Dark Emu was so bad even AIATSIS rejected it
In 1960, the Liberal government of Sir Robert Menzies instituted a plan to provide for a more comprehensive approach by the Australian Government to the recording of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and cultures. An Interim Council consisting of 16 members, chaired by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the ANU, Professor AD Trendall, and under the guidance of experts such as anthropologist W E H Stanner, was formed and the first version of the institute now known as the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, AIATSIS, was created by 1963.
Today AIATSIS is governed under an Act of parliament which sets the organisation the task of conducting, facilitating and promoting research in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and training Indigenous researchers. This has led to a diverse research history; from languages and archaeological research, land rights and political engagement to contemporary topics in health and commerce. The AIATSIS collections contain not only priceless records of Australia’s Indigenous cultural heritage, but provide a significant national and international research infrastructure for research by, for and about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (Wikipedia).
Such is the reputation and gravitas of AIATSIS that Indigenous authors frequently submit their manuscripts to Aboriginal Studies Press (ASP), which is the publishing subsidiary of AIATSIS, where they will get a supportive and professional assessment of their work and hopefully a publishing deal.
This is where ‘Aboriginal’ writer Bruce Pascoe first brought the manuscript for his non-fiction book, Convincing Ground, which was successfully published by ASP in 2007.
A mere four years later, just before Christmas in 2011, we imagine Bruce Pascoe, with a spring in his step, heading into town to post off another manuscript to Aboriginal Studies Press in Canberra, hoping for another book deal. This new manuscript was for his revelatory book, Dark Emu.
‘This book is way better than Convincing Ground’ he thought to himself as he slipped the thick envelope into the rusty, old red post box outside the Mallacoota Post Office. ‘They are going to love it. What could possibly go wrong?’, he mused.
Well, it seems in 2011-2012 a lot did go wrong with the manuscript of Dark Emu.
The story started to come light in a 2019 feature article on Pascoe’s Dark Emu by Richard Guilliatt in The Australian of May 25th 2019, where we learn that,
…Pascoe was best known as a writer of fiction and a publisher, pursuits he had subsidised over many decades by working variously as a tourist guide, dairy farmer and fencer. His broadsides against the history profession [in the manuscript for Dark Emu] he recalls, came to the attention of a group of academics in Canberra who were sufficiently concerned to invite him to an off-campus meeting at one of their homes. Pascoe remembers arriving there in his second-hand ute, having driven to the nation’s capital from his home four hours away in the remote Victorian town of Gipsy Point in East Gippsland. “They said, ‘Look, we don’t want you talking to our students about this stuff, because it’s wrong, it didn’t happen’,” he says. “‘You’re talking about agriculture, but that didn’t happen. Aboriginal people were hunter-gatherers’.”
Pascoe is hazy on the identity of these eminent professors, but remembers that they slapped him over the wrist with utmost civility. “Cup of tea, lovely conversation — nice people, actually. But when I left that meeting, I got in my old beaten-up ute, and I was furious.” He says he drove straight to a second-hand bookstore and plonked down $8 for a copy of the journals of 19th-century explorer Sir Thomas Mitchell, which he cracked open while sitting in the driver’s seat. There his eyes fell on Mitchell’s eyewitness account of Aboriginal villages in Queensland housing more than a thousand people, and “haycocks” of harvested seed-grass stretching for miles, drying in the sun to make flour for native bread. It was then he knew he had his next book. “I have to thank that group of academics,” he says wryly. Because without their intervention, he might never have written his one and only bestseller’
It always intrigued us here at Dark Emu Exposed as to who this ’group of academics in Canberra’ might have been - if they had of prevailed, Dark Emu might never have made it to the printing press.
Then, late last year, we found another clue as to their identity, from a 2014 ABC Radio interview, on the eve of the widespread release of Dark Emu, where Bruce Pascoe tells his ABC interviewer that,
‘…Convincing Ground was published by Aboriginal Studies Press. They had the option on this new book that I'm working on, on Aboriginal agriculture called Dark Emu, and they knocked it back because the professors on the board couldn't bear for me to use the word agriculture. I rewrote the Little Red and Yellow, Black book for them. On the first page, I want to talk about agriculture. They removed the word. I'll never forget it. And now I know why, [interviewer interjects: why?] um, you know, because they didn't believe it.
They didn't believe that we could say agriculture. They thought it was, you know, pumping up Aboriginal people too much. And there's a lot of that goes on, you know, a lot of Aboriginal, um, you know, uh, people, in defense of their culture try and overreach, but I didn't believe this was overreaching…’
- Podcast of ABC RN interview: Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe, 29 July 2014 - Listen from 20:35
So there you have it - the ‘professors’ who rejected Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu manuscript were none other than some of Australia’s most qualified scholars on Indigenous Knowledge at the AIATSIS and its publishing arm, Aboriginal Studies Press. These professors are the curators and custodians of the world’s largest single repository of artifacts, writings, research reports, films and audio of the Australian Aboriginal peoples. But according to Bruce they are wrong and he is right - after all he bought a second-hand copy of the journal of Thomas Mitchell for 8 bucks that he says turned out to be some sort of Holy Book of Revelations on Aboriginal agriculture.
So we wondered what these professors actual said to Bruce about his Dark Emu manuscript?
Now, we all whinge and moan from time to time about how the public is kept in the dark by the government, its departments and the raft of statutory bodies that govern our lives, but in this great country of ours there is actually a hard-fought for right which us ‘little people’ can utilize to find out the truth. It does take a lot of effort and time and sometimes considerable expense, but there is actually a system that works - it is called FOI - Freedom of Information.
So one of our contributors, Mia (Note 1), lodged her application and surprise, surprise we got to the bottom of this story, a story in which Bruce Pascoe is confirmed as an excellent writer of fiction.
Mia’s FOI correspondence with the AIATSIS is shown below chronologically - and we have to admit that the disclosure that Mia was able to achieve shows the AIATSIS, and their publishing arm ASP, in a very good light. They did a very professional job when considering Pascoe’s manuscript. Now, financially is was a loss to them - Dark Emu with the free promotion of the ABC/SBS/NTIV media complex went on to achieve some of the biggest book sales ever seen in Australia. But the AIATSIS was able to maintain its principled reputation - AIATSIS and ASP were correct in their decision that the Dark Emu manuscript, in the form in which it was offered to them, just wasn’t worthy of their endorsement as a work of non-fiction.
Fiction maybe, but a scholarly book on Aboriginal society? No.
1. Initial Request for FOI at AIATSIS and Podcast of ABC RN interview: Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe, 29 July 2014 - Listen from 20:35
2. Reply from AIATSIS to our FOI Request
3. Record of Internal discussion within AIATSIS and ASP regarding Dark Emu manuscript and reasonings for recommendation not to publish
4. Seven pages of a detailed review by a qualified AIATSIS assessor highlighting the deficiences in Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu manuscript
The final paragraph of the AIATSIS letter says it all - insert say, ‘We at the ASP’ in the blank:
Notes
Not her real name. Unfortunately in these Soviet-style times in which we live, many of our contributors are compelled to use pseudonyms so as to prevent any chance that they may be ‘cancelled’ within their professions. It is regrettable but it is the only way we can get contributions from highly qualified people who work deep within the political-academic complex that now exist in our institutions and public service.
