Mr Pascoe's Main Reference Source Bombs
Andrew Bolt’s thorough dismantling of Rick Morton’s, weak and inaccurate article in The Saturday Paper of 30th November 2019, “Bolt, Pascoe and the culture wars”, must have the owners of The Saturday Paper, Schwartz Media, a bit worried. As their ‘senior’ reporter, not only did Morton so thoroughly fail to make any successful arguments to counter Bolt’s evidence and logic, but he was even shown to be a more sloppy transcriber of the historical journals than Dark Emu’s author, Bruce Pascoe himself, which is quite an achievement!
So what to do when your ‘senior’ reporter has rings run around him by Bolt and an army of Boomer grannies and grandpas armed with keyboards at www.dark-emu-exposed.org?
Well, a bit of self-esteem rebuilding of course! In a hastily put together podcast, in a studio ‘safe-space’ with an interviewer who sounds like a grief counseller, Morgan melodically talks himself back to the comfort of his toy-town world of the Progressive Left, far away from the enquiring minds of adults.
In this podcast, Morton comes out with completely made up gems such as,
“ …this dark-emu-exposed website, which has been set up and run by a bunch of Quadrant contributors … “ (at 4:40),
which is how he describes us grannies and grandpas curled up on our sofas all around the country, with our keyboards and cups of tea! Oh, Mr Morton we are clutching our pearls in horror that you should fling such left-wing mud at us from your podcast bubble! Like Pascoe, Morton just seems to pull falsehoods out of the air to support his narrative. Don’t contact us to verify anything, just make it up!
Let us go on the record and say that we, at Dark Emu Exposed, are not in any way associated with that fine magazine, Quadrant - we are not contributors, members or aligned in any way, other than as readers of Quadrant. We treat Quadrant like any other source and reference their articles and books where appropriate.
This compares to The Saturday Paper, for which Morton wrote his article, who is also we believe closely related to Black Inc Books, the publisher of Pascoe’s latest book, Salt. Perhaps Morton should have ‘declared his employers interest’ in his article on Pascoe? But what we would we know, we are only amateurs, not professional ‘senior’ reporters with an ethics code.
OK Millennial
So if us Boomers were writing about Pascoe and his Dark Emu book, we would have perhaps dug a little deeper into the subject matter, just to try to find out some more about the real story behind the creation of this wonderful, ‘history and farming handbook’, the best seller that is Dark Emu – how did it originate?; where did Pascoe really get his ideas from?
Well, the amateur pops and grans at Dark Emu Exposed set to work and found some very interesting background, which we think puts a whole new slant on the value, or rather lack of, in the Dark Emu thesis. It is such a surprise to us that a professional, ‘senior’ reporter like Morton didn’t uncover this as well.
Pascoe freely admits that he lifted almost the whole idea for Dark Emu from the published work of one, Rupert Gerritsen from his 2008 book, Australia and the Origins of Agriculture, BAR International Series 1874. Oxford: Archaeopress. As reported in The Australian in May 2019,
“Gerritsen died in 2013 without ever achieving a university job, and Pascoe cites him as a scholar who languished in obscurity because his theories contradicted the mainstream view. “Rupert should have got all the credit for Dark Emu,” he says candidly, a sentiment that gets ready agreement from Gerritsen’s brother Rolf, a professor of economic and indigenous policy studies at Charles Darwin University. “Ninety per cent of Bruce’s book is taken from my brother’s research,” Rolf Gerritsen says with a chuckle, adding that this is not to belittle Pascoe’s considerable achievement in popularising complex issues and shifting the national conversation about indigenous history.”
Now ‘senior’ reporter Morton should have asked himself, why would it be that Gerritsen, the creator of 90% of Dark Emu, only “languished in obscurity”, whereas Pascoe, presenting the same information in his Dark Emu, takes off into best-seller land?
But Morton didn’t follow this up. To us however, a bunch of worldly-wise oldies, something doesn’t look quite right here, so we dug a little deeper and what we found was some explosive information, information that we think shaped Gerritsen in his dogged, almost ‘fanatical’ pursuit of his crazy, new theory of Aboriginal agriculture, and cast him as perhaps, an ‘intense’ personality, with perhaps a poor sense of judgement.
Explosive New Evidence for Pascoe’s Dark Emu
For in fact, it transpires that Gerritsen was one of modern Australia’s first, convicted terrorists :
“In August 1972 he [Gerritsen] placed a bomb in the Perth office of the Department of Labour and National Service…The primitive device was timed to detonate early in the morning but failed to go off. He was subsequently arrested in Melbourne, extradited back to WA and bailed, but fled to New Zealand, where he was caught and extradited back to WA again in July 1973… Gerritsen pleaded guilty and served one year in Fremantle and Geraldton Regional prisons. He later renounced violence and direct action, but he continued throughout his life to be a social activist strongly committed to social justice and empowerment.” - See Ref 1 here, Ref 2 here and Ref 3 here.
What a classy source it appears that Pascoe has based 90% of his Dark Emu book on!
To us therefore, it looks quite possible that Gerritsen was seen by academia as something of a ‘crackpot and nutter’. Perhaps other academics realized he may have been just a ‘fanatic’ in his pursuit of his theory that the Aborigines were farmers. Nevertheless, Gerritsen’s research work was given a thorough peer-reviewed, academic analysis in 2010 at a major Pre-history Conference, and it was found that his evidence just did not stack up to support his view of a widespread ‘Australian Aboriginal industry’,’ as Pascoe calls it.
So here are two probable reasons why Gerritsen and his theory “languished in obscurity”, but that doesn’t seem to satisfy Pascoe, who is always ready to blame us, the ‘mainstream’, for not embracing his fanciful, unsubstantiated, crackpot theory that the Aborigines were farmers and lived with their penned animals in large towns. Another ‘nutter’?
Main Photo : Montage of Bruce Pascoe and Rupert Gerritsen ‘on dais pontifico’ - Credit: off the internet.
Time for a well earned Earl Grey and an episode of Blue Hills on the wireless.
Update on 27/6/2020
Gerard Henderson writes in his MWD column in The Australian, how ‘our man Pascoe just makes things up,’
‘BRUCE PASCOE’S (UNCORRECTED) HOWLER ABOUT HIS ANARCHO-SYNDICALIST BESTIE
These days Bruce Pascoe is presented by the taxpayer funded Literary Festival Set as one of the leading Australian historians – if not the leader itself. It was in this capacity that he appeared on ABC Radio National’s Big Weekend of Books gig…which ran from morning to night last weekend [June 20-21, 2020]…[and]… the ABC’s fox-hunting man – Jonathan (“Proudly the ABC’s Sneerer-in-chief”) Green – interviewed freelance historian Bruce Pascoe. Your man Pascoe identifies as indigenous but has yet to cite one grandparent who was Aboriginal. But there you go. MWD was particularly interested in this exchange which, at least, was understandable.
Jonathan Green: ‘…It’s a story that was itching to be told. It’s amazing Bruce, that sort of the arc of your life, from a primary school boy writing about the oak door – that sort of, steeped in Englishness. To then become, what you are in your 70s, as someone looking at how to rehabilitate this country, how to give those ideas about what we might do to use indigenous knowledge to help us in our future. It’s an amazing life story.’
Bruce Pascoe: ‘Yeah it is. But I think of Rupert Gerritsen’s life too, you know. A man who tried to blow up the American embassy in Perth during the Vietnam War was the person I relied on most in telling Dark Emu. It should have been Rupert who was getting this acclaim. But he died.’
The fact that Comrade Rupert Gerritsen (1953-2013) has departed this mortal coil is the only accurate comment in Comrade Pascoe’s statement. Here’s why:
۰ The United States Embassy is based in Canberra – not Perth.
۰ No one has tried to blow up the US Embassy in Canberra as a quick search of the internet will document.
۰ The US has a consulate in Perth. It was not attacked by Rupert Gerritsen in his wild anarcho-syndicalist days in Western Australia.
۰ Rather, Comrade Gerritsen pleaded guilty to placing a bomb in the Perth office of the Department of Labour and National Service in August 1972.
It did not go off. If the bomb had exploded, it probably would have wounded and perhaps killed Australian public servants and others near the Commonwealth government office. It would not have killed or injured Americans or damaged US property.
It is merely a fantasy for Bruce Pascoe to suggest that Gerritsen was striking a blow against what the left likes to call American imperialism. It would seem that your man Pascoe just makes things up.
Needless to say, he was not contradicted by Jonathan Green.
- Gerard Henderson’
For the ABC Jonathan Green- Bruce Pascoe interview -
go here at 38:21 for the section on Mr Pascoe just making stuff up about the ‘American Embassy bombing’ ;
go here at 37:00 for Mr Pascoe talking about his grandmother who is meant to be Aboriginal, but Mr Pascoe still has never provided any evidence that she was;
listen from 26:00 where Mr Pascoe acknowledges our website, Dark Emu Exposed, which leads us to think he is only speaking now, in June 2020, of the bombing background of his mentor, Rupert Gerritsen (who was imprisoned for his terrorist deed) after we broke the story back in 2019 in this blog post;
and then again Mr Pascoe just makes stuff up about us, at 27:29, where he claims that we are only publicising the falsehoods we have found in his book, Dark Emu, because we are are motivated by,
‘trying to prevent this story of chemical-free agriculture being taken up by Australians’
LOL!! Just another made-up idea of Mr Pascoe’s! He can’t win against the factual arguments on our website, Dark Emu Exposed, so now he has to resort to branding us as some sort of chemical company lobby group, so as to denigrate us in front of his New Age, organic produce eating, followers!!
I would love to have a ‘yarn over a beer’ with Bruce, if he extends the offer he gave to Andrew Bolt - it’s been a while since I’ve had a drink with a comedian.
-Editor
