Your Child Can Ask The Teacher about Young Dark Emu
Miss, I’ve got a question! On page 70 and 71 of Young Dark Emu there is a sketch by the Aboriginal man Tommy McCrae who was born in 1835 into a traditonal Aboriginal life. He only ever made sketches of Aboriginal people doing hunting and gathering. If his tribe were farmers why didn’t he ever draw them doing farming? - See here and here
Sir, can you please tell us why Aboriginal people have lots of Dreamtime stories about Creation and moving over the land and hunting and gathering foods and animals, but there is not one Dreamtime story about building houses and living in towns or farming? There are lots of farming myths and stories in the Bible, and in Maori and North American Indian legends because they were farmers. Why didn’t Aboriginal people have the those stories if they were farmers too?
Miss, my Dad wants to know if Aboriginal people were really farmers and bread makers why don’t we see them at the market today selling their produce? He says they were great artists and hunter-gatherers and that’s why there is lots of Aboriginal Art you can still buy, and bush-tucker foods available on-line. But they were not farmers and that is why they don’t have stalls at the market like other Australians with a long history of farming like the Italians, Vietnamese and British.
My Dad also says all the mutton-bird hunting and gathering businesses in Tasmania and the Bass Strait Islands are owned and operated by Aboriginal people. That proves that Aboriginal people have deep connections to the hunting and gathering of mutton-birds. He says there are none, if any, Aboriginal farms growing crops because Aboriginal people do not have a deep understanding or history of farming in their culture.
Sir, if Aboriginal people are so good at using fire safely and effectively to reduce big bush-fire risks, why aren’t there any Indigenous Fire Companies that we can ring up today to come and burn-off and manage the forests so we don’t have any more big bushfires?
Miss, my mum says Aboriginal people were one of the world’s best hunter-gatherers, and they knew about farming from their cousins in New Guinea, but they decided that farming wasn’t worth doing it dry Australia, because we have too many droughts. My mum says there is nothing wrong with deciding to be a hunter-gatherer and we should stop trying to pretend that Aboriginal people were farmers when they didn’t want to be.
Sir, if there are 800,000 Aboriginal people in Australia and they were originally farmers why don’t we see lots of Aboriginal farms now? My Dad says they own 30% of the whole of Australia under native title so they have plenty of farmland but there are no Aboriginal cropping farms.
Miss, when we look at old Aboriginal dictionaries, there are lots of ‘hunter-gather words’, like spear, nets, digging stick, water-hole, fish-trap, etc, but there are never any ‘farming words’ like cultivation, drilling, propagation, weeding, tilling, yield, lodging, fertilizer, fallow, etc. Why is that?
Sir, my mum wants to know why, if Mr Pascoe and his Aboriginal publisher want our farmers to grow indigenous crops instead of foreign crops like wheat, why then did they get their book, Young Dark Emu printed in China? Couldn’t they have employed Australian people to print their book in here? My mum used a word I don’t know the meaning of - I think she said ‘hypocrites’? And she laughed when she read the book’s dedication on the front piece, ‘To the Australians’ (except when it affects the publisher’s profits I heard her mutter).
Miss, why do all other professional academics say the Australian Aboriginal people were hunter-gatherers, and only Mr Pascoe says they were farmers? Even Bill Gammage says they were not farmers.
9. But Wait there is More!
Further debunking of Mr Pascoe’s claims in Young Dark Emu that Aboriginal people were farmers, selecting seed and planting crops can be found at the end of another blog post on our Dark Emu Exposed website here.
But Don’t just take our word for it - For an additional, critical review of Mr Pascoe’s Young Dark Emu, and its unsuitability to be used as a school text for our children, see Joanna Hackett’s article in Quadrant July-August 2020 here.
10. Update October 2020 - A New Student & Teacher Study Guide
Are you a student, teacher or parent worried about that fact that you might be getting a ‘false-narrative’ about our Aboriginal and Colonial history? Are you too worried about the lack of rigour in our education system?
Well, the book for you is Robert Lewis’s, Is Dark Emu good history? which will teach you how to critically assess Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu so you can make up your own mind as to the veracity of its main thesis.
For further information, and ordering your own copy of this excellent study guide, see here.
