How Low Can Three Writers Go in Misleading our Children with Their Re-writing of our Aboriginal History?
A new book, Dark Emu in the Classroom (Magabala Books, 2019), written by Victorian teachers, Simone Barlow and Ashlee Horyniak, has been designed to be used for, ‘Teacher Resources for High School Geography.’ It is ‘based on the concepts in Bruce Pascoe’s highly acclaimed book, Dark Emu-Agriculture or Accident?’
Unfortunately, we at Dark Emu Exposed believe that this collection of ‘teacher resources’, is not much more than an ideological kit with which to indoctrinate our children into accepting the ‘de-colonisation’ ideology of the Australian Activist Left.
But more particularly, we believe the writings of Mr Pascoe and these two teachers, Ms Barlow and Ms Horyniak are highly disrespectful to Aboriginal people, their customs and the way of life that they have successfully followed for millennia.
As an example of our concerns, consider how these three writers selectively quote one early Australian record to slant their narrative for idealogical gain.
In 1933, Alice Duncan-Kemp published, Our Sandhill Country, a recollection of her childhood in the early 1900’s on a 881 km² cattle property, Mooraberrie, west of Windorah, south-west Queensland. She drew on her childhood experiences, her father’s diaries and day books, and information from an Aboriginal Karuwali man named Moses.
Mr Pascoe ‘quotes’ Alice Duncan-Kemp several times in his Dark Emu book, even displaying his strong ‘feminist credentials’ when he writes,
‘The writing of Alice Duncan-Kemp is also often dismissed simply because she was a woman. Despite her having written a million words on Aboriginal life at Bidourie, the only writer from south-west Queensland remembered in Australian literary history is the bush balladeer, Barcroft Boake. It might seem a petty thing to mention, but eliminating Duncam-Kemp’s first hand observations compromises our understanding of the past.” (ibid., p88-89).
So, despite the fact that Mr Pascoe is doing his usual, ‘just making stuff up’ routine again (Alice Duncan-Kemp is indeed remembered, along with Barcroft Boake, as ‘a writer from south-west Queensland - here is her entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography; Oh! we are exhausted in constantly having to point out all of Mr Pascoe’s furphies), he is also admitting that he accepts that Alice Duncan-Kemp is a woman who’s word on Aboriginal people carries weight and should be listen to. Unlike the usual Australian male ‘misogynists’, Mr Pascoe will not ’dismiss’ her ‘simply because she is a woman'.
Hmmm, well let us see how Mr Pascoe, and his two ‘protege’ authors, Ms Barlow and Ms Horyniak treat the words of Alice Duncan-Kemp.
Mr Pascoe’s Original ‘Settler-Woman’ Source
- one of ‘the sources upon which Australia’s idea of history is based…’ - (Dark Emu, 2018 Reprint p 2)
Title page of the 2nd Edition 1934 reprint of Alice Monkton Duncan-Kemp’s book, Our Sandhill Country, cited by Pascoe, Barlow and Horyniak.
The two relevant pages (p146-147) of Our Sandhill Country, which describe the increase ceremony ritual, selectively quoted by Pascoe and cited on page 31 of Dark Emu (2018 Reprint). See here for larger image
Our 1934, 2nd edition, copy of Alice Duncan-Kemp’s book, Our Sandhill Country, Angus & Robertson, has the following passages,
CHAPTER XVI - EAGLE-HAWK'S TOWRI
‘…Riding round the bend of the hole we cantered into a company of blacks rehearsing a Wompoo or rain dance. The bucks were adorned with the usual fuss and feathers of corroboree regalia; the fronts of their shiny bodies were covered with hieroglyphics, heads and feet of frogs and birds, all picked out in lines of blood-stuck feathers and kopi paste. Their faces were kopied white except for the eyes, which gleamed like onyx by way of contrast.
The gins had little or no regalia; all wore emu feather amulets, grass necklets, and white shell charms on their arms and chests. Above their ears and across their foreheads were fastened miri-miri nets, ornaments of kangaroo teeth hung rosette fashion at the side of their temples.
The dance was an imitation of their totems, emus, brolgas, and swamp-haunting creatures.
From their woven dilly bags the gins sprinkled seed food over the ground as they danced and sang the rain song: “Bo bo quadger an goonun noo. Bo bo quadger un-goon yun-noo' -aia-a-a-ee-ee-ee." The same refrain of “Bo bo quadger un-goon-yun-noo” preceded many verses. Katoora or barley-grass seed lay in little hillocks, already swelling and creeping to repeated applications of water which the gins poured on them to make “wun-jee all the same walkabout (grass to grow).”
The katoora seed gathered from the coarse barley grass of downs country was obtained by barter from the Kalkadoon, Goa, and Pitta Pitta tribes of Winton and Boulia districts. The Myorlis of Davenport country passed it down in reed or grass wrappings. It was used for ceremonial purposes, and ground in conjunction with crude fish four which aborigines living on “big waters” (permanent fish holes) made from fish dried and pulverized.
From three transverse incisions on their chests and thighs, blood dripped in beady drops on to the ashy soil. At intervals the performers rested, squatting on their hams or lying on the ground, drawing pituri “'chews' or cigars from behind their ears; already their lips were yellow-white, caked with the ring of pituri-acacia compound. A “nugget” of pituri wrapped in a coolabah leaf was placed in the fork of a tree overhanging the water, as an offering to Wompoo, half bird, half frog, fantastic creature of swamp and brake.
Above : Three images of Aboriginal ceremonies from Alice Duncan-Kemp’s book, Where Strange Paths Go Down, W.R.Smith & Paterson, 1964, which includes a greater part of her original Our Sandhill Country of 1933.
Alice Duncan-Kemp is providing an eye-witness account of an ‘increase ceremony’. The Katoora or barley grass seeds were not even local, but were bartered from tribes further away and were used only for ceremonial purposes and were sprinkled over the ground and watered symbolically to make the naturally occurring, local ‘grass to grow’. The ceremony witnessed by Alice Duncan-Kemp was just that, a ‘ceremony’, a ‘ritual’ designed to result in favourable local grass-growing in the coming season. It was a ritual similar to those which are still practiced by mankind the world over. For example, these Indonesian fishermen are making offerings to the sea in a ritual to increase their catch - they are not practicing aquaculture
The First Manipulation and Selective Quoting to ‘Slant the Narrative’ - By Mr Pascoe.
Author Bruce Pascoe.
Photo Source: Off the Internet
In his Chapter of Dark Emu, titled “Agriculture’, Mr Pascoe selectively quotes from Duncan-Kemp to give the reader an impression that the Aboriginal women, the gins, were ‘sowing’ seed and expected the ‘grass to grow’ from which the reader might easily think the women were accustomed to doing this on a large scale on a regular basis as ‘cultivators’, ‘sowers’ and ‘reapers’ of seed crops - ‘farmers’ no less. Mr Pascoe writes,
‘Alice Duncan-Kemp, who grew up with Aboriginal people on her father’s station, Mooraberry* near Bidourie in Queensland around 1910, described, the Katoora ceremony where :
‘From their woven dilly bags the gins sprinkled seed food over the ground…Katoora or barley grass seed lay in little hillocks, already swelling and creeping to repeated applications of water which the gins poured on them to make ‘wunjee aal (sic**) the same walkabout (grass to grow)’. - Dark Emu, 2018 Reprint, p30-31.
Mr Pascoe does at least mention it was part of the ‘Katoora ceremony’ - but he does not include any of Duncan-Kemp’s context explaining that the Katoora was an ‘increase’ ceremony designed to bring on a good season of local grass growing - she says there was ‘the usual fuss and feathers of corroboree regalia’; the seed ‘was used for ceremonial purposes’, and it was all a ‘performance’ - they were not Aborigines doing ‘farm work’ that day.
In our view, this selective quoting by Mr Pascoe leaves the modern Australian reader with the impression that here is a first-hand, settler’s account of Aboriginal women ‘sowing and irrigating seed’ as agricultural cultivators do nowadays. This is totally misleading.
*Duncan-Kemp spells her home as ‘Mooraberrie’.
**sic -In Duncan-Kemp’s book, ‘wun-jee’ is hyphenated and it is not ‘aal’ but spelt, ‘all’, as it should be for the sentence to make some sense with ‘wun-jee’ presumably being the local Aboriginal word for grass, ‘wun-jee all the same walkabout’ (Reference 1). It is surprising Mr Pascoe allowed his book to be re-printed many times without correcting this apparent ‘typo’ but then, given that he appears to be bit of an Aboriginal ‘linguist’ himself (He is/was on the Committee of First Languages Australia who are ‘working toward a future where Aboriginal language communities and Torres Strait Islander language communities have full command of their languages and can use them as much as they wish to’), maybe he thinks ‘wunjee aal’ is correct?- it does sound Aboriginal. But it does raise the question of whether he actually read Alice Duncan-Kemp’s book at all, or just searched some on-line version, that carried these typographical errors, looking for key ‘agricultural’ words. It is not surprising that his ‘proteges’, the ‘Two Teachers from Williamstown’ repeated this ‘typo’ in their ‘Teacher Resources’, but more worryingly to us is when another ‘academic’, Dr Jennifer Silcock Research Fellow School of Biological Sciences Faculty of Science University of Queensland, repeats the same error when ‘quoting’ Duncan-Kemp in her paper in the Journal of Ethnobiology. (See Reference 2 below). Has an intellectual rot pervaded all of academia?
The Second, and Further, Manipulation and Selective Quoting to ‘Slant the Narrative’ - By Ms Barlow and Ms Horyniak.
Joint author of Dark Emu Teacher Resources, Simone Barlow, B.A (Syd), Dip.Ed (Melb), teacher at Williamstown High Senior Campus. Photo Source Credit - from 2009 SMH
Joint author of Dark Emu Teacher Resources, Ashlee Horyniak M.Ed (Melb), and BA (Hons) Humanities Coordinator at the Williamstown High. Photo Source Credit - Linkedin
Available at Booktopia
In their book, Dark Emu in the Classroom - Teachers Resources for High School Geography, Magabala Books, 2019, joint authors, Simone Barlow and Ashlee Horyniak, in our view, seriously manipulate even further Mr Pascoe’s already highly selective quote, from the original Alice Duncan-Kemp book.
Barlow and Horyniak’s version of Duncan-Kemp’s eyewitness account reads as follows,
‘Alice Duncan-Kemp grew up on a sheep station in Queensland, stated this in 1910:
From their woven dilly bags the gins sprinkled seed food over the ground…Katoora or barley grass seed lay in little hillocks, already swelling and creeping to repeated applications of water which the gins [ Aboriginal women] poured on them to make ‘wunjee aal the same walkabout (grass to grow).’
- Dark Emu in the Classroom - Teachers Resources for High School Geography, Handout 1A.2, p17.
This gives students the totally wrong impression of what actually happened and was recorded by Duncan-Kemp.
Firstly, these ‘Two Teachers’ tell students that Duncan-Kemp ‘stated this in 1910’, ignoring the fact that she only stated it when she wrote her book in 1933 (She was born in 1901 and writes in the Foreword of her book that the, ‘…scenes described in this book are…between the years 1906 and 1923...) (ibid.,vii).
Secondly, they leave out any reference to it being part of the ‘Katoora ceremony’, which at least Mr Pascoe feels obliged to mention.
So what are naive high school students, eager to please their teachers and pass their tests, meant to think? How are they going to answer some of the questions on the work-sheet titled, ‘Were Aboriginal Australians hunter gatherers?’, that comes with this Project Handout -
Question 1 : What do these sources tell us about Aboriginal Australians ? (Probable answer - Aboriginal women sowed and watered seed crops).
Question 2 : What evidence is presented to support the provided definition of agriculture ? [ie: ‘the five signifiers of agriculture, selection of seed; preparation of the soil; harvest of the crop; storage of surpluses; and large populations and permanent housing’]. (Probable answer - Yes to 1, 2 & 3).
Question 4 : Are these sources reliable? Why/why not? (Probable answer - Of course. The original quote is by a ‘white’ woman who saw it with her own eyes and recorded it accurately, since we know that ‘Professor’ Pascoe discovered it in her original writings, the writings of an early settler that we all know Australians trust.)
So dear reader, in our opinion, what is happening in our schools is very, very bad and nothing less than an indoctrination to manipulate our children’s education to believe that Aboriginal people were ‘farmers’ and not highly successful, nomadic hunter-gatherers. One can see this by the manipulation of Duncan-Kemp’s evidence as it progresses through Pascoe’s adult book version to the final school kids version.
Think for a moment how disrespectful and indeed highly offensive this is to Aboriginal people. Here are two, young, ‘white’ women down south in the city of Melbourne, manipulating a first-hand account by Duncan-Kemp, a trusted confidant of the Aboriginal women who lived with her, of a ceremonial Aboriginal ‘increase’ ritual and, with no sense of shame or sacrilege, telling those Aboriginal people that you were just a group of women planting some seed that day and farming like we, the European colonisers, do nowadays!
The arrogance of these ‘Two Teachers’ is mind-blowing.
Alice Duncan-Kemp writes in the Foreward to her book,
‘…I have condensed considerably my account of the aborigines, their customs and curious rites, but I have kept to fact, and only recorded things as I saw them…The seed of my knowledge, of that corner of sandhills, was implanted within me as a mere babe straddling Mary Ann’s hip [Alice’s nurse-gin], or toddling with little black mates after the billy-cart.
In later youth the seed grew and fruited. The secret lay in a profound respect for the aborigines and their customs. In return these trusty folk taught me to read, with wonder and pleasure, in nature’s Infinite Book of Secrecy, the reading of which was as simple as A B C to them.’ - (ibid., page vii-viii).
Why oh Why Would These ‘Two Teachers’ Do Such a Sacrilegious Thing?
Why are the young followers of Mr Pascoe’s ‘Aboriginal Farmer Theory’ so passionate and hell-bent on indoctrinating our children into believing that Aboriginal people were farmers? What is so wrong about listening to, and believing, Aboriginal people, historians and anthropologists when they all say Aboriginal people were very successful, hunter-gatherer people for millennia? There is nothing shameful in that. All our ancestors were hunter gatherers at some stage in the past.
We believe that Ms Barlow may have given her ideological game away when she wrote a review of Mr Pascoe’s book, Dark Emu in March 2017. In her review she states,
‘This compelling [book] should be compulsory reading for all Humanities teachers (and arguably all teachers full stop). Bruce Pascoe questions the paradigm of White Australian History and challenges readers to look beyond what we ourselves were taught in school…’
‘…What I like most about Dark Emu is that it reminds us that History is interpretation…’
‘[Pascoe] reminds us to look at the context and purpose of evidence - to be critical of the person creating the source and question what their agenda might be…’
‘There are so many lessons that non-Indigenous Australians can learn from how Aboriginals thrived here for so long. They had systems of governance that allowed slow and sustainable growth and land use. And more than that, it is clearly evident that Aboriginals were the original inhabitants of the land and that Australia was not ‘terra nullius’ for the taking. This uncomfortable truth needs to be recognised, but more than that, Aboriginal people need to be involved in the consultation of planning Australia’s future. “The opportunity to be involved in the future of the country will release Aboriginal people from some of the shackles of colonialism. The country will still be colonised but the disposed (sic) will be included…in the general Australian psyche.”
- Book review by Simone Barlow, Williamstown High School here.
So there you have it. Has Simone Barlow nailed her colours to the mast of ‘HMAS Aboriginal Sovereignty’, under the command of Captain Pascoe? Has she been shown to be willing to manipulate and demean Aboriginal customs, ceremonies and their nomadic hunter gatherer society, all in the name of, what?, re-instating some utopian Aboriginal society in Australia? Only Intellectuals with a Post-modern, Australian tertiary education could come up with such a wacky, destructive plan as that.
And, who are the main victims again, of what many would only see as just another example of ‘white’ supremacy from ‘down South’? Aboriginal people, past, present and future and our students of today. The future for Australia is, as it always has been, about honesty, truth, scientific and historical method, trial and error and tolerant debate. It is the only way our children will be able to cope and thrive in the future that is fast approaching them.
The Final Word
- Are All of Our Histories and Cultures Now Open to a ‘Reconsideration” from the New Breed of Ideological Teachers?
After absorbing the above dear reader, we know that you will be swinging between being totally depressed and enraged at what is happening to our young school children. So to finish on a lighter note, here is some satire to show just how stupid is the Progressive Left’s attempt to re-write our history and the facts of all our cultures.
From the Journal of Australian Post-Modern Anthropology.
After their ground-breaking paper that proved Aboriginal people really were farmers, anthropologists ‘Barlow’ and ‘Horyniak’ (not their real names) have now conclusively shown that the well documented morning exercise sessions of the ‘Tribe of Muhammad’ are actually evidence that Muslims in the Middle East are secular, fitness devotees like the American Invaders of Iraq. Barlow and Horyniak provide a compelling argument that Muslims are not the deeply religious people that the American historians paint them as. The evidence insists that we need a reconsideration of the ‘religeous devotee’ label for Muslims, which Americans, as well as Australians, continue to mistakenly apply to them, as seen here.
Further Reading and References
Note : We have scoured our books for a translation of the word ‘wun-jee’ or a derivative, but no luck so far - any leads or comments from readers would be appreciated.
Silcock, J. L, Aboriginal Translocations: The Intentional Propagation and Dispersal of Plants in Aboriginal Australia. Journal of Ethnobiology, 38(3) : 390-405 Published By: Society of Ethnobiology.
Screen-shots from ‘academic’, Dr Jennifer Silcock, Research Fellow School of Biological Sciences Faculty of Science University of Queensland, who repeats the same error when ‘citing’ Duncan-Kemp’s 1934 book in her paper in the Journal of Ethnobiology.
From what we can see, the wording, including Mr Pascoe’s ‘typo’ error of ‘wunjee aal’ (should be ‘wun-jee all’) is repeated in Dr Silcock’s paper.
Worryingly, she includes Pascoe’s Dark Emu in her cited references. Did she really read and cite Duncan-Kemps original book, or did she just transcribe it from Pascoe’s Dark Emu, error and all, and pretended that she read Duncan-Kemp’s original book? I fear we will never know.
3. Mary Ann’s Foods
Alice Duncan-Kemp was looked after as a child by Mary Ann, her nurse-gin. Mary Ann later became their house gin, in charge of cooking and keeping house.
Duncan-Kemp devotes a whole Chapter in her book to Mary Ann, where she describes, amongst other things, how Mary Ann used to,
‘take us out hunting…’, ‘digging for roots’ and ‘yams’, and ‘gathering seeds’ and ‘fruits’.
All in all, this sounds like classic subsistence hunting and gathering. At no time does Duncan-Kemp mention that Mary Ann was a disciple of Professor Pascoe’s Theory of Australian Agriculture - no selecting seed and planting it, no irrigation, and no digging irrigation channels ( women were the ‘navvies’ or ‘diggers’ in Aboriginal Society’).
However, maybe we have found something Professor Pascoe has missed in Duncan-Kemps account, which is surprising since he says he has ‘read’ her book.
Duncan-Kemp goes into considerable detail about how Mary Ann was adept at locating, harvesting and ‘cultivating’ the honey-ant known as eerumba teeta. Using the methodology of Professor Pascoe, Aboriginal people were the world’s first ANT-BEE Keepers! They located the nests, and dug down to collect the large ants containing engorged abdomens full of honey (these ants were known as the ‘vats’) and then carefully sucked out the honey before replacing the ant vat back into the nest, where it would be refilled by worker ants over the next season. This is arguably, incipient, ant ‘apiculture.’
It seems Professor Pascoe missed this one. And he does insist he did read Alice Duncan-Kemps book doesn’t he?
See here for the Chapter on Mary Ann and the description of the eerumba teeta ants from Page 259.
And see here for a film clip from another location in the 1940’s (see at 01:30) recording 'Numidee’ digging for these honey ants, whilst singing (‘corroboreeing’) just as Duncan-Kemp described all those years ago.
Are you a student, teacher or parent worried about that fact that you might be getting a ‘false-narrative’ about our Aboriginal and Colonial history? Are you too worried about the lack of rigour in our education system?
Well, the book for you is Robert Lewis’s, Is Dark Emu good history? which will teach you how to critically assess Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu so you can make up your own mind as to the veracity of its main thesis.
For further information, and ordering your own copy of this excellent study guide, see here.
