Fact-Checking Mr Pascoe's Claims - Part 3 with Kerry O'Brien
In this post we will provide more examples of what appears to be, Mr Pascoe ‘just making stuff up’.
Consider what he said during his Byron Writers Festival interview with former ABC 4Corners presenter and journalist, Kerry O’Brien, in 2019.
1. Mr Pascoe Wants Us to Believe That Aboriginal People were ‘Cereal Farmers & Croppers’, Like the Europeans who ‘Stooked’ their Crops.
Mr Pascoe tells O’Brien, listen here at 5:51
“I went to the first second hand book shop…and I came across Sir Thomas Mitchell’s Journals 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 at 5:51
Except, no it wasn’t.
We found a copy of Mitchell’s journal and opened it at page 90, as Mr Pascoe says he did, to look for Mitchell’s ‘nine miles of stooked grain.’
All we found was Mitchell informing his readers that,
‘I counted nine miles along the river, in which we rode through this grass only, reaching to our saddle-girths…’
No mention of, ‘nine miles of stooked grain’ and no mention of the word ‘stooked’ here on page 90, or anywhere else in the Mitchell’s journal for that matter. Readers can go here to the on-line version of Mitchell’s journal and word search for ‘stook’ or ‘stooked’ and not find this word mentioned anywhere.
Just another example of Mr Pascoe ‘making things up’?
2. Mr Pascoe Wants us to Believe that Australians Thought Aboriginal People were, ‘Not Part of The Human Species.’
We believe Mr Pascoe makes an offensive slur against the Australian people during his interview with Kerry O’Brien when he implies that we Australians believed that, ‘Aboriginal people were not human’.
In the interview at 10:37, when speaking about the British settlement of Australia, Mr Pascoe says of the Colonists,
‘ …you [the Colonists] can not accept anything that those people [the Aborigines] have done as being an achievement ….you have to deny that Aboriginal people were part of the human species, and Australians did.”
To us this sounds like Mr Pascoe is perpetuating the myth that, ‘Australians classified Aboriginal people legally under a flora and fauna Act’, a myth still promulgated by many Aboriginal activists today (See here at 06:23).
This myth has been totally debunked by no other that the ABC’s own fact checking service here .
Contrary to what Mr Pascoe says, Aboriginal people have always been considered part of the ‘human species’ in Australia.
Indeed, everyone born in Australia, including all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, were deemed from 1829 to be ‘British subjects by birth’ (see here).
This appears to be just another example of Mr Pascoe, ‘making stuff up’, and very disrespectful stuff as well, about Colonial Australia and the Aboriginal people.
3. Mr Pascoe Says Aboriginal ‘Villages’ Now Contain 2000 People.
Mr Pascoe’s claim that Aboriginal people lived in villages of 1000 people has been thoroughly debunked by others :
“Contrary to Pascoe’s claims, neither Sturt nor Mitchell, during the course of five expeditions, ever describe a village of over one thousand people, as I prove in my book Bitter Harvest”. - Peter O’Brien writing in Quadrant, 17/2/2020
Mr Pascoe now literally ‘doubles-down’ when he tells Kerry (no relation) O’Brien,
‘To talk about Aboriginal people cropping from the strong part of a village, of a town, of 2000 people, then you are talking about civilization’ - Listen here at 17:55
Mr Pascoe’s aim here appears to be that he hopes his readers and listeners will naively accept that Aboriginal people were living in very large ‘towns’, which by definition implies they were a ‘settled’ and ‘agricultural’ people and not nomadic. This lends weight to Mr Pascoe’s argument that the British incorrectly took ‘possession’ of New South Wales because they believed it had no ‘civil sovereignty’, and was inhabited by unsettled, nomadic, hunter gather peoples only living off the ‘fruits of the land.’
Mr Pascoe is wrong - there is no evidence that Aboriginal people lived in towns of 1000 or 2000, people.
But don’t just take our word, or other researchers like Peter O’Brien’s word, for it. One of Australia’s most eminent historians, Professor Geoffrey Blainey says, when discussing Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu book,
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.’
Professor Geoffrey Blainey 19th August 2020 - listen here from 2:57
4. Mr Pascoe Says the Pan-Continental Government of Aboriginal Society Provided a Safer, more Secure Place for Children than the Modern World
Irbmangkara is a stretch of the Finke River in Central Australia. The name means 'running waters' and is the site of the 1875 massacre.
Syrian mother and child victims of a modern war and ‘massacre’.
An Aboriginal mother and child not unlike the 80 to 100 victims of the inter-tribal Massacre of Running Waters in 1875.
Mr Pascoe tells Kerry O’Brien, from 25:33
‘In Australia 120,000 years ago at least [sic] …old [Aboriginal] people sat down and they worried…about the condition of the human…how do we order ourselves, how do we civilize ourselves if we are going to live in towns together how are we going to act in civil way.’
After describing an Aboriginal ‘utopia’ where, the ‘old people decided everybody would have a house’, ‘everybody would have enough to eat’ and ‘everybody would take part in the culture’ , Mr Pascoe then goes onto to contrast that with the modern world where,
‘If you think about how the world is now run. If you think about the children in Syria, when they hear a noise like that aeroplane going over now, what those kids think …how can we accept a world where that is the reality, where some men, somewhere decide that, that child and that child’s family have done the wrong thing so we will kill them, we’ll not talk to them, we’ll kill them. And this is our world and yet in this country, on this continent, people, recognizing the humanity of people, decided that there are rules in place and we create this across the whole country…the law says that they couldn’t invade anyone’s lands’. - Listen from 26:30
A naïve reader might be convinced by Mr Pascoe’s claims that the Aborigines did indeed live in a ‘nirvana’ administered by an Aboriginal, Pan-Continental government that ensured its children, unlike the children of Syria, lived a safe and secure life.
Except once again, Mr Pascoe appears to be, ‘just making stuff up.‘
Sadly, there are documented cases to show that an Aboriginal child living a traditional life in Central Australia in 1875 had a similar chance as a child in modern day Syria of being killed along with his, or her family.
For example, historian Professor Geoffrey Blainey in his book, The Story of Australia's People - The Rise and Fall of Ancient Australia : Volume 1, 2015, p116-119, describes the 1875, inter-tribal, ‘Massacre of Running Waters’.
‘Irbmangkara is a stretch of the Finke River in Central Australia: the name means 'running waters'. In 1875 it was also the scene of a massacre. The Matuntara people planned the attack in the belief that a neighbouring group, the Southern Arrernte or Aranda, had committed an act of sacrilege. Revenge was called for. The offenders and even the relatives of the offenders must be killed…The Matuntara…timed their secret raid for the hour when their enemies were cooking their meals before making their beds on the ground.
The attackers, numbering at least fifty and maybe as many as eighty, arrived quietly. As the evening shadows grew, the altering pattern of shadow and light almost camouflaged the places where they hid. Near dusk, at almost the same instant, they began to kill the men and women and older children with clubs and spears. Next the babies and small children were set upon. Their limbs were broken, and they were left to die. Those killed - we are told, by the main informant - could well have reached the high figure of 100. Probably the death toll, so far, was closer to eighty. At the murder-camp a woman survived. Her body bleeding, and perhaps a limb or two broken, she somehow concealed and protected her own child. Not far away were two other potential witnesses. Soon after the attackers had quietly fled from the river they encountered these two men returning late to the riverside camp. One was chased and killed, but the other escaped in fading light. The two survivors of the massacre, female and male, eventually spread the word that the Matuntara were the killers…’ - [our emphasis]
So, for the sake of a perceived, Aboriginal sacrilege, we might also ask, paraphrasing the words of Mr Pascoe,
‘…how can we accept a world where that is the reality, where some men, somewhere decide that, that child and that child’s family have done the wrong thing, so we will kill them. We’ll not talk to them, we’ll kill them’.
Is Mr Pascoe referring to the men planning the bombing of Syria, or to the Elders of the Aboriginal Matuntara people? It’s hard to say.
Just maybe mankind is the same all over the world. Was pre-colonial Aboriginal society really the safe, secure, child ‘nirvana’ claimed by Mr Pascoe, operating under some benevolent, Pan-Continental Aboriginal government of Elders?
We don’t think so. There is too much evidence to the contrary.
