Fact-Checking Mr Pascoe's Claims - Part 4 with Kerry O'Brien

Renowned journalist, Kerry O’Brien’s first interview with Dark Emu author, Bruce Pascoe, came across to us as just two blokes ‘making stuff up’ by re-imagining Australia’s history’.

In this second ‘interview’ with Professor Pascoe, Mr O’Brien, seems to have done a bit more homework on the claims in Dark Emu and, to our mind, as Mr O’Brien reads out his pre-prepared questions, we sense that the ‘penny might be dropping’ within Kerry’s head that ‘Uncle Bruce’ might be just a classic Aussie yarn-spinner rather than a University of Melbourne academic, whose scholarship our young people can trust.

This livestream interview is part of Griffith University’s in-conversation series, A better future for all, presented in partnership with HOTA, Home of the Arts where we join,

’…renowned journalist Kerry O’Brien and celebrated Indigenous author Bruce Pascoe as they explore the way Bruce’s critically acclaimed book Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the birth of Agriculture challenges conventional thinking about the First Australians as hunter gatherers.

In this book Bruce draws on the historical record to recreate a much more sophisticated picture of an ancient civilisation in Australia before the Europeans arrived. This is at odds with colonial and post-colonial stereotypes and points to ways that Indigenous knowledge can provide lessons that can be applied today, despite the backlash which has attempted to discredit him.’

- Advertising blurb by Griffith University here

As part of ‘the backlash which has attempted to discredit him’, we are proud to provide further evidence to support our case that Professor Pascoe’s scholarship is ‘sloppy’ due to his, ‘making-up’ of outlandish claims, selective quoting from the historical records and failure to adequately provide real evidence for his ideas.

We ask the reader to consider the following items in our critique of Professor Pascoe’s second interview with Kerry O’Brien.

1. Aboriginal society was a nomadic, hunter-gatherer one.

Everybody knows that it was. There is nothing shameful about being part of a brilliantly successful, nomadic hunter-gatherer society. No matter what our individual heritages, all our ancestors were once hunter-gatherers. If they hadn’t have been successful, we would not be here now.

We suspect even Kerry O’Brien knows this when he quotes the anthropologist WEH Stanner who wrote,

“They are, of course, nomads — hunters and foragers who grow nothing, build nothing, and stay nowhere long.

Listen to O’Briens question here at 37:52, followed by what to us sounds like a rambling, non-answer by Professor Pascoe, who implies that the famous WEH Stanner is wrong because people (including presumably Stanner) could have read the explorers journals and read about the ‘massive dams’ Aboriginal people built (no they didn’t), the ‘incredible fields of harvest’ (just naturally occurring seed-grass, not planted, cultivated, farmed fields), and ‘storage pits for grain’ (Mr Pascoe has toned down his previously outlandish claim of Aboriginal grain storage silos of ‘one-tonne 3 metres off the ground to just ‘storage pits’ now).

Professor Pascoe then steers his answer off to a political end where he throws in an obligatory anti-Colonial slur, in this case that anyone who fails to agree that Aboriginal people were ‘settled farmers’ must therefore think that they were ‘savages.’

This doesn’t adequately address O’Briens point at all, namely that such a well respected authority as WEH Stanner, who studied Aboriginal society for decades, believed that their material economy was a nomadic, hunter gatherer one.

2. Professor Pascoe says ‘half the country’ was under crop to Aboriginal people. Even Mr O’Brien is incredulous at this outlandish claim.

Kerry O’Brien seems to have been studying our website when he challenges Professor Pascoe on what we think is Pascoe’s most outlandish claim and manipulation of the evidence, namely the extent of the area of Australia where some Aboriginal people had a high incidence of seed grains in their diet, which Pascoe says was 'under crop’ by Aboriginal people.

Mr O’Brien asks incredulously , at 1:00:48,

‘You’ve said in interviews that roughly half of pre-colonial Australia was under crop to Aboriginal people. That sounds like a huge area of the country under crop. In desert and in more fertile soil. How did you arrive at that conculsion? Half the country?’

And Professor Pascoe answers,

‘Well, I didn’t arrive at that conclusion. Norman Tindale posited that theory because of where he had found grinding stones… It is roughly two-thirds of the Australian continent.’

After just plucking the figure ‘two-thirds’ out of thin air, Pascoe continues, and unashamedly tells Kerry,

‘It was the Rural Industries Research Council [sic*] which actually then studied Tindale’s position and drew a map for it. And I read that Rural Industrial paper, that’s where I got that map from. I’m not inventing anything. I was relying on Australian science'.

Map 1: Original ‘Tindales’s Arc’ from Norman Tindale, Aboriginal Tribes of Australia, UC Press, 1974, p99.

Map 2: Map of ‘Tindale’s Arc’ in RIRDC Report, June 2015, RIRDC Publication Number 15/056.

Map 3: Professor Pascoe’s much expanded ‘hand-drawn dodgy’ version from Dark Emu (2018 reprint, p.28)

Area Calculation of Tindale’s Arc as 25% of Australia

Sceptical Kerry sounds like he just can’t believe it and neither should he.

Anyone can see when checking Professor Pascoe’s map in Dark Emu (Map 3 below) that he seems to have rubbed out Dr Tindale’s and/or the RIRDC boundaries on their maps (Maps 1 and 2 respectively) and then redrawn his own new, enlarged boundary in ‘texta’ so as to trick the reader into thinking that the Aboriginal grain belt included most of Victoria and larger parts of SA, WA and Qld than Dr Tindale or the RIRDC ever intended.

We have previously debunked this claim by Professor Pascoe here.

We have calculated the approximate area of Tindale’s Arc using a Google Map calculator (Map 4 below) and we estimate it at only 25% of the country not the 66% claimed by Professor Pascoe.

But hey, we are just amateurs, not an esteemed Professor in a University of Melbourne Science Faculty like Professor Pascoe, so readers are encouraged to check our results (unlike the editors of Dark Emu it appears).

And it is not just us who have identified this ‘sloppy’ and misleading scholarship by Professor Pascoe, see here at 16:26 for what appears to be a Left-wing Aboriginal critique of Pascoe’s methodology.

*Actually it is the ‘Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation (RIRDC)’ - another example of Professor Pascoe’s ‘sloppy’ scholarship?

3. O’Brien asks a straight question - Pascoe rambles off and avoids an answer

At this part of the interview at 56:40, O’Brien reads a pre-prepared question, quoting the lawyer and author Russell Marks writing in The Monthly Magazine, that,

‘you regularly exaggerate and embellish facts in Dark Emu. He [Marks] gives examples which he says,

‘By themselves, examples like these split hairs. But they’re all the way through Dark Emu. Together, such selective quoting creates an impression of societies with a sturdiness, permanence, sedentarism and technical sophistication that’s not supported by the source material’.

O’Brien then asks Pascoe, ‘now do you think any of that is fair criticism?’

Professor Pascoe agrees that it is ‘an intelligent argument’, but all he offers in his defence is to say that he goes from one ‘fact’ to another ‘fact’ to another to ‘try and get a global view of what our world looked like then’.

But the criticism Russell Marks (as well as many of us) makes is that his ‘facts’ are not true to start with, so no matter how Pascoe strings them together, the ‘global view’ Pascoe gets of how Aboriginal people lived in 1788 is wrong and misleading.

Russell Marks is also very politely pointing out that the source material such as explorers journals and archaeology does not support the claim that Aboriginal society was a ‘civilization’ - it lacked sturdiness (ability to overcome nature’s variability), permanence, (towns & cities), sedentarism (pastoralism, agriculture & industry) and technical sophistication ( division of labour, numeracy, metal working, a unit of exchange, transport, etc).

In his reply, Professor Pascoe fails to provide O’Brien with any of the source material to counter Russell Marks’s criticism, but instead he rambles off on a tangent about how,

‘…world civilizations last less than 1000 years’, ‘the Pyramids in Egypt [are] 2000 years old’…’these are short lived civilizations and yet here, there was Law that bound people for 120,000 years…people stayed where the Law told them to stay’.

Where does one begin in unpacking this? You don’t have to be a contestant on Mastermind to know that the Pyramids are older than 2000years (actually around 4500 years old - but perhaps he means Ancient Egyptian civilization lasted 2000 years? Who would know).

Similarly, there is no widely accepted, conclusive evidence that Aboriginal people have been here for 120,000 years. The currently accepted age is 50,000 years with work continuing on sites which may indicate around 65,000 years in northern Australia.

In respect to Professor Pascoe’s claim that the ‘Law’ told people where to stay, how on earth can we ever know what Aboriginal Law beliefs people had 1000, or 5000 years ago, let alone 50,000 years ago? If the Law told them where to stay, why did they move to colonise all of the continent?. Why didn’t the first Aboriginal colonisers just land on the north coast and then stay there according to their Law? How does Professor Pascoe explain the expansion of the Pama-Nyungan Aboriginal languages across all of Australia some 6,000 years ago if the Law told Aboriginal people to stay put? Why did Aboriginal people abandon Kangaroo Island, Lake Mungo and the west coast of Tasmania if the Law told them to stay put? Why do many Aboriginal people today not live on their ancestral lands?

The Political Fallout from Dark Emu is Coming

Our take from this interview is that even supportive observers such as Kerry O’Brien and Russell Marks are starting to see the flaws in Professor Pascoe’s ‘scholarly’ book, Dark Emu. But this puts them in somewhat of a dilemma. In their heart-of-hearts, they do subscribe to the ideal that one needs to be rigorous in seeking out and assessing the evidence and the facts to ultimately find truth, so they are deeply troubled by Professor Pascoe’s blatant manipulations and selective quoting of the sources to support his thesis.

On the other hand, we suspect both O’Brien and Marks would be supporters of the Uluru Statement, A Voice to Parliament and Constitutional Change so as to support Aboriginal Sovereignty and Self-Determination. They both can see the great political value in the consequences of accepting Pascoe’s thesis that Aboriginal people did ‘farm’ the land in a Eurocentric sense prior to British colonisation.

If Australians, and especially the voters of tomorrow, our children (hence the push to get Young Dark Emu into schools) can be convinced that a great legal (let alone a great moral) injustice has been done by the British in claiming New South Wales by settlement rather than by conquest or cession then the chance of a change to the Constitutional at a referendum is greatly enhanced.

Russell Marks, in his article in The Monthly, hit the nail on the head in his closing paragraph when he correctly observes,

‘…the right’s mission: to extinguish the basis for Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination.’

in so far as those of us on the Centre-right, who are responding vigorously to argue against Professor Pascoe’s false narrative, are doing it to combat what we see as,

‘…the left’s mission : to promote race-based politics as a basis for an Australian Apartheid and the Break-up of Australian sovereignty.’

In our view, Professor Pascoe’s Dark Emu and Young Dark Emu are not about correcting our Colonial history. They are purely books of political persuasion, and child-indoctrination in the case of Young Dark Emu, to change the mindset of the voting public to support Aboriginal sovereignty.

Further Reading on the Politics of Constitutional Change

1. The Voice to Parliament and the dangers of altering Section 122 of the Constitution

2. Race-based Politics and the threat of an Australian Apartheid