Dark Emu's Hall of Fame - Will I have Egg on my Face?
Under Construction During 2021
Nominations are open for the Dark Emu Hall of Fame
Category : Will I End-up with Egg on My Face?
And the nominees to date are :
Nominee 1
Professor Richard Broome (LaTrobe University) is nominated for,
‘He [Bruce Pascoe] has done a great service by bringing this material to students and general readers, and in such a lively and engaging fashion’
- Dark Emu book commendations, 2018 Reprint p(iii)
Nominee 2
Professor Marcia Langton AM, anthropologist and geographer is a welcome repeat nominee for her insight that,
‘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.’
- Marcia Langton, The Australian, Dark Emu book commendations, 2018 Reprint p(i)
We are surprised that these comments come from Professor Langton given that,
‘Professor Marcia Langton AM is an anthropologist and geographer, and since 2000 has held the Foundation Chair of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne.’ - Source
Similarly, Dr Ian Keen from the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra has had ‘his eyebrows raised’ by Prof Langton’s position, when he writes in his 2021 paper that,
‘Defences of Dark Emu have come from the political left…Professor Marcia Langton is reported to have said that Dark Emu ‘is the most important book on Australia and should be read by every Australian’. Again, coming as it does from an eminent scholar, this is an unexpected judgement.’
Indeed.
Nominee 3
As we think Tim Watts’ MP tweet says it all, his self-nomination (or is that self-promotion?) gets him a place in this year’s contender list for entry into the Dark Emu Hall of Fame - Will I end up with Egg on My Face?
Nominee 4
Dr Michael Davis, BA Hons (La Trobe)PhD (UTS, Sydney), Honorary Research Fellow, University of Sydney is nominated for the following gem of a review (Best Taxpayer Funded Academic Category), when he writes,
‘This [Dark Emu] 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…an important and well-argued book.’
- Dr Michael Davis, Dark Emu book commendations, 2018 Reprint p(iii)
Hmmm, interesting.
Rick Morton, Senior Reporter for The Saturday Paper, gets support for his nomination by Dr Ian Keen who writes,
“Defences of Dark Emu have come from the political left. Rick Morton of The Saturday Paper, for example, writes: ‘after reading the explorer journals on which the book is based’ he was ‘unable to find any errors’ in Dark Emu (Morton 2019). This is quite surprising, as we shall see.”
- Dr Ian Keen, Foragers or Farmers: Dark Emu and the Controversy over Aboriginal Agriculture.- page 3 here
We have posted another critique of Rick “Squiggly” Morton’s claims of his ‘in-depth’ checking of Bruce Pascoe’s sources, which gives him a double nomination. Well done Rick!
The Wheeler Centre is nominated for our Clique Claque Award*, for their long-term, never-ending commitment to the Dark Emu thesis and Bruce Pascoe - Wheeler Centre Bruce Pascoe Bio.
Wheeler Centre Events :
Bruce Pascoe, Make It New: 2021 and Beyond - 10 Dec 2020
Dark Emu Revisited - 12 Aug 2018
Dark Emu: Bruce Pascoe and Tony Birch in Conversation - 10 May 2017
Books and Ideas at Montalto Bruce Pascoe - 21 Oct 2016
* We thank blogger Henri Theureau for his description of clique claque
Une clique is a sort of in-crowd, literary, artistic, philosophical, political, more or less united towards some goal, defending the same ideas or interests.
Une claque is a group of people who were originally scattered in a theatre on the first evening of a play, and loudly clapped their hands so as to encourage the audience to do the same. Some authors or theatre managers went so far as to pay for “une claque” on “première” evenings.
Nominee 7
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
Nominee 8
A Tweet from ABC Kitchen personality Annabel Crabb.
No comment required, Ms Crabb has said it all.
Nominee 9 : Best TEAM EFFORT - The Australian Labor Party
From Hansard (and a hat-tip to The Mocker):
Labor MP Alicia Payne: “We are waking up, with the help of thought leaders like Bruce Pascoe and his book, Dark Emu, to the sophistication of Aboriginal cultures and societies.” Thought leaders?
Labor MP Susan Templeman: “He [Pascoe] demonstrated by taking apart the accounts of settlers that there was agriculture, engineering and ownership and stewardship of this land by the First Peoples.”
It was, “an amazing book,” said Labor MP and indigenous woman Linda Burney. It “turns on its head the widely held view that Aboriginal people were hunter and gatherer societies,” and presents “a truer picture of Aboriginal society and the land”.
Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese: “Look at what Bruce Pascoe has done with Dark Emu and our place in this land. In this one extraordinary book, Bruce has unearthed the knowledge that we already had in our possession but chose to bury along the way. Ignorance feeds in darkness. Bruce has simply reminded us where the light switch is. With the flick of that switch a complex mosaic of ancient nations is suddenly laid out before us in light as bright as those early European explorers first saw it and recorded it.”
Labor senator Penny Wong: “We are no longer trapped in the ignorance of our own assumptions and prejudice, premised on the underlying supremacism of the narrative that white people know best. Bruce Pascoe writes of Australia before colonisation with First Nations people engaging in complex water management and agriculture and living in sophisticated housing among villages — none of which fit the definition of a hunter-gatherer.”
Labor MP Tim Watts went as far to single out and shame his great-great-great grandfather John Watts for observing Indigenous Australians were a “nomad race who made no use of [the land] except for going from place to place and living only on the wild animals and the small roots of the earth and never in any way cultivating a single inch of the ground.” “This statement of ignorance is laid bare by the prize-winning book Dark Emu, in which Bruce Pascoe carefully disproves the ignorant assumptions my ancestor had about the ‘natives’ and their agricultural primitivism,” Watts self-righteously declared, oblivious to his own gullibility. What is more, Watts’s reference to “agricultural primitivism” is itself a form of chauvinism which Sutton deplores. The absence of agricultural methods in Indigenous Australia was, he notes, “an active championing and protection of their own way of life and, when in contact with outsiders, a resistance to an alien economic pattern”.
And sitting on the substitute bench, wanting to add their two-bobs worth we have :
Greens senator Janet Rice: “I recently read the book Dark Emu … There were really complex technologies, there were settlements, there was agriculture, and there were villages and towns of thousands of people, in some cases, which have been wiped from our history, unacknowledged, because we have a myth of our history …” Independent MP Zali Steggall: “Bruce Pascoe has demonstrated that there was once a grain belt that extended across the whole continent.”
Nominee 10 : Best Museum - The Australian Museum
Nominee 11. Historian James Boyce
A product of our research into the dark emuing of the Australian public is that some really interesting ‘facts’ are now being discovered, such as the existence of the Man of Mystery, Edward White.
We here at Dark Emu Exposed believe that there was in fact no man called Edward White present in Risdon Cove on May 3rd 1804 to witness the so called, Risdon ‘Massacre”.
If our theory is ultimately accepted as being true, then the highly regarded historian James Boyce will be a contender for a, Bruce Pascoe, Egg-On-My-Face Award, for his following gem,
‘Overall, the reliability of Edward White’s evidence to the Aborigines Committee about the Risdon massacre therefore looks reasonably good.’ - James Boyce, Whitewash, Black Inc, 2003, p41
