Is Jonathan Green an ABC Interviewer or a Counsellor?

Jonathan Green - ABC ‘interviewer.’

Bruce Pascoe, ‘interviewed’ on RN Big Weekend of Books.

On June 20th 2020, ABC RN Radio broadcasted, during the Big Weekend of Books, a ‘long conversation’ between the ABC’s Jonathan Green and Dark Emu author, Bruce Pascoe.

From the ABC interview podcast, we learnt that,

‘Summer's fires have left their mark on Dark Emu author Bruce Pascoe.

As he explains in this long conversation with Jonathan Green, the experience of fighting fire is something shared in a nod or a glance.

And while the fires raged, Pascoe was caught in the continuing culture war over his Aboriginal identity.

"It was an incredibly painful time and it just went on and on ... it was the kind of tactics which are meant to sap your morale, and it worked."

As usual, the ABC are treating Mr Pascoe with kid gloves despite some pretty important fact-checking and ancestry questions we think the ABC should be asking, respectfully but firmly, of Mr Pascoe, if he wants the Australian public and taxpayer to accept him as, ‘a Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian man’, and have his Young Dark Emu text admitted to our schools.

A week after Jonathan Green’s interview, Gerard Henderson wrote in his MWD column in The Australian, how ‘your 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’

To listen to the ABC’s Jonathan Green and 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 was meant to be Aboriginal, but Mr Pascoe has never provided any evidence that she was. Apparently he is just expecting Australians to accept him as a ‘Yuin, Bunerong and Tasmanian man’, despite a lot of documentary and Aboriginal evidence to the contrary;

listen from 26:00 where Mr Pascoe acknowledges our website, Dark Emu Exposed, which leads us to think that he is only speaking now, in June 2020, of the bombing background of his mentor, and ‘90% author of Dark Emu’, Rupert Gerritsen (who was imprisoned for his terrorist deed) after we broke the story back in 2019 in a blog post;

and then again Mr Pascoe just makes stuff up about our Dark Emu Exposed website, 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!!

And it is not just us, Centre-Right Australians, who think Dark Emu falls short in credibility - See Russell Mark’s article in The Monthly in February 2020 for another, independent, very unflattering, review of Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu.

So once again the ABC disappoints. Mr Pascoe and his Dark Emu are just one small example of why the ABC is in decline as a serious, intellectual organisation. Are ABC management and staff so blind to their own biases that they prefer to watch their organisation crumble, and suffer a death of a thousand budget cuts, rather than increase their Centre-Right perspective? We on the Centre-Right would gladly lend our political and financial support to the ABC to restore it to the wonderful organisation that is was before it took the, ‘Go Woke, Go Broke’ path.

We are not asking for anything other than some balance at the ABC - the presentation of all sides to a story - so that the Australian public are fully informed and can make up their own minds on any issue.

-Editor, Dark Emu Exposed