Chairman Pascoe’s Great Leap Forward - Do What I Say, Not What I Do

Like Chairman Mao with his agricultural collectivisation of 1949, which was meant to lead to a Chinese agricultural revolution, Chairman Pascoe lectures us in Chapter 7 of Dark Emu with a call for “An Australian Agricultural Revolution”.

This chapter makes the blood boil of our resident agriculturalist who we have on the Dark Emu Exposed committee. Besides being highly offensive to the hard work, intelligence and dedication of Australia’s farmers, Chairman Pascoe is just plain wrong and if his recommendations were adopted, then Australia’s economy would suffer irreparable damage.

Let’s look at Chairman Pascoe’s, Great “Australian Agricultural Revolution”. He writes :

“One of the most fundamental differences between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people is the understanding of the relationship between people and the land. Earth is the mother. Aboriginal people are born of the earth, and individuals within the clan had responsibilites for particular streams, grasslands, trees, crops, animals and even seasons. The life of the clan was devoted to continuence.” - (Dark Emu , 2018reprint, p209).

So what Chairman Pascoe appears to be saying is that, because someone is Aboriginal, like for example Stan Grant, they have a better understanding of the relationship between people and the land, and they carry greater responsibility for the caring of the land and for their family’s continuity on the land than say, a multi-generational, Australian farmer, who is not Aboriginal.

Now Stan Grant is an intelligent, professional and all round nice guy, but are you Mr Pascoe honestly saying his genetic heritage gifts him with special landcare powers?

Does Stan Grant know more about crops, stock and the land and its long-term management than the farmers below? Are they lesser custodians of their farms, animals, crops and soils because they lack the required genetic heritage according to your grand intellectual plan for the ‘Australian Agricultural Revolution’? It is beyond belief that anyone would even dare to put forward such a bogus ethnocentric ideology in our modern, multicultural Australia of 2019.

The Chairman writes further of his ideas :

“Perhaps the most significant difference was the attitude to land ownership and resource use. Instead of operating privately owned small holdings, clans were co-operating to prepare large tracts of land for production with burning and tilling methods.” - (Dark Emu, 2018reprint, p210).

So does Chairman Pascoe really want to try to emulate the intellectual hair-brained scheme Chairman Mao carried out in China’s agricultural experiment from 1949, involving the collectivisation of all the small privately owned peasant farms? Does Chairman Pascoe remember the result? - The Great Chinese Famine of 1959-1961, in which tens of millions of Chinese starved to death?

Chairman Pascoe continues :

“Imagine freeing ourselves from the overuse of superphosphates, herbicides and drenches. Envisage freeing ourselves of the need of fences and instead experimenting with grazing indigenous animals and growing indigenous crops.”

We know Chairman Pascoe believes that because he is ‘Aboriginal’, and has an ‘understanding of the relationship between people and the land’ and ‘Earth is the mother,’ his views should be listened to and consulted. He believes he and his people possess a special and long custodianship with the Land which make them qualified to speak on land and farming matters. We beg to disagree and say he appears to know very little about farming on the Australian continent. He has not provided any evidence he knows what he is talking about. You need to show us your farming account books, crops, yields and farm-management plan before we give you the ‘keys to the tractor’. We would suggest that, like many intellectuals with hair-brained ideas, it is best to adopt the position of “look at what he does, not what he says.” So we dug a little deeper into the farming practices of Chairman Pascoe and we are not convinced his apparent actions match his rhetoric.

For example why is he using a “metal Chinese hoe” to till his “Australian Mother Earth” rather than one of his Aboriginal farming implements, the “Bogan pick” (see our previous post). And are those paddocks fenced? Doesn’t he advocate fenceless properties in his ‘Australian Agricultural Revolution’?. And are those tractors? Made in Asia and run on greenhouse emitting, fossil fuels? The same fossil fuel raw materials used to make pesticides and drenches? And polystyrene seedling containers made with ozone destroying gas? And why is he and his crew wearing cotton clothing - that most thirsty and chemical demanding of GMO crops?

No, sorry Chairman Pascoe, any clear thinking Australian is not going to join your ‘Revolution’ - it can only lead to crop failures, hunger and poverty if we follow your advice.

But as Chairman Pascoe claims, when the explorer ‘Sturt was doing it tough’ in the outback, amongst the ‘savages’, they just said, let him eat, ‘roast duck and cake!’

- Dark Emu (2018 reprint p100)

And if the traditional wheat, fruit and vegies get short we can all just go on-line and order from the large Aboriginal food larder below - or maybe mum’s budget wont stretch that far?

“Motoring through the fields on his red tractor, Mr Pascoe is on a mission.

He’s restoring old fences on the property to protect his seedlings and “keep the angry wombat out, keep the bowerbird out, keep the wattle birds out.”

“We are surrounded by wild Australia out here, everything wants to eat everything else.”

- SBS /NITV article 23/6/2019. 'A shocking lie': Bruce Pascoe opens up about his search for Pre-Colonial truth

Chairman Pascoe claims in the SBS/NITV article :

“Australia could learn a lot from using perennial plants. You’re not ploughing, you’re not using diesel, you’re not using chemicals or poisons of any kind [because] they’re Australian plants … they like the amount of rain they get here, because this is where they were born, they don’t need any fertiliser [and] they don’t need any pesticides because the insects in Australia are their mates,” Mr Pascoe told NITV News. "If we started using Aboriginal agricultural know-how, it would go a long way to securing the environmental future of this country, that’s for sure.”

OK then Chairman Pascoe , we have located some actual footage on how Australian farmers would have to live if we adopted your farming ideology. Rather than rely on your word for it, let’s look at your ancestor’s ways and how they successfully managed the country and fed themselves for 50,000 years.

So if we adopt The Chairman’s hair-brained agricultural schemes we could feed about 300,000 people at a subsistence level, as The Chairman’s ancestors did from time immemorial. But please Chairman Pascoe, explain how we are going to feed the other 24.7M Australians?

And like all of history’s great ideologues, humbleness, thankfulness and gratitude doesn’t appear to be in The Chairman’s tool-kit when he says :

“But the hardest thing for Australia to do, because we’ve failed at it dismally for 230 years, is making sure that Aboriginal people are included in the bounty of the country, the bounty that Aboriginal people actually produced by the way we managed the landscape.”

We wonder whether this includes himself as a respected, popular writer or any of the following 600,000 Australians of Aboriginal descent who by our reckoning have hardly been excluded in the “bounty of the country”; Cathy Freeman, Ken Wyatt, Stan Grant, Linda Burney, Australians of Aboriginal heritage working as employees at the taxpayer-funded ABCS, SBS, NTIV, museums and in the Arts, National Parks, defence forces, public services and in private enterprise?