The Sorcerer's Apprentice Number 5 - Dr Richard Davis — Dark Emu Exposed

Aug 22

Aug 22 The Sorcerer's Apprentice Number 5 - Dr Richard Davis

This blog post is the fifth in our series of ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, a series that illustrates how many young Australian’s are completely enamoured with Bruce Pascoe and his Dark Emu thesis.

These ‘apprentices’ defend and promote Bruce Pascoe and his book Dark Emu, against all common sense, and in the face of obvious facts and evidence which clearly shows that Bruce Pascoe is ‘just making stuff up.’

Our latest nomination for the position of apprentice to the ‘Literary Sorcerer’ that is Bruce Pascoe, is anthropologist, Dr Richard Davis.

Dr Richard Davis is an independent anthropologist living in Darwin. He has held postdoctoral and research fellowships at NARU/CDU and AIATSIS, lectured anthropology for over a decade at the University of Western Australia, and was Senior Anthropologist at the Central Land Council. - Source — Dr Richard Davis is an independent anthropologist living in Darwin. He has held postdoctoral and research fellowships at NARU/CDU and AIATSIS, lectured anthropology for over a decade at the University of Western Australia, and was Senior Anthropologist at the Central Land Council. - *Source*

In our opinion, Dr Davis, as a university trained, practicing anthropologist, should know better than to attempt to defend Bruce Pascoe and his Dark Emu thesis where it is clearly wrong, misleading or ‘just made up’ with regard to Aboriginal economies, or the past work by scholarly Australian institutions and anthropologists.

1. Dr Davis’ Defence of Pascoe’s ‘Dodgy’ Aboriginal Grain-Belt Map.

In an on-line lecture on May 28th 2020 called, ‘Celebrating Reconciliation Week - Black Agriculture, White Anger: Arguments Over Aboriginal Land Use in Bruce Pascoe's 'Dark Emu'‘, Dr Davis critiqued our exposure of Bruce Pascoe’s ‘dodgy’ hand re-drawing of a map produced in 1974 by the famous Australian anthropologist, Dr Norman Tindale. Tindale drew his map, or ‘arc’, to show what he considered were the ‘grassland areas exploited by aborigines as important sources of grain food’.

As we have explained in a previous blog-post, Bruce Pascoe clearly includes in his book Dark Emu, a ‘dodgy ‘copy of this map, where he has ‘rubbed out’ Tindale’s borders to his ‘arc’ and then hand re-drawn the borders to appear very much larger than Tindale originally intended. Pascoe does this so that he can claim that Aborigines cultivated and farmed vast areas of Australia to produce grain-crops.

So how does Dr Davis attempt to rescue Pascoe’s reputation on this ‘dodgy’ claim? - a claim even the respected journalist of the Left, Kerry O’Brien is incredulous at when he asks Pascoe directly in an interview,

‘You’ve said in interviews that roughly half of pre-colonial Australia was under crop to Aboriginal people. That sounds like a huge area of the country under crop. In desert and in more fertile soil. How did you arrive at that conculsion? Half the country?’ - [See Item 2 from our blog-post here].

Well, Dr Davis, in a short clip from his on-line lecture (from here at 05:07) and his published paper (here) claims that,

‘…Pascoe expands Tindale’s area and poorly explains why he does so. The justification is there in his work, Pascoe’s book, but it is actually quite hard to make sense of. So he expands it, he gives some references but he doesn’t really make clear what the relationship is between the references and the expanded area is.

And Dark Emu Exposed says that Pascoe basically ‘makes up’ the expanded area in order to make an argument that Aboriginal people were involved in large scale farming and gathering of grains across Australia. Pascoe’s at fault here. He’s careless in explain the expansion, but Dark Emu Exposed is also lazy in not checking his sources. They could do so. I went and did it and you can see what Pascoe is doing.

He is more of a story teller than a scholar, so he is not doing that, kind of, firm scholarly practice of explaining his sources and the way he comes to interpretations and conclusions.“ - (see here from 06:18)

So, Dr Davis agrees that Pascoe does redraw the map without providing a clear explanation. Dr Davis however attempts to rescue Pascoe by saying that the evidence for the re-drawing of the map is there in the references and we at Dark Emu Exposed are lazy for not checking these references.

Nice try Richard, but we are not lazy. As we pointed out in a previous blog post, we ‘amateurs’ at Dark Emu Exposed did in fact spend some un-lazy time ‘checking his [Pascoe’s] sources’ and what we found then still holds,

‘We have highlighted in bold the location and researcher references cited in Dark Emu and the RIRDC report, which some readers [ie, in this case Dr Richard Davis] think have provided the basis for Professor Pascoe to re-draw his extended ‘Tindale’s Arc’ boundary to extend further into Victoria, NE Qld and SW WA. We disagree. The RIRDC has indicated the locations of these additional researchers work by adding blue diamonds to their map (See Fig. 2 above). Some of these points fall outside Tindale’s original map, but we note none are located in Victoria, NE Qld or SW WA. The point on the SA southern coast may, or may not, be an outlier. If anything, professor Pascoe may be entitled to extend his boundary further north into the NT, but he has no evidential basis to support the ‘dodgy’ map he has published in Dark Emu’. - Editor [ see this update of 7th January 2020 at bottom of this blog post here]

Now it is completely bewildering for Dr Davis to claim that, with regard to these references at the bottom of Pascoe’s ‘dodgy’ map, ‘I went and did it and you can see what Pascoe is doing’.

No you can’t. These references lend no support whatsoever to Pascoe’s claim that his ‘aboriginal grain belt - after Tindale 1974’ extended so much further to encompass SW Western Australia and most of NSW and Victoria.

In our opinion, Dr Davis can not claim to be a scholarly anthropologist, educator and researcher if he believes Bruce Pascoe is correct on this point.

But then perhaps Dr Davis gives the game away when he admits Pascoe, ‘…is more of a story teller than a scholar, so he is not doing that, kind of, firm scholarly practice of explaining his sources and the way he comes to interpretations and conclusions.’

So Dr Davis, why are you accepting the thesis of Bruce Pascoe and his Dark Emu, that Aboriginal people were sophisticated farmers and agriculturalists, when his arguments are based on such ‘dodgy evidence’ as his re-drawn map?

As an academic, aren’t the ‘warning bells going off’ in your head when you read Pascoe, who clearly writes like someone who goes to the past, not to investigate the evidence about his subject, but rather to cherry-pick and distort the writings of other eminent academics to vindicate the position he has already taken, namely that Aboriginal people were farmers and agriculturalists? Don’t you, as an academic have a basic sense of quality control, which requires you to check that what you write is based on facts and verifiable evidence?

2. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Dr Davis, Learns ‘barrier referencing’ from the Master, Professor Bruce Pascoe.

Bruce Pascoe is the master of what one might call barrier referencing, the trick used by ‘shonky’ academics to add innumerable and authoritative sounding footnotes and references to their writings as a way of putting a barrier between the reader and the real truth - the facts and evidence for what is being claimed.

For example, a reader looking at Pascoe’s ‘dodgy’ re-drawing of Tindale's map might see the references below it and conclude that Pascoe used these several academic references to support his map. This is in fact what Dr Davis says Pascoe achieved - Davis claims that he ‘checked’ these references and concluded that the evidence in these references supports Pascoe’s re-drawing of the map. Dr Davis wants his readers to believe this.

The reality is that, if the reader really checks these references, they discover that they provide no evidence at all to support Pascoe’s claims. All they do is provide a barrier to the reader who would need considerable resources and time to individually check each of these papers. The accepted position taken by the general reading public is to take the academic writer’s footnotes and references on trust - and a ‘hoaxer’ knows this. That is why, If they want to project a scholarly image to the general public, they include lots and lots of footnotes (end-notes) and references, knowing full well that the average punter will not check and hence see the hoax. [See Further Reading below on the ‘weaponisation’ of footnotes]

Dr Richard Davis’s article in Arena where he uses ‘Barrier Referencing’ - Source Arena — Dr Richard Davis’s article in Arena where he uses ‘Barrier Referencing’ - *Source Arena*

As an example of how Dr Davis use ‘barrier referencing’ himself, consider an article he wrote in August 2021 in the online magazine Arena, titled, Dark Emu’s Critics, where he tells us,

‘Despite its problems, Dark Emu has inspired research prepared to ask new questions. Archaeologists working with the Mithika [Aboriginal people] of the Channel Country have uncovered evidence of earthen weirs developed to provide a flood-driven irrigation system to increase plant growth (Ref 14)’.

Dr Davis is citing as his reference No. 14, a paper by a team led by anthropologist and archaeologist Dr Michael Westaway, titled, Hidden in Plain Sight: The Archaeological Landscape of Mithaka Country,

Now, the average reader of Dr Davis’ article would be swayed to think that, yes, Bruce Pascoe is correct when he tells us that Aboriginal people built dams to irrigate their crops. Dr Davis is confirming that archaeologists, ‘have uncovered evidence of earthen weirs developed to provide a flood-driven irrigation system to increase plant growth.’ Dr Davis is citing this work by independent, professional academics, which the general public would therefore expect to be true.

Only it isn’t. In fact, Dr Davis is just making this up - he is trying to dark emu us with a bit of ‘barrier referencing’ in exactly the same way as Bruce Pascoe does throughout the book, Dark Emu.

What Micheal Westaway actually says in his team’s paper is,

Michael Westaway, Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Archaeology, School of Social Science, The University of Queensland - a biological anthropologist and archaeologist specializing in human evolution in Australia and South East Asia, zooarchaeology, palaeoanthropology (the study of human evolution) and environmental archaeology - *Source*

‘Recently there has been renewed interest in the possibility that Indigenous Australians engaged in agriculture before European colonisation (Gerritsen 2008; Pascoe 2014). In this context, there is evidence that the Mithaka constructed earthern weirs to retain water as part of a flood-driven irrigation system in order to increase the productivity of local plant species (Duncan-Kemp 1968). (ibid. p14)

So Dr Davis is completely misleading in saying that archaeologists (Dr Westaways team) have uncovered evidence of the weirs themselves. Do they didn’t. Dr Westaway is just claiming that the evidence for the weirs is from a 1968 book written by Alice Duncan-Kemp, a non-academic author who lived in Mithaka country in the early 1900s.

Now we have checked our copy of Duncan-Kemp’s 1968 book, Where Strange Gods Call, and for the life of us we couldn’t locate where, in her 325 page book, she refers to ‘evidence that the Mithaka constructed earthen weirs’. It is a pity an ‘academic’ such as Dr Westaway does not provide page numbers in his cited references. Scholarship 101 we would have thought. We would be pleased if any readers could perhaps find the reference to the weirs in Duncan-Kemp’s book and let us know?

‘Scholarly history distinguishes itself from popular works by providing references to its sources. It does this through the device of the footnote…The role of the footnote is to make historians publicly accountable. Footnotes verify that the historian has evidence for the claims he or she makes. In traditional history teaching, the distinction was once clear: 'the text persuades, the notes prove’.

The footnote's role is to permit a reader to check the author's sources, references, facts, quotations and generalisations. Footnotes allow readers to find the original source to determine whether a quotation has been accurately transcribed and whether it contains the information the author claims. To act in a properly scholarly fashion, authors should be able to support, through their footnotes, every factual claim they make. In particular, if a work of history makes a contentious claim, the author often gives it a footnote and uses that footnote's text to comment on the evidence about the controversy itself.

Most readers, of course, take historians' evidence on trust. They have neither the time nor the expertise to go back to the archives, or whatever other resource has been used, to check an author's claims for authenticity. However, footnotes always allow the potential for others, especially doubters or critics, to do this. So, even if the process of verification is rarely followed up, the footnote nonetheless functions as a means of keeping historians honest.

Footnotes are one of the principal reasons why those who practise scholarly history can be trusted, and can trust one another, to tell the truth. Unfortunately, not all historians deserve this trust because some fudge their work by not doing the research they have claimed or, in some cases, by inventing sources or falsifying their content. However, those who make claims they cannot substantiate usually get found out, sooner or later, by someone checking their footnotes.

An ideal work of history would provide a footnote for every claim it made. In most cases, however, this would mean one footnote per sentence, which would clog up and extend the length of the work. Publishers also believe this would decrease readability and increase their costs. So the practice has arisen in which many authors put one footnote at the end of a paragraph and then use it to cite several sources to cover all the claims made in that paragraph. This might suit readers and publishers but it makes the task of verifying authors' claims much more difficult. To check an assertion, you now have to look up all the sources cited for a whole paragraph to find the relevant one.’

- Windschuttle, K. the Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Vol. 1, Van Dieman’s Land, Macleay Press 2002, p132-133.

2. Dr Richard Davis is in Good Company

Professor Marcia Langton AM

‘…people [critics] are lying about what is in the book [Dark Emu]. All of Bruce Pascoe’s references are correct ‘ (Source at 01:09ff)

Senior Reporter Rick ‘Squiggly’ Morton from The Saturday Paper

‘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’. (Source here).