A Tale of Two Scholars - and the 'Shallow' Scholarship of Professor Pascoe
This is a tale of Two Scholars from the University of Melbourne.
Dark Emu author, Bruce Pascoe, was recently appointed in 2020 as Melbourne Enterprise Professor in Indigenous Agriculture in the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Veterinary and Agricultural Sciences (FVAS). Professor Pascoe was undoubtably assisted in obtaining his Professorship at Melbourne University due to the popular success of his book Dark Emu, which,
‘draws on accounts from European explorers to argue that history has whitewashed the fact Indigenous Australians had sophisticated agricultural practices prior to European settlement. “The book has been incredibly successful and read by thousands of Australians and the support for it has been incredible,” Professor Pascoe says…Dark Emu calls for a reconsideration of the hunter-gatherer label for pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians and pushes for a return to more sustainable Indigenous land management methods…[but]…“I am not saying Aboriginal people were like white farmers, what I am saying is - they were engaged in a form of food production which is unlike hunting and gathering. We did hunt, we did gather, we still do,” Professor Pascoe said.’ - The Sydney Morning Herald , 19/1/2020 - [our emphasis]
and
‘…Pascoe says,…he kept reading colonial accounts of Aboriginal people farming: irrigating, harvesting, living and prospering in large villages. “I had disbelief. I’d read the record and kept thinking to myself, ‘surely that can’t be right’,” Pascoe says. “An observation of that importance couldn’t have gone straight through to the keeper without anyone in education or politics or history remarking on it, but that’s what happened…I realised…that the sources I would have to use exclusively would be unimpeachable European sources.”
Pascoe immersed himself in those records – such as the diaries of explorers, which were surprisingly full of information about the way Aboriginal people managed their lands. “You have to read them in the original form, without the editing, because in some of them there was a severe edit before they became public documents, and often the only stuff missing was the observations about Aboriginal use of land,” Pascoe says.
“Our kids have grown up, for 200 years, in a fog about the history of the land.” Clearing the fog is a long process. “I think the country’s ready for it. I think one of the reasons Dark Emu has had that sort of impact is because Australians are much more ready now to look at these things.
“My generation is in total denial. Even good friends of mine still struggle to get their heads around what the country was really like, so I think to give our kids this education is really important for the psychology of the country…Here’s an opportunity to learn the real history and learn your country, learn what makes your country tick.” - The Guardian 24/5/2019 - [our emphasis]
As indicated above, and from what we have gathered from listening to many interviews with Professor Pascoe, is that the main themes of his book Dark Emu are that Aboriginal people were engaged in sophisticated food production using agricultural techniques which were recorded by the early explorers and observant Colonials, but then destroyed by the ‘nasty’ settlers and deliberately erased from the record and ignored by academics. Australians were thus totally ignorant of these Aboriginal practices until Professor Pascoe arrives to set the record straight and write his ‘truer history’ after immersing himself in the records.
But as usual with Professor Pascoe, nothing is quite as it seems and the more we learn, the more we see that Professor Pascoe’s work is hardly original and often involves very superficial ‘research’ that misses much and distorts what it does find.
We have explored previously how Professor Pascoe freely admits 90% of Dark Emu is based on the work of convicted terrorist bomber Rupert Gerritsen.
Now we will describe how Professor Pascoe seems to have completely missed the work of a researcher who had beaten him by some 50 years in writing about many examples of Aboriginal food production by ‘farmers’, as Professor Pascoe would call them or, as we at Dark Emu Exposed would call them, ‘complex - hunter gatherers’ or, as the researcher Alastair Campbell would call them in 1965, ‘hunter gatherers’.
Alastair Campbell MBBS, MD, FRACP. (1917-1996) - Source, p45-46
Alastair Heriot Campbell’s (1917-1996) obituary was published in Chiron , the Journal of University of Melbourne Medical Society (p45-46), where he was remembered as ‘a physician of high repute’, and ‘a gentleman, a political activist, and a scholar’. He had graduated as a doctor from The University of Melbourne during the Second World War (1940), served in the RAAF and then worked, in Repatriation Hospitals, on the treatment of tuberculosis (catching it himself in 1948) and on other medical research.
In addition, he took up social anthropology, joined the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines with the aim of improving the lives and equal rights of Aborigines, published research papers on Aboriginal tooth avulsion, traditional pharmacy and the culture and prehistory of the Aboriginal peoples of Victoria.
More importantly, he published in 1965 a paper on Aboriginal elementary food production where he, like Professor Pascoe some 50 years later, surveyed the original literature for examples of early Aboriginal food production that was more complex and could even be called ‘proto-farming.’
Incredibly, his paper, Elementary Food Production by the Australian Aborigines, (Mankind, Vol 6, No 5, May 1965) contains a large number of examples of food production from around Australia (defined as measures taken by humans to assist the growth or reproduction of fauna or flora utilised as food), which do not appear at all in Dark Emu, but one would think would have been most relevant in the support of Professor Pascoe’s arguments. Why didn’t Professor Pascoe refer to these examples?
Furthermore, Campbell anticipates that there might be more to the practice of the Aborigines ‘burning off’ than meets the eye, when he writes, ,
‘Whether or not the extensive practice of burning grass was ever done for the same purpose [in order to improve the next crop] or to encourage animals to graze on the new grass is a possibility that requires further investigation” (ibid., p.208).
Indeed, four years later in 1969 Rhys Jones published his influentially titled (for better or worse) paper Fire-Stick Farming.
To our mind, the fact that Professor Pascoe does not acknowledge the prior work of Alastair Campbell, an alumni of Professor Pascoe’s own University with regard to this paper on the myriad of examples of Aboriginal ‘complex’ food production does seem strange. Either Professor Pascoe’s own research was rather ‘shallow’ and he was just unaware of the work of Alastair Campbell or perhaps, more mischievously, he ignored this work of Campbell so to avoid having to explain that yes, Australian researchers were well aware of the complex food production techniques of Aboriginal societies 50 years ago - well after colonial times and well before Professor Pascoe came onto the scene with his revelatory ‘theory’ - and thus, this knowledge had not been destroyed or buried at all, as Professor Pascoe claims.
Perhaps we will never know, but one does wonder when one considers that in Professor Pascoe’s previous book, Convincing Ground, the very same Alastair Campbell is actually listed in the Index and is quoted in two paragraphs (Ref. 1).
For you see, Alistair Campbell was also the author of the book, John Batman and the Aborigines, (Ref. 2) which Pascoe cites as a reference on the deeds of one John Batman, the founder of Melbourne, and who Pascoe appears to hate with a passion.
In the words of the illustrious Bruce Pascoe,
“Batman is not just telling porkies, he’s fabricating blatant lies in a callous attempt to defraud everyone. Many contemporary influential Australians have cleaved to the same principle.” - Bruce Pascoe in Convincing Ground, p.17
Indeed!
ps: You couldn’t make this stuff up.
Reference 1. - Pascoe, B. Convincing Ground, 2007, Aboriginal Studies Press, p.16..
Reference 2. - Campbell, A. John Batman and the Aborigines, Kibble Books, 1987
