Is Dark Emu a Hoax?
A hoax is a falsehood deliberately fabricated to masquerade as the truth. It is distinguishable from errors in observation or judgment.
- Curtis D. MacDougall, (1958).
Is Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu a hoax?
To help us interrogate this idea, we will rely on the work of Peter Hancock, who is Provost Distinguished Reaseach Professor, Pegasus Professor, and Trustee Chair of the Department of Psychology and the Institute for Simulation and Training at the University of Central Florida. He also directs a psychology laboratory at MIT in the US.
Hancock wrote an academic book in 2015, Hoax Springs Eternal - The Psychology of Cognitive Deception (Cambridge University Press) which,
‘defines and explains cognitive deception…Unlike sleights of hand, which fools the senses, sleights of mind challenge cognition….The book further examines how and why we allow others to decieve us and how and why at times we even deceive ourselves.’
In the following text, we have heavily paraphrased a few sections of Hancock’s book – they are essentially his words - between which we have added some relevant references with regard to our research into Mr Bruce Pascoe and his Dark Emu.
Hancock has identified what he calls the ‘Trinity of Deception’, which are the three essential elements of deception. These elements are common across all deceptions, whether they are based on sensory/perceptual illusions, or are primarily cognitive in nature.
Part 1 of the Trinity - The Deceiver.
In the first element of the Trinity of Deception, the deceiver must accomplish several things, namely:
a) identify a constituency—a person or group of people who, for reasons such as piety, patriotism, greed, politics or even political correctness and virtue signalling, will truly care about the hoax. If no one cares about the explicit or implied issue, then the hoax or deception will fail.
Bruce Pascoe - writer, performer, orator, old-style storyteller
Stan Grant - writer, commentator.
“Pascoe is a writer but also a performer, an orator, a dedicated storyteller in the old style…Earlier this year I was in a university lecture hall packed with hundreds of young people who had come out on a dark winter night to listen to the author of Dark Emu, and they were enthralled. You could have heard a pin drop. At the end of the speech the crowd erupted in an ovation for several minutes. Whatever Bruce Pascoe is saying, Australians clearly want to hear it now.”
- Professor Tom Griffiths, Reading Bruce Pascoe, The author’s compelling yet curiously old-fashioned account of Indigenous history has inspired and empowered, Inside Story- 26/11/2019 [our emphasis]
“Pascoe is a fascinating and unique writer. Pascoe is widely touted as Australia’s most influential Indigenous historian. It is a role he seems to revel in, carefully cultivating his public image. His white hair has grown out, his beard is longer. He has an air of self-conscious mysticism, a Zen-like aura that I’m sure many believe adds to his authenticity. Pascoe has taken to being photographed with a red headband: a traditional signifier of the Aboriginal man of high degree…
The storyteller is the embodiment of the story itself. This personification is why people come to listen. The crowd falls under the storyteller’s spell. The storyteller is transparent to the transcendent. The light on our dark path. The storyteller takes us to a land of magic and wonder to reveal essential truths…
Pascoe is shrewd. I can see in him something of the oldtime carny. He’s a spruiker in a travelling medicine show. He is a conjurer. Pascoe invites people to disbelieve their eyes. The white man vanishes and behold, the black man appears…This is an illusion for a white audience. Crucially, the conjurer is not a conman. Pascoe is not deceiving his audience. Far from it. They believe because they want to believe.
Pascoe knows this… Listen to how he describes his Aboriginal awakening: “as if I have been led at night to a hill overlooking country I have never seen”. He is smart enough to play on the mythical archetype: the hero called to the forest, who must find the grail and return to save others.
Pascoe has spun his own myth, replete with days in the wilderness; overturning the gatekeepers of received wisdom; his moment of revelation; and, crucially, his heroic return. He’s had a vision and through him we can be led to his Australia never-never land.”
- Shifting ground by Stan Grant, The Monthly, May 26, 2021 [our emphasis]
b) identify a particular dream which will make the hoax particularly appealing to the constituency. The deceiver needs to convince others to believe something about the state of the world that is untrue. The purpose of cognitive deception is not solely to confuse others, although this may certainly be a part of the process, but rather to seek to actively inculcate a specific belief in others about the ‘true’ state of the world. This belief, of course, turns out to be a false one.
This induction of false belief is facilitated by the process known as apophenia, which is when one draws cognitive linkages between unassociated items or events. The Dark Emu dream is that, ‘Aboriginal people were farmers and their society was a civilization and sophisticated, the Colonists massacred the Aborigines and destroyed the evidence, modern Australia should now adopt this ancient, Indigenous knowledge and Aboriginal farming technology for the betterment of Country and Mother Earth’.
As an example of apophenia, Bruce Pascoe provides the following separate thoughts in Dark Emu and lets the reader’s apophenia take over.
‘Aboriginal people were farmers who tilled the soil’.
‘Ploughs are used today by farmers to till the soil’.
A colonial palaeontologist named Robert Etheridge wrote a paper in 1894 that mentioned the words, ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘hoe.’
The explorer Thomas Mitchell wrote a paragraph in his diary that contained the words, ‘natives’, ‘clods’ [of soil] and ‘hoe’.
The Australian museum has a collection of ancient stones (left) labeled as ‘Bogan picks’
After the storytelling treatment of the above thought-lines by Bruce Pascoe, many readers of Dark Emu will ‘believe’ (be deceived) that these pointy, Aboriginal stones are evidence that Aboriginal people used them to ‘till the soil’ when ‘planting their crops’. Only that none of this is true, but it takes a lot of research to prove it is untrue, an effort that a ‘deceived true believer’ will not bother to do - see this hoax exposure here and here.
Bruce Pascoe includes these photographs in Dark Emu of very large, complex huts, which he says are Aboriginal housing from Queensland. Indeed, in his lectures he says his grandfather probably stayed in one of these in the Lockhart River region of Nth Queensland. He claims they show how the Aborigines lived in settled villages and how sophisticated and civilized Aboriginal housing was.
The ‘true believers’ are easily deceived by Bruce Pascoe’s claims. We are not. But it takes a lot of effort to get to the truth and find that this is just a case of blatant cultural appropriation - these are huts of the Meriam people of the Torres Strait and clearly show Melanesian and Polynesian influences. They are not Aboriginal at all (Hoax exposed here ).
But the ‘true believers’ are convinced - Aboriginal people were a sophisticated, settled, and therefore agricultural, people.
c) create an appealing but inexactly defined hoax – allow for plenty of ambiguities, so that ‘confirmation bias’ can take hold. This leads to ‘leaps of faith’ by the constituency as they search out information that supports the hoax, but they are not as equally diligent in searching out facts that contradict their hopes.
d) Find some respected champions who will actively support the hoax. The best are unsuspecting champions. If the hoaxer himself is this 'champion' or main advocate, and especially if obvious monetary gain is involved, even those naturally accepting of the outlandish claims of the hoax may eventually become suspicious.
Often, the champion is also the target of the hoaxer, for whom the hoax represents not just one part of a panoply of dreams; it is the dream. These are the people who carry the torch of the hoax. If they have the imprimatur of authority, so much the better, for their opinions will carry all the more weight. Ardent amateurs are fine, but deluded professionals are even better, since they bring their credentials to the subject.
ABC Reporter and compare, Patricia Karvelas
Professor Marcia Langton AM
Tweet from the ABC’s Patricia Karvelas when critics were questioning the veracity of Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu :
“Seems to really trigger some people to use the word agriculture and Aboriginal in the same sentence. So here we go. Agriculture and Aboriginal”. #darkemu PatriciaKarvelas (@PatsKarvelas)November 18, 2019.
‘Dark Emu is a profound challenge to convential thinking about Aboriginal life on this continent. He [Bruce Pascoe] details the Aboriginal economy and analyses the historical data showing that our societies were not simple hunter-gatherer economies but sophisticated, with farming and irrigation practices. This is the most important book on Australia and should be read by every Australian.’
- Professor Marcia Langton AM, anthropologist and geographer at University of Melbourne, Dark Emu book commendations, 2018 Reprint p(i)
e) Make people emotionally attached, either positively or negatively, to the hoax —the ambiguities encourage interest and debate. It is strange but true that the hoax must not be too perfect. If the hoax is to raise contention, it must possess characteristics that are open to some degree of interpretation and contention by both sides involved in the associated argument.
This factor actually works in favor of the deceiver because components of the actual hoax itself, that are not evident giveaways, actually serve to foment greater interest, discussion and debate. These are always advantages in selling the deception and, in essence, foster incorrect decision making.
The most effective way of providing such ambiguity is to leave crucial aspects under-specified. That is, do not over-elaborate the hoax itself, leave room for the participation and contribution of others. Hoaxes that provide complete, closed-end explanations are not generative and fail to allow involved individuals to actively participate in the discovery, elaboration, and elucidation. Evidence that is discovered by an individual who is not the primary deceiver is particularly persuasive.
From the publisher’s synopsis:
Bruce Pascoe has collected a swathe of literary awards for Dark Emu and now he has brought together the research and compelling first person accounts in a book for younger readers. Using the accounts of early European explorers, colonists and farmers, Bruce Pascoe compellingly argues for a reconsideration of the hunter-gatherer label for pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians. He allows the reader to see Australia as it was before Europeans arrived — a land of cultivated farming areas, productive fisheries, permanent homes, and an understanding of the environment and its natural resources that supported thriving villages across the continent. Young Dark Emu: A Truer History asks young readers to consider a different version of Australia's history pre-European colonisation.
DARK EMU EXPOSED TEAM VS RICK MORTON. OUCH
“I pointed out more than 20 errors in Rick Morton's defence of "Aboriginal author" Bruce Pascoe and his book Dark Emu - a defence that ABC presenter Linda Mottram hailed as "excellent reporting". Now the team at Dark Emu Exposed fact-check Morton's piece, too. It's devastating. So why do so many ABC presenters still defend Pascoe?”
- Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun Newspaper Blog, 3/12/2019
Part 2 of the Trinity - The Medium
The second component of deception's trinity is the conduit or medium by which the deception is communicated. This medium can be an artifact or a physical entity (like the Turin Shroud), but it can equally be just information expressed in the form of spoken or written language. It also can be represented by a person acting as an imposter. The conduit is an essential bridge, since its characteristics must be understood in a shared manner by both the deceiver and the third component of the trinity of deception, the deceived.
The medium (or media) itself presumes some common and shared assumptions as one central principle of a successful hoax holds: the deceiver and the deceived must have some common medium (media) through which to interact. Therefore, the conduit or medium of the message is always an important constraint upon deceit.
A hoaxer who want to push a ‘history revisionist’ hoax in Australia today can use a number of closely related media – the non-fiction book, the ‘Progressive Left’ electronic media (eg: the ABC’s TV, Radio & Education Unit, SBS, NITV, The Guardian, The Wheeler Centre, et al) and academia (conferences, lectures, universities). [A really interesting aspect of Dark Emu’s acceptance is that its constituency is predominately ‘university educated’. In general, much of the working- and middle-class in Australia have never heard of the book. When I bring it up in conversation I just get blank stares from my friends and colleagues. Why? Essentially because they did not/do not attended university, are not big readers of books of Dark Emu’s genre and they do not watch, or listen to, the ABC – hence by Hancock’s definition they are outside of the required ‘medium’, and so are not influenced by the hoax. But their school age children can be - hence the push to get the ‘hoax’ into the medium of the school curriculum].
People following the Dark Emu saga will notice how Bruce Pascoe and his main champions are never formally interviewed or debated by the book’s critics ‘outside’ his chosen media and constituency. Instead, Dark Emu has remained unchallenged and safely ensconced within the Church of the Deceived.
Part 3 of the Trinity - The Deceived
The third and final part of the trinity of deception is, the deceived. One might easily envisage the hoaxer or deceiver as the active participant and the deceived as the passive recipient in the process of deception. However, this is not necessarily so.
Often the deceived individual plays a very active, albeit unwitting, role in the whole process. Many questions emerge as to what degree the deceived wishes to, or indeed can, be deceived. Obviously the more the deceiver can co-opt the active participation of the deceived, the more likely the deception is to succeed.
As Francis Bacon observed in the early seventeenth century,
‘Human understanding...is infused by desire and emotion, which give rise to 'wishful science: For man prefers to believe what he wants to be true. He therefore rejects difficulties, being impatient of enquiry'
- Francis bacon, Novum Organum (1620), translated by James Spedding, et al
While the world has moved on in a technical sense since Bacon's time, it is clear that certain basic aspects of human nature remain, tragically, very much unaltered. The promotion of hoaxes and our susceptibility to them is a case in point.
Similarly, it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau himself who pointed out that,
“it is hard to prevent oneself from believing what one so keenly desires”.
- Rousseau, J.J., Reveries of a solitary walker (1796)
Now, once the Trinity of Deception is in place, the hoax is then ready for launching – the trigger must be pulled and the deception set in motion. The best way is to launch the hoax discretely and have it subsequently “discovered.”
A successful deceiver is often peripheral to this initial announcement. Centre stage is given to the hoax itself and the champions who step forward and reap the plaudits that tie them wholeheartedly to the cause of authenticity. These champions are now publicly invested in the deception, although most probably still ignorant of its deceptive nature.
The next stage of the elaborate process acts something like an outbreak of psychogenic illness. Indeed, it may well be considered in those very terms. [Psychogenic disease (or psychogenic illness) is a name given to physical illnesses that are believed to arise from emotional or mental stressors, or from psychological or psychiatric disorders. It is most commonly applied to illnesses where a physical abnormality or other biomarker has not yet been identified.]
The initial discovery causes a flurry of activities and comment. The item has its supporters and its detractors, but often the supporters who assert the positive case have the easier task; after all, if it is a good hoax, the general public already wants to believe. A good hoax allows room for this belief to expand and blossom.
Dark Emu “an important and well argued book”
“This is an important book that advances a powerful argument for re-evaluating the sophistication of Aboriginal peoples’ economic and socio-political livelihoods, and calls for Australia to embrace the complexity, sophistication and innovative skills of Indigenous people into its concept of itself as a nation.”
- Review by Dr Michael Davis, honorary research fellow at the University of Sydney, appears in the latest issue of the ANU Press journal Aboriginal History. Himself an author and scholar of Indigenous history and culture, Dr Davis assesses Dark Emu in the context of other works on the subject of Aboriginal land and agricultural practices. - Reported here
“Pascoe is an Indigenous historian and is clearly motivated by a desire to redress the serial denigration of Indigenous people. His cards are on the table, but this does not mean that he is not a rigorous and exacting judge of the historical record”.
“Pascoe assembles a persuasive case that Indigenous Australians farmed their land, lived in villages, built houses, harvested cereals, built complex aquaculture systems — possibly the earliest stone structures in human history — and led the kind of sedentary agricultural lives that were meant only to have arrived with Europeans in 1788.”
- Tony Hughes-d'Aeth, Associate Professor, English and Cultural Studies, The University of Western Australia, Friday essay: Dark Emu and the blindness of Australian agriculture, The Conversation, June 15, 2018
Following on the initial positive episode, there occurs a wave of general but more diffuse support. At this stage great advantage can be taken of the hoax by various constituencies. A good hoax looks to attract more than one of these constituencies and, if it can cause argument in both, then it should indeed be considered a ‘superb hoax’.
During this stage of development, the critics and detractors summon up their objections. But for the master deceiver, they also co-opt and even ‘manage’ this criticism. Criticism is not to be shunned and avoided, but rather it should be embraced. This is what turns a merely effective deception into a legendary hoax. It is apathy and neglect, not criticism, that kills a viable hoax.
‘While some still see Dark Emu as controversial (perhaps none so much as NewsCorp’s Andrew Bolt), the book is now in its 40th reprint.
“We owe Andrew a lot,” quips Pascoe. “He doubled the sales of Dark Emu – five years after it had been released!
Really, I think it was (that) the permaculturists got onto it and they’ve got a big sway over uni students and it lit a bit of a flame – but Andrew certainly helped.”
- Sydney Morning Herald, 23/1/2021
An additional characteristic of a good hoax is longevity. The secret to longevity is twofold. First, one needs a believable artefact or evidence around which the hoax is based, but such artefacts and evidence are rare and difficult to fabricate.
It is especially difficult to sustain because it requires a good degree of foresight. In this respect, having the artefact or evidence itself disappear is always an advantage. [Aboriginal villages and evidence destroyed by the colonials for example?]
The second key to longevity resides in the continuing need for people to believe. The life of a hoax is only extinguished when people no longer care about what it represents. Thus, the good hoaxer must look to what is perennial and persistent and not to what is temporary, faddish, and of the moment.
As has been discussed previously, was Dark Emu actually written as ‘evidence’ that pre-colonial Aboriginal people were settled, agriculturalists and farmers, thereby potentially supporting the claims, by modern day Activists, for Aboriginal sovereignty over Australia? Will the public discussion of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, The Voice and Treaty lead to continued book sales of Dark Emu?
Or will a continued momentum of the Dark Emu ‘thesis’ come from the university-educated permaculturalists, sustainability warriors and adherents of the New Green Deal who dream of a Nirvana based on an imagined, low energy, simple, Aboriginal agrarian life, in harmony with Mother Earth? In fact, it does seem like a bargain that is too good for anxious, over-educated, under-achieving uni students to refuse - buy a copy of Dark Emu for $20 and achieve an inner peace, in harmony with your friends, the Aboriginal collective and Mother Earth.
Only time will tell as to how part three of Dark Emu’s ‘trinity’ will play out - will enough of the constituency still believe, or indeed, need to believe?
Will we all look back on Bruce Pascoe and his Dark Emu and decide it was indeed a truer history of Australia, something our kids should learn in school?
Or, will we find that it was all just a good hoax, maybe even a superb or a legendary, long-living hoax, but still a hoax nevertheless?
Only time will tell.
Terry Newless
Contributor
