The ABC - 'A Noble Liar'? — Dark Emu Exposed - And the Assault on Australian History

Jan 31

Jan 31 The ABC - 'A Noble Liar'?

Politics, ABC & The Media, Culture & Identity

In 2018, British journalist Robin Aitken published a book, The Noble Liar, which was about,

‘how and why the BBC distorts the news to promote a liberal agenda’.

Although Aitken was writing about the BBC in the UK, his analysis of the situation in Britain was insightfully very similar to the situation we find in Australia with OUR own, national broadcaster, The ABC.

For example, if we replace the words, ‘Britain” with ‘Australia’, and ‘the BBC’ with ‘the ABC’, in a couple of paragraphs from the Introduction of Aitken’s book, we get:

“The title of this book draws on a concept originated in Plato's Republic; a ‘noble lie’, a myth or an untruth, knowingly propagated by an elite, in order to promote and maintain social harmony or advance an agenda. The ABC prides itself on being a ‘truth teller’: its hard-won, worldwide reputation is built on the foundation stone of audience trust. But what ‘truth' is the ABC telling? It is the contention of this book that the ABC, along with its media and establishment allies, has become the vehicle for the propagation of a series of noble lies in pursuit of a political agenda.

Though the noble lie is always told with the best of intentions, there is an inherent problem with it: the deception misleads people and substitutes imagined problems for real ones. The great danger is that sooner or later people will realise they have been duped, and this will be a moment of great peril for the established order — with unpredictable consequences.

This is the prospect facing Australia. What is urgently needed, this book will argue, is a new and bracing honesty which allows the nation to face its problems in full possession of some uncomfortable facts.” - [our emphasis]

It is the contention of our website, Dark Emu Exposed, that Bruce Pascoe’s book, Dark Emu, is being vigorously promoted by the ABC without any intellectual critique. To our knowledge, there has not been one occasion where an ABC interviewer has robustly questioned Mr Pascoe on the claims he has made in his book. Nor are we aware of the ABC endeavoring to provide an opportunity for any independent academic, or book critic, to openly critique the book, or debate Mr Pascoe on-air.

Why? Because we believe that Dark Emu fits perfectly into the Progressive Left’s narrative that the British, when they colonised Australia, knowingly failed to record, and indeed destroyed all,

“…the evidence [that] insists that Aboriginal people right across the continent were using domesticated plants, sowing, harvesting, irrigating and storing - behaviours inconsistent with the hunter-gatherer tag.”- from Dark Emu, 2018 Reprint, dust jacket blurb.

In our opinion, the Progressive Left within the ABC want to promote this narrative, or ‘noble lie’ for the best of intentions. If the Australian public can be persuaded that the British wilfully failed to sign a treaty with the ‘settled, agrarian Aboriginal society’, that Pascoe claims was present in Australia at colonization, then Britain can be shown to have acted illegally. This will convince the Australian public that a great legal injustice has been done against the Aboriginal people and reparations for their descendants, in the form of Constitutional Recognition and ultimately, some form of ‘sovereignty’ will be justified.

In our opinion, the programs, articles and news reports emanating from the biased ABC, frequently repeat the slogans of the Progressive Left such as, ‘Sovereignty has never been ceded’ and, ‘Always was, always will be Aboriginal land’ and here.

The ABC appears to be fully supportive of the Progressive Left’s and Aboriginal Activist’s desire to ‘re-write’ history so as to support this ‘illegally stolen land’ narrative, when in fact what actually happened in 1770-1778, is well described on page 6 of a 1996 paper by David Ritter, the associate to French J, President of the National Native Title Tribunal :

“When Australia was originally colonised by the Crown, neither terra nullius or any other legal doctrine was used to deny the recognition of traditional Aboriginal rights to land under the common law. Such a doctrinal denial would not have appeared necessary to the colonists, because the indigenous inhabitants of the colony were seen and defined by the colonists as intrinsically barbarous and without any interest in land. Thus the colonists required no legal doctrine to explain why Aboriginal people's land rights were not to be recognized under law because no doctrine was required for what was axiomatic”.

That is, to the British (and hence the International legal community) the Australian Aborigines were patently a nomadic, hunter gatherer society with no civilized form of government, no formal leadership with whom to negotiate, no settled agriculture, no cultivated lands or domesticated animals, villages or towns.

The British at the time were quite capable of recognizing native peoples in other parts of the world who were settled agriculturalists and who therefore had an ‘interest in their land’ and a recognized sovereignty that required the British, as colonisers, to deal with them formerly as sovereign states via treaties. That is why the very same British made treaties with the local natives when they colonized New Zealand, North America, Canada, India, and many other countries. Australia was a legally, justifiable exception and no amount of ‘noble lies’ from the ABC will overturn 250 years of International Law.

But good-luck with trying to get the ABC to stop being the “Noble Liar”, and instead revert to their charter of being a “fair and balanced reporter” in the service of ALL Australians.