We Respond to Rick Morton's Pascoe & Bolt Article in "The Saturday Paper"
Dear Mr Rick Morton,
Many of your readers are sending us, at Dark Emu Exposed, a copy of your recent article in the misguided belief that it provides enough counter argument to invalidate our critique of Mr Pascoe’s book, Dark Emu, which claims that pre-colonial Aboriginal Australia was an agricultural society. We beg to differ and find your arguments totally unconvincing and have answered the points you make in your article with bold comments inserted within your article as below.
Roger Karge, Editor, Dark Emu Exposed
But firstly Mr Morton, it appears that you are trying to be a credible and ‘independent’ news reporter when you discuss Bruce Pascoe and his book Dark Emu, yet you don’t seem to disclose in your article anywhere that the company you work for, Schwartz Publishing, was also the publisher of Bruce Pascoe! This seems incredible to us and appears to be a Conflict Of Interest and a breach of basic journalist professionalism! It makes it hard to take your article seriously, but we will give it a go anyway:
You write in your article, "Bolt, Pascoe and the culture wars", The Saturday Paper, Nov 30, 2019 :
“There is one particular question Andrew Bolt does not wish to answer. In correspondence with The Saturday Paper, the News Corp columnist was asked three times whether he has read Bruce Pascoe’s best-selling history of Aboriginal Australia, Dark Emu. Each time, he evaded the question”.
[We can’t help you on this question – if it is any consolation, we at Dark Emu Exposed HQ have two highly annotated copies, one of each edition, of Dark Emu, plus a copy of Young Dark Emu, so we know Mr Pascoe’s text inside out]
“It is useful, then, to start an examination of his attacks on the author with this in mind. A more inconvenient truth is that Bolt’s dislike of Pascoe began at least two years before the publication of the book, which has now become the focus of a minor culture war led by Bolt and others. Bolt’s efforts to “fact-check” Pascoe’s book are based largely around a website called Dark Emu Exposed. The site’s contributors cast doubt on Pascoe’s account of an Indigenous history different from the one allowed by colonial interpretation”.
[Yes, we cast great doubts on Mr Pascoe’s accounts]
“They also doubt his Aboriginal heritage”.
[Yes, we have on our website a link to an alleged ancestry of Mr Pascoe, based on publicly available evidence, such as birth, marriage and death certificates, and other public records ; evidence which we note, has also been freely available to Mr Pascoe, but which he has as yet been unwilling to confirm or refute].
“As one prominent Indigenous leader tells The Saturday Paper, on the condition of anonymity, the argument against Pascoe’s work is an extension of “19th-century race theory”, which once espoused the view that race is the major indicator of a person’s character and behavior”.
[ ………..bang!……..Excuse me. I just fell off my chair! Your readers might want to reflect on what is being said here. We suggest you and your informant might want to join the rest of us in the 21st Century and update your attitudes. I can assure you, that all of us at Dark Emu Exposed are firm believers in Dr Martin Luther King’s world, where we will not be judged by the colour of our skin, but by the content of our character.
Indeed, some people might suggest that in fact, Mr Pascoe perhaps himself, is using his professed Aboriginality or ‘race’, to define his writing, his character and his behavior as an Aboriginal Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian man. – Don’t just take our word for it, the literary critic for the Canberra Times seemed to agree in 1988, when reviewing Mr Pascoe’s book, Fox,
“One is conscious that the ideas, fears and longings of Fox are, as here, described for him, from the outside, and with an overlay of a white author's interpretation. Pascoe is, after all, imagining the psyche of an Aboriginal person; and it is not possible for him to convey all that the concept of "my people" would mean to, say, Colin Johnson or Sally Morgan. He writes as a humane, informed liberal, but as a white man as well.”
This is a clear recognition by a very woke, 1988, Canberra critic that a writer’s “race” is important in establishing his authenticity, and by implication furthering his career, as an Aboriginal writer. So put yourself hypothetically into Mr Pascoe’s shoes : he’s about 40 years old – mid-life crisis territory - he loves writing and dreams of making it his career, but each of his books so far has failed to launch into the big-time. This critic implies that his latest book, Fox, one of his best Pascoe believes, is good but inevitably lacks a certain ‘authenticity’ because unfortunately, he is not ‘an Aboriginal person’, but in fact ‘a white man’. So, what is a man to do?]
“Any suggestion that Aborigines are anything other than furtive rock apes has to be destroyed by these people,” the leader says”.
[Sorry but we are not going there – your informant needs to join us in the 21st century – if he wants to discuss racial inferiority theories he’s best talk to Melbourne University, who have a shown some expertise in the past in this area - perhaps you could help with an introduction given that we understand Melbourne University Press is your personal publisher, which we think might not have been a great choice given their obvious racist past history?]
“Pascoe’s book is based on close reading of the original journals of Australia’s explorers”.
[Errrr, no it’s not. This is the fundamental smoke and mirrors trick of Mr Pascoe’s that we and others have uncovered in Dark Emu. Yes Mr Pascoe’s bibliography and cited reference list is very extensive – and that is always a good hook to catch the intelligent reader – “Oh look, there are lots of references; must be well researched” . But 99% of readers don’t, or can’t, go and check the original references so they just accept Mr Pascoe’s word for it. But not so fast buster. When we went to the effort to actually check Mr Pascoe’s references we found many were either completely wrong, or had been muddled and conflated to slant the evidence, or were quoted totally out of context. We direct the readers to for example, the following pages which show: rubbing out boundaries on the original map then had re-drawing by hand new, larger boundaries; conflating several different explorers’ journal reports for seed granaries to give one, non-existing example of a 1 tonne granary, 3m off the ground; completely botching the evidence for an Aboriginal dam, the largest Aboriginal-made structure ever found in Australia, by citing an article in a defunct Tasmanian literary Journal by a lovely, retired farmer, Eric Rolls, instead of actually citing the peer-reviewed scientific paper by the actual researchers who studied the dam – amateurs like us found the original scientific paper with the correct details as did the historian Geoffrey Blainey, so why couldn’t Mr Pascoe? ; and the list goes on as evidenced on many of our blog posts].
“In these journals, he has found new evidence of Indigenous agriculture and development. As the Indigenous leader notes: “He’s gone to the records and said, ‘Hang on, what does this really mean?’ While some historians with their PhDs have gone to the same original documents and came to the conclusion that we were all backward”.
[Your informant needs to provide some basis for this – every historian or anthropologist with a PhD or not, have almost always admitted that yes, Aboriginal society in material terms was primitive, but in the other two spheres of man’s life, family & kinship, and the spiritual & artistic, Aboriginal society was very complex and sophisticated, if not more so, when compared to our own, admittedly very rich material culture. These academics increasingly came to the view that Aboriginal society was neither good nor bad, right nor wrong, but just very well suited to surviving in the conditions of this most inhospitable of continents]
“In Dark Emu, which has sold more than 100,000 copies, Pascoe mounts a convincing argument that Aboriginal people actively managed and cultivated the landscape, harvested seeds for milling into cakes at an astonishing scale, took part in complex aquaculture and built “towns” of up to 1000 people. That word, by the way – “town” – is not Pascoe’s. That is how one such settlement was referred to by a man in the exploration party of Thomas Mitchell in the mid-1800s”.
[Yes that is a point we make in our blog post – We take our hat off to Mr Pascoe’s wordsmith ability – even though we think his ‘story’ is wrong and lacks supporting evidence, we agree he tells it so well, in the manner of a great Australian ‘yarn spinner’. Mr Pascoe seems to latch onto the use by the explorers of a few Eurocentric words such as, “towns”, “villages”, “hayricks” and “cake”, when it suits his narrative, but then complains bitterly when the Colonials use their Eurocentric vision of what agriculture should look like - soil tilling, seed selection, crop planting, crop maintenance, storing of grain for planting next season - to dismiss Aboriginal society as a simple, nomadic hunter gatherer society. We, like every other historian and anthropologist are sensible enough to realise that just because a European explorer uses a term such as “town” to describe a large collection of huts and humpies, that doesn’t mean we should envisage a laid out town with roads, permanent houses, seed milling operations, stores and public communal buildings in our modern sense].
“What some have found so astonishing about Pascoe’s claimed developments is not that they happened – they are right there in Charles Sturt’s and Mitchell’s journals, among many others – but that we, as a nation, could have been so ignorant to their existence”.
[No so. All academics and historians and interested lay people have always known about these ‘developments’. The problem for Mr Pascoe is that, even after very close, peer-reviewed, academic research into these ‘developments’, the conclusion is that they do not constitute agriculture as understood by academics and scientists (see our blog here). No one is denying their presence – we are all just denying Mr Pascoe’s exaggerations and extrapolations in his attempt to use these ‘developments’ to re-brand a hunter gatherer, Aboriginal society as a settled agricultural one, which it was not. But don’t take our word for it , see at the end of this article below how the highly esteemed anthropologist W.H.Stanner describes it].
“As Pascoe wrote last year in Meanjin: “Almost no Australians know anything about the Aboriginal civilisation because our educators, emboldened by historians, politicians and the clergy, have refused to mention it for 230 years”
[Pre-colonial Australia was collection of highly complex Aboriginal societies. It was not a ‘civilization’ by the currently accepted academic meaning of the word]
“Think for a moment about the extent of that fraud”.
[It might be advisable for a supporter of Mr Pascoe’s work to steer clear of that word]
“Imagine the excellence of the advocacy required to get our most intelligent people today to believe it.”
[A sad reflection on the intelligence of some people today]
“It is Pascoe’s attempt to shout down this conspiracy of silence that has primed the culture war machine. But why should a successful race of First Nations peoples be such a threat to modern Australians? The most compelling answer to this question is that it removes a psychological shunt in the mind of European settlers and their descendants that this occupation, this invasion of land unceded, was to save Indigenous people from themselves, to bring civilisation to them”.
[Here is we believe, the prime aim of Dark Emu – it is but a political project, a building block on the way to a major political move to create Treaty, Sovereignty and Constitution Changes – we are working on this topic and will post soon]
“Of course, it is uncomfortable to later ask: What if this race of First Australians were civilised all along? Maybe we were the barbarians? Pascoe achieves this questioning with a somewhat controversial manoeuvre. He takes the European ideal of farming and architecture, and thoroughly white notions of success, [Pardon? Are you saying people with different coloured, non-white skins have different notions of success? Are you saying all white-skinned people have the same notion of success? – this does sound a tad racist to us - what evidence do you have that notions of success can be tied to skin colour? - time for you Mr Morton perhaps to replay Dr King’s video above] and applies them, through the primary evidence, to Indigenous Australians. [This has what upset so many of our Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander contacts – the utter presumption by Mr Pascoe that Indigenous Australia needs to re-brand itself as a bunch of farmers so they can appear more ‘civilized’- what a cheek!].
“Asked why he is offended by Pascoe’s assertion of complex farming and settlements built by First Nations peoples, Bolt said he is not. “So, to answer your insult: I am not ‘offended’ by the thought of Aborigines being ‘well-adapted’ or ‘sophisticated’. How on earth would that be offensive to me? I in fact am determined to change policies and thinking that hold back so many Aboriginal communities that are now in poverty,” he said in a lengthy correspondence with The Saturday Paper. “I am simply interested in the truth, and opposed to falsehoods … If I’m ‘offended’ by anything it is frauds. “Or let me put this in the same sneering (again) tone that you used: What is it about Aborigines being hunter-gatherers that so offends you? Where is the shame in how so many Aborigines lived, which makes you feel compelled to imagine them instead as just like good old white farmers – only black? Isn’t this refusal to accept the truth a little, er, racist?” [Mr Bolt’s position sounds very reasonable to us]
“Bolt has purported to catch Pascoe in the act of faking his Aboriginal identity, as if to cast doubt on the book itself through the use of a skin-tone chart. But Pascoe has long grappled with the necessarily murky past of his own identity. This murkiness speaks to how such relationships on this continent progressed for so long – disguised by violence, shame, lost records and stolen children. In 2012, Pascoe wrote a response to a column in which Bolt alleged that Pascoe “decided” to be black. This followed a 2011 Federal Court of Australia ruling that found Bolt racially vilified other “light-skinned” Aboriginal people under section 18 of the Race Discrimination Act. “I can see Bolt’s point, and the frustration of many Australians when pale people identify with an Aboriginal heritage,” Pascoe wrote in the Griffith Review at the time. “The people he attacked for this crime, however, had an unfortunate thing in common: their credentials were impeccable. Any good reporter could pick up the phone and talk to their mothers about their Aboriginality until the chooks go to roost. “If I had been part of the group who took Bolt to court for impugning their heritage, he would have had a field day.” Pascoe tells of the struggle to find his Aboriginal ancestor, which was sketched by family members not so much through what they said but through what they didn’t say. It was an absence that provided clues. [We ask the reader to reflect on this logic for a moment – Maybe I have Aboriginal ancestry? Mum and Dad never said anything about it. Maybe that was a clue that I am Indigenous?]
“But is this so extraordinary? As Pascoe says, the circumstance “mirrors the turbulence of postcolonial Australia and explains why so many Australian families have a black connection”.
[All we can say here is that qualified genealogists have constructed an alleged family tree for Mr Pascoe here. No one should really have to prove their ancestry in the normal course of events, that is a private matter for them and their family. But the legal system we have in Australia requires some proof of Aboriginal descent before individuals can gain access to certain government programs, or make certain claims for Indigenous qualifications and prizes. We think that is all that Mr Bolt is asking; for Mr Pascoe to put other Indigenous up-and-coming writers, and the Australian taxpayer, at ease that all is above board. – over to you Mr Pascoe]
“The senior Indigenous leader who spoke to The Saturday Paper excoriated those who pressed this line of attack. ‘When they insist on this inquiry, do they wonder if this person had family members stolen from the missions? Do they wonder if this person’s family was dispersed during the frontier wars? Do they wonder if they were hiding truths because of a concerted effort to shame or humiliate Aboriginal ancestry?’ “
[Even as amateur historians, we appreciate the complexity of ancestry in Australia – but for Mr Pascoe to say he has Aboriginal descent via three tribes, then he must have at least some clear proof that he can provide publicly to quash any controversy?
It is not the Australian community who are insisting that Mr Pascoe prove his Aboriginal ancestry – it is in fact, Mr Pascoe who is insisting that the Australian community accept his Aboriginal ancestry, so the burden of proof falls to the initiator, Mr Pascoe]
“The agitation surrounding Dark Emu, renewed by the announcement of an ABC documentary, has quickly driven a stake through the recently formed advisory group on the co-design for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. The group is chaired by Indigenous academic Marcia Langton, a defender of Pascoe’s, and counts Chris Kenny as a member. Last week, Ken Wyatt, who established the group as minister for Indigenous Australians, backed Pascoe against the conservative onslaught and noted that Australians tend to “question if you are Indigenous”. “If Bruce tells me he’s Indigenous, then I know that he’s Indigenous,” Wyatt told Kenny on Sky News”.
[Mr Wyatt seems like a very nice, genuine person, but as a politician and Minister, we fear he may struggle in the real world of politics if he operates on the principal, “if he told me something, then I know it’s true..”]
“This week, Wyatt told ABC’s Radio National that his office has been receiving calls where staff have been threatened and called “cunts” because he dared defend Pascoe. ‘I’ve had one of my staff resign because she can’t cope with being abused over the issue,’ he said.” [This is an appalling outcome and only suggests that Mr Pascoe should urgently clarify the whole issue as soon as possible].
“Another of the co-design group’s members, Indigenous lawyer Josephine Cashman, has publicly questioned Pascoe’s ancestry. On Twitter, she stated that her former partner is a Yuin man who says he has never heard of Pascoe. Other Yuin people responded on Twitter, cautioning Cashman for relying on a single man’s testimony. A week ago, Kenny wrote in The Australian: “Many claims in Dark Emu have been debunked by forensic reference to primary sources.” But this week The Saturday Paper spent two days at the National Library of Australia reviewing the original documents and explorer accounts in question. They are – at every instance – quoted verbatim and cited accordingly in an extensive bibliography at the end of Pascoe’s book. Bolt alleges: “They even overlooked the fact that his big hit – Dark Emu – included incredible misquotations of its sources. “How else could Pascoe have argued that the historians had been wrong. Aborigines had not been hunter-gatherers but sophisticated farmers, living in ‘towns’ of up to 1000 people, in ‘houses’ with ‘pens’ for animals. (Koalas, perhaps?)” It would take many thousands of words to address all of Bolt’s claims, but it is useful to highlight a few of them. The Saturday Paper put these claims to Bolt. For example, he says that Pascoe tells the story of Sturt stumbling onto a town of 1000 people on the edge of the Cooper Creek. Dark Emu does not claim this; it instead quotes Sturt correctly on this front, when his party is taken in by “3 or 400 natives” in the area. Bolt says he was referring to a speech Pascoe made where he said there were 1000 people in the town. Thomas Mitchell also noted a town of 1000 people in his journals, and the quote is attributed to Mitchell in Dark Emu at the bottom of page 15. Bolt, when he does reference Mitchell, gets the date of that quotation wrong, too. He says it is from Mitchell’s 1848 journal when, in fact, the quote is from his 1839 journal. This, too, is recorded faithfully in Dark Emu".”
[Mr Bolt is only confirming what we have also found at Dark Emu Exposed – that there are many instances where Mr Pascoe writes one thing in Dark Emu, but then in his lectures stretches, manipulates and even fabricates the information further to make it appear that Aboriginal society was something that it was not. This will be especially concerning for us when Young Dark Emu is introduced to schools. For example, when Mitchell writes of, “a town of 1000 people”, this means, to critically thinking adults, a collection of a large number of huts, humpies, wind-breaks, campfires and timber tree-stores, where 1000 Aboriginal people had gathered to either feast on a local abundant food source, or to meet for ceremonial, initiation or marriage reasons. It is more than likely that if Mitchell had of passed that same way again say, four months later, the same site may have been just a deserted collection of empty huts as the Aborigines had dispersed to smaller clan sizes and moved off to new hunting and gathering grounds. School children however, without a maturity to know otherwise, will imagine a town of well laid out streets, fences and solid permanent buildings with settled inhabitants, which is complete indoctrination by a falsehood].
“Bolt has twice scoffed at the idea of animal yards being found by these explorers. But Dark Emu records the firsthand account of David Lindsay on his 1883 survey of Arnhem Land, where he says he,
“came on the site of a large native encampment, quite a quarter of a mile across. Framework of several large humpies, one having been 12ft high: small enclosures as if some small game had been yarded and kept alive … This camp must have contained quite 500 natives.”
In reply, Bolt says: “Maybe they were animal pens, who knows? “Arnhem Land has, after all, more game than Cooper Creek that might at a stretch be kept in a pen, although it is difficult to imagine what animals might have been kept. Wallabies?”
[Mr Morton, you are making the same sneaky mistake (or willful deception?) by using selective quoting from the original journal, just as we claim Mr Pascoe does, thereby beautifully proving our case. If we actually look at a fuller quote involving David Lindsay this time, from Federal Court documents lodged in “The Ngalakan People v Northern Territory of Australia [2001] FCA 654" - Historical Writings - para 11:
“…One further source should be mentioned because of its attention to detail. In the early 1880’s Lindsay, a surveyor, had considerable contact with local Aborigines. He found them to be “very friendly” and recorded a Roper vocabulary. He reported favourably on the country that he had surveyed and stated that the “whole country passed over is well suited for grazing purposes and a great deal of it fit for agriculture” – prophecies that did not, however, come to pass. Some of Lindsay’s more notable observations were made on 15 August 1883 on the Wilton River: “…we came on the site of a very large native encampment, quite a quarter of a mile across. Framework of several large ‘humpies’, one having been 12 ft high; small enclosures, as if small game had been yarded and kept alive. The natives had excavated five holes in the red clay soil, three of which were oval; one I measured 18 ft long, 8 ft wide and 4 ft deep with the earth thrown up in a heap on one side; two were semi-circular, 3 ft deep and 3 ft across, with a diameter of 20 ft. the ‘humpies’ were of a superior description to anything I have seen in the Territory. This camp must have contained quite 500 natives, and have been the scene of some great festival, the corroboree, or dancing grounds, being numerous and well-worn.
About two miles north of the main camp there is the remains of another large camp, with a painted post 4 ft high, 9 in diameter, set firmly in the ground; also about twenty pieces of paperbark, each piece 3 ft long, and bound up with creepers. These pieces were then placed in the form of a star, with the inner ends embedded in the ground.”
Lindsay’s original journal source is here on page 79 .
Now a real historian or anthropologist studying this journal entry of Lindsay would conclude the following :
1. Lindsay has written it in past tense – “…humpies, one having been…”, “…as if small game had been yarded…”, “…must have contained quite 500 natives…”, “…have been the scene…” , and “…remains of another camp…” That is, the camps were now abandoned and so were not a permanent settlement;
2. The description, “Framework of several large humpies, one having been.. “ implies an abandoned humpie that existed in frame only, that is, the leaves, bark or soil clods used as roofing had been removed or dispersed over time - ie the encampment was old and abandoned.
3. The word “encampment” implies a temporary camp, not a permanently settled village or town.
4. They were very large encampments, and knowing that the Aborigines generally lived in family bands of 5 to 10 and in loose clan groups of say 50, an encampment of 500 suggests a large meeting for ceremonial reasons. Generally the countryside, except in exceptional times, could not support a population of 500 Aborigines for too long in one spot as the local food and firewood would be quickly consumed .
5. The large holes were most likely used for ceremonial purposes (see photos below) or for communal cooking ovens during the course of the gathering.
6. The pens may have been for animals, but where is the evidence? They could also have been used to ‘secure’ young boys and/or girls prior to, or after, initiation ceremonies, or used for some other ceremonial “enclosure” ceremony, or to house the deceased - see sketches below of typical Aboriginal pen-like timber structures.
7. No animals were actually seen, domesticated or held as game, in the pens.
8. Lindsay was European and so perhaps could only imagine a pen-like structure being used only for animal containment. He may not have had the ability to think that the pens could be used for other reasons, such as ceremonial.
9. Lindsay also recorded that the, “whole country passed over is well suited for grazing purposes and a great deal of it fit for agriculture”, yet Lindsay makes no mention of any presence of Aboriginal agriculture such as, tilled soils, crops, irrigation schemes and seed granaries, which Mr Pascoe claims were in widespread evidence to the early explorers.
We see that Mr Morton selectively leaves out the remaining part of Lindsay’s final sentence, “…and have been the scene of some great festival, the corroboree, or dancing grounds, being numerous and well-worn.”, and so has committed intellectual dishonesty, by leading the reader towards only visualising the possibility of an encampment of 500 natives which was, using Mr Pascoe’s Newspeak, ‘a town of 500 Aboriginal people with large framed houses and animal pens’. In fact, the full quote leads the reader to another conclusion, namely that the 500 natives had assembled at this encampment for a one-off, large ceremonial gathering. (The irony is that Mr Pascoe himself does include the full quote is Dark Emu (2018 reprint, p116, but his defender Mr Morton doesn’t!)
So we rest our case - both Mr Pascoe and Mr Morton too, have been found to use selective quoting from explorer’s journals to mislead the reader and slant the evidence to support their narrative of an Aboriginal Agricultural Industry.]
“Again, Bolt says he is not so much quoting from Pascoe’s book as from his lectures, of which the author has done hundreds since Dark Emu’s 2014 release. However, Bolt frequently conflates the two. While Bolt mocks Pascoe for speaking at a lecture about a well that was made by Indigenous people and was “70 feet deep”, there are, in fact, a litany of accounts of incredibly sophisticated wells in the journals. Of one, Sturt writes: “… we arrived at a native well of unusual dimensions. It was about eight feet wide at the top and 22ft deep, and it was a work that must have taken the joint strength of a powerful tribe to perform.”
[We note that 22ft is not 70ft, and from our research so far we have not come across any reports of 70ft deep ‘wells’ in the Eurocentric sense of straight walled shafts. Actually we do not think that any Aboriginal would be foolish enough to dig a straight-walled well down 70ft ( 20m+) given the chance of collapse in sandy soils. Indeed, a lot of the water was collected by young children, who no parent would risk sending down a deep straight-walled well. This may be again a case of Mr Pascoe grasping at the the Eurocentric word, ‘well’, when in fact if a well was deep, it generally had a conical shape. And Sturt may be making the same mistake that Mr Pascoe makes – just because a ‘well’ is deep that does not necessarily mean that it is an ‘engineering feat’, or ‘must have taken the joint strength of a powerful tribe to perform.’ Considering these wells may have been dug as required over decades, or even hundreds of years, only a few kilograms of digging per week by one family group over generations would have resulted in a very impressive, large well. This exact point was made by researchers who have studied very large, Aboriginal dams and is illustrated in the film clip below].
“In his rebuttal, the Herald Sun columnist has been forced to accept there were incredibly sophisticated settlements and seed-milling operations, and that Aboriginal people really did give cake and honey and roast ducks to Sturt and his party.
[Hey, there you go again, Mr Morton – you’re just making that up – where is the actual evidence, drawings, photographs, archaeological remains and relics to support your claim of “incredibly sophisticated settlements and seed milling operations” and that indeed Mr Bolt has accepted it – You’re just another scribbler behind a desk imagining things. To us this just seems a lazy form of research – you need to go out into the field with real archaeologists as they unearth real Aboriginal “settlements”, interview real Aborigines for their oral stories, and piece together a theory based on real evidence and then write a peer-reviewed paper].
“The debate has now been reduced to minutiae – questioning how many mills were going and the different depth of various wells. Bolt responds: “Trust you to attempt to make this about me and not his incredible claims.” But Pascoe is not alone in his assessments. Writing in Inside Story this week, Australian National University professor of history Tom Griffiths lauded the book and its addition to a long trajectory of scholarly work [Dark Emu Exposed has a critique of Tom Griffith’s work in progress which we will release as a blog post] My point is that the blindnesses and complacencies that Pascoe rails against are the same silences and lies that Australian historians have been collaboratively challenging for decades now,” he says. “It’s a job that will never finish. Pascoe is primarily bridling at an older form of history, the history he learnt at school and university 50 years ago.”
“Edie Wright, the chair of Magabala Books, which published Dark Emu, told The Saturday Paper: ‘We Pascoe, and celebrate the contribution that Dark Emu has made to bringing a fuller understanding of our history to so many Australians of all ages.’ On Wednesday, Marcia Langton replied to Josephine Cashman on Twitter. The two were previously close. ‘The critique of Dark Emu is a job for actual historians not Andrew Bolt & others who benefit financially from tearing apart the lives of people looking for family,’ she said. [Don’t we wish the real historians and other academics would step up and do our job for us ! – but where are they? - Silence]
“Looking for family has taken on a mournful quality this week, as Pascoe’s kin went to libraries around the country to find the name of their Aboriginal ancestor. But how to proceed, one must ask, when so much of their story and the story of a people has been destroyed to protect the last excuse for colonisation?”
[Yes, there are always regrettably, casualties on both sides in a “History War.” We are aware of allegations, as Mr Pascoe and his publisher will also be aware, that the descendants of some settler families felt that their good family names were badly denigrated by comments published Dark Emu, and despite evidence being supplied to the contrary to Mr Pascoe and his publisher, these comments were never corrected in any of the reprints of Dark Emu. So as you say, “But how to proceed, one must ask, when so much of their story and the story of their families has been besmirched to protect the next excuse for the re-writing of our Australian history?
“They [the Australian Aborigines] are, of course, nomads — hunters and foragers who grow nothing, build nothing, and stay nowhere long. They make almost no physical mark on the environment…They move about, carrying their scant possessions, in small bands of anything from ten to sixty persons…Their tools and crafts, meagre — pitiably meagre — though they are, have nonetheless been good enough to let them win the battle for survival, and to win it comfortably at that. With no pottery, no knowledge of metals, no wheel, no domestication of animals, no agriculture, they have still been able to people the entire continent…”
- W.E.H.Stanner, The Dreaming & Other Essays, Black Inc Agenda, 2010, p 64,65 & 70 - our emphasis)
Photo and Diagram Credits : Ceremony - #1: Gould, R., Yiwara, Foragers of the Australian Desert, Collins, 1969, p156, #2 & 3: "Death & Burial War” ca 1901 Spencer, Walter Baldwin Gillen, Francis James, Tennant Creek, NT, Museum Victoria, and #4 Memmott, P., Gunyah Goondie + Wurley, QUP 2009 reprint p164
