Is Dennis Foley a Purveyor of 'Pseudo-profound Bullshit'? - Part 2 — Dark Emu Exposed

Sep 21

Sep 21 Is Dennis Foley a Purveyor of 'Pseudo-profound Bullshit'? - Part 2

Fakes, Dennis Foley, Just Making Stuff Up

This website Dark Emu Exposed was established in 2019 to provide a forum for the critical analysis of the book, Dark Emu. This website also undertook a detailed critique of the claims made by the book’s author, Bruce Pascoe, in other forums such as in lectures, interviews and in print.

Additionally, over the past three years, other critics have provided a large amount of evidence that confirmed Pascoe’s Dark Emu book was a largely a hoax built on a concoction of a selective reading of the historical record and a fabrication of ethnographic information. Pascoe presented this material in Dark Emu in such a way that it completely misrepresented the true nature of pre-colonial Aboriginal societies.

An approximate chronology of the critiques of Bruce Pascoe and his Dark Emu is summarised here.

Now, all these critics, including our website Dark Emu Exposed, really only critiqued Pascoe and his book at the factual level - Pascoe made a claim and we critics then provided the evidence to show that Pascoe was wrong, ‘just making stuff up’ or fabricating to mislead his readers.

We at Dark Emu Exposed did analyse Pascoe and his Dark Emu book from the perspective of Hoax Theory but, as far as we were aware, no academic or commentator had made a detailed study of Pascoe and his Dark Emu at a deeper, scholarly level, to try to understand the emerging phenomena of the Indigenisation of Australian history and the promotion within our universities of Indigenous knowledges as being on an equal par with Western Scientific knowledge.

But then finally, on the 26th of June 2022, two academics, Terry Moore and Carol Pybus, were brave enough to publish a paper in the online magazine Quillette, entitled, Myth-making Isn’t the Right Way to ‘Indigenise’ Our Universities - Too often, the noble goal of reconciliation is being co-opted by those seeking to invent fake histories and advance politicized narratives.

Terry Moore has worked in remote Indigenous education, and taught Aboriginal Studies at three Australian universities and Carol Pybus has coordinated UTAS’ first-year Aboriginal Studies program for twenty years.

Their article, written by two people with the ‘lived-experience’ of what is going on in academia today, perfectly describes the ‘myth-making’ that passes for scholarship in universities, the public service and corporations today.

A good example of how deep this ‘myth-making’ goes in ‘Indigenising’ our institutions with ‘fake narratives’ in the pursuit of reconcilliation is provided by a Youtube of a 2016 lecture by Bruce Pascoe at the internationally renowned Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne.

At their Reconciliation Seminar Series on 1 June 2016, Bruce Pascoe proceeded to spin a long series of fake histories and yarns to rapturous applause by some of the most credentialed scientific minds in Australia (Watch here, especially the first 5 minute introduction by the gullible organiser).

It is frightening to consider how this collection of Australia’s best scientific minds swallowed Bruce Pascoe’s ‘pseudo-profound bullshit’, hook, line and sinker.

In their article, Moore and Pybus cite a 2015 paper in the journal, Judgment and Decision Making, (Vol. 10, No. 6, November 2015, pp. 549–563) by psychologist Gordon Pennycook (et al) from the Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Canada.

Pennycook’s paper is entitled, On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit, where ‘pseudo-profound bullshit’ is defined as consisting of ‘seemingly impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually vacuous’.

In our opinion, Professor Dennis Foley, like Professor Pascoe, seems to be a graduate of the school of ‘pseudo-profound bullshit.’

When one reads Professor Foley’s contributions to the book, What the Colonists Never Knew, or listens to his talks on Youtube, one can’t help but think, “this guy is just talking rubbish” - “he is just making up myths as he goes along” - “sounds like total bullshit to me” - “he never provides any evidence to support his assertions.”

Now ‘bullshitting’ is not ‘lying’. A very interesting distinction between ‘bullshitting’ and ‘lying’ is made by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt.

***Source:*** Quoted by Pennycook, G. in *Judgment and Decision Making*, (Vol. 10, No. 6, November 2015, p. 549)

To our mind, we think Harry Frankfurt’s description fits the actions of Professor Dennis Foley perfectly - we don’t think Foley is lying per se when he speaks of Aboriginal culture and societies, but rather he is just bullshitting. In Frankfurt’s mind, people like Foley are not lying because to lie you need to know the truth first, whereas someone like Foley has no real idea about Aboriginal culture or societies. When he speaks, he ‘just makes stuff up’ based on bits of hearsay, or what he might have read somewhere in an unrelated situation, or what he thinks sounds good and strengthens his bullshit narrative.

Some examples will illustrate our point.

Example 1. Professor Dennis Foley speaks [bullshits?] on behalf Northern Cemeteries, who are,

‘delighted to work collaboratively with our local First Nations community in the Northern Sydney region. The board was introduced to Professor Foley a number of years ago and we have been building upon our relationship with him ever since. Our aspiration is to create pathways for the wider community to connect and to be better educated about the land on which our cemetery sites are located…On the day of filming there was a light sprinkling of rain which Dennis commented on as being a good sign from the spirits of the land and him seeing it as permission for us to continue and for him to share his knowledge and tell us the story of place’.

In this Northern Cemeteries ‘advertorial’ film clip, Dennis tells us that,

‘nagaya woolgie nagaya wenma gai-mariagal [?], they're the two names that I was given as a child.

Through my grandmother and through my mother I am connected to this land.

When I was born my placenta and my umbilical cord were actually processed by my grandmother and by one of my aunties because they thought I was going to die - I was actually born in the Coloured and Asiatics ward which was an old army building at the front of Royal North Shore Hospital which is just down the hill from here - and there was a tree; there was an iron bark uh a rough rough bark, you know the real thick bark iron barks at the red redwood, um yeah that's where my umbilical cord that was placed so sadly that's now gone but it's still in the land so I've got a very strong connection here.

The environment around here was an open forest, apart from the cleared areas where the bora rings were; and around the bora rings there was - and this is prior to European occupation of course - it was quite thick, the scrub that was around there purely to hide the bora ring; and also so when you dance to the night time the vision of the dancing couldn't be seen by people that it shouldn't be seen, like young children, things like that, but it was an open woodland right for this country…’ - (listen 00:00 to 01:25)

We have done extensive research and we can find no record that there was ever a ‘Coloured and Asiatic [maternity] ward, which was an old army building at the front of the Royal North Shore Hospital’ in 1953 where Dennis could have been born.

Even if there was, is it really conceivable that when Dennis’s father, Gordon Foley turned up one night with his in-labour wife Beatrice, that the Admissions Nurse would have taken one look at them and directed them to the Coloured and Asiatics Ward? This was Sydney in 1953, not North Queensland in 1876 or South Africa in 1961.

**Figure 1 - Dennis’s parents Gordon and Beatrice Foley in 1946 (7 years before Dennis was supposedly born in the Coloured and Asiatics Ward).**
(Source: *Dennis Foley’s own book, What the Colonists Never Knew, p61)*

**Figure 2 - Dennis’s parents, Gordon and Beatrice Foley in 1941 on their wedding day (12 years before Dennis was supposedly born in the Coloured and Asiatics Ward).**
*Source : Ancestry user jeb1313 originally shared this on 06 Jun 2013*

In addition, Dennis Foley wants us to believe that in 1953, his grandmother and one of his aunties went to the hospital when he was born and the doctor or midwife gave them the placenta and umbilical cord. They then ‘processed’ this after-birth by placing it under an ironbark tree near where he just happens to be filming this video 60 years later for his client, Northern Cemeteries. Dennis claims that this confirms that he is connected to this land.

Come on Dennis, you’re just pulling our leg.

This has got to be just some ‘pseudo-profound bullshit’ that you made up or perhaps read on-line at some Indigenous New Age website that is all the rage overseas.

Our understanding is that in 1953, the ‘after-birth’ was considered as ‘medical waste’ that had to be disposed of appropriately. It wasn’t until much later in the New Age days starting in the 1970s that some mothers started to consider ‘weird’ ideas like eating their placenta or fertilizing garden roses with it.

Example 2

A standard technique of the ‘pseudo-profound bullshitter’ is to firstly decide what political or cultural idea they want to convey and then secondly, construct an academic-sounding piece of ‘pseudo-profound bullshit’ that seems to support that idea or narrative.

Dennis Foley wants to let the world know he supports Progressive causes such as feminism and environmentalism. A good way to do this is to create some ‘Indigenous myths’ that describe how ‘Indigenous people and their knowledges’ were way ahead of the ideas of the colonial British and modern Australians in regard to women’s issues and the environment.

In his book, What the Colonists Never Knew, Foley makes the assertion that, ‘ours [i.e. his claimed Gai-mariagal Aboriginal society] is a matriarchal society.’ He makes this claim without providing any evidence or anthropological citation whatsoever. Foley’s opinion is at odds with the generally accepted view that ‘most anthropologists hold that there are no known societies that are unambiguously matriarchal’ and ‘no true matriarchy is known actually to have existed.’ (Source: Wikipedia). Foley would need to cite the results of an anthropologist’s research of traditional Gai-mariagal society before we could believe his claim.

Foley then goes on to make another ‘pseudo-profound bullshit’ claim when he then writes,

‘Perhaps the most powerful attribute of such a [matriarchal] society is the ecological complexity of fresh water.’

According to the ideas of Pennycock, ‘although this statement may seem to convey some sort of potentially profound meaning’ it is actually incomprehensible. It may have been constructed to imply that it is communicating something, but in reality it is just an example of ‘bullshit’, which in contrast to mere nonsense, is something that implies but does not contain adequate meaning or truth.

Readers who try to analyse Foley’s sentence will be struggling to understand how or why the attributes of a human society are conceptually equivalent to, or can even influence, aspects of the earth’s water cycle.

Figure 3 - Source: What the Colonists Never Knew, p16.

In this piece of ‘pseudo-profound bullshit’ above, Foley masterly creates the ideological tension he desires - a good, Progressive Aboriginal Australia with its matriarchy, Earth Mother, order and stability with laws controlled by women who regulate the fair sharing of water with gentleness and respect; as compared to a bad Old Conservative Australia based on the British class system and imperialism - greedy men and farmers who demand and take too much water from Mother Earth at times and in quantities without the women custodians (or Murray-Darling law makers) permission.

Example 3

Consider the following sentence written by Professor Foley in his book, What the Colonists Never Knew.

***Figure 4 - Source:*** Dennis Foley, *What the Colonists Never Knew*, p13.

This sentence is ‘pseudo-profound bullshit’ as it seems to ‘convey some sort of profound meaning’ but instead it is ‘merely a collection of buzzwords put together randomly in a sentence that retains syntactic structure’ (See Gordon Pennycook, below Figure 5).

Professor Foley has strung together some words from the dictionary of the latest academic fad - the Ideology of Decolonisation - in an attempt to make a profound statement to appeal to those readers of his who believe in decolonisation ideology and want to denigrate Australia and its history.

Foley’s sentence seems to promote the idea that any racial inequality in Australia is due to the British colonists - that race inequality, where it exists, began in Australia from the moment when the British colonists stepped ashore and failed to understand 50,000 years worth of diverse Aboriginal cultures and knowledges.

In line with the international anti-colonial movements underway around the world today, Foley extrapolates his idea to claim that any Aboriginal peoples around the world experiencing difficulties today are victims of the colonial powers and oppressors such as the British and Australians.

But Foley offers no evidence for his assertions and in fact, this sentence of ‘pseudo-profound bullshit’ actually has deeply racist overtones.

Dennis Foley is telling us that, no matter what the relative standing of the two parties in terms of their other attributes, such as their comparative military, commercial or religious standing, because one party fails to understand fully the culture and technology or knowledge of the other party, they are doomed to racial inequality.

That is, the party that fails, for whatever reason to understand ‘the other’ is doomed to be an oppressor and racist no matter what. Foley believes a race of people are thus locked into being racists because they don’t fully understand any other race that they may come into contact with.

But then, surely this works both ways?

Is Foley really asking us to believe that because of the ‘inability’ of the Aborigines to ‘understand the cultural layers of thought’ of Captain Cook and his crew as they walked up the beach at Botany Bay in 1770, then Aboriginal people laid a ‘foundation for racial inequality’ that is still with us today?

If Aboriginal people today claim that there is racial inequality then, using Professor Foley’s reasoning, we would say that it is their fault due to their inability to understand British ‘cultural layers of thought’ and the Western Scientific knowledge of the colonial powers that settled Australia.

Similarly, is Dennis Foley saying that Australia is necessarily locked into racial inequality in perpetuity with China because Australians don’t ‘understand the cultural layers of thought’ and the ‘Confucian knowledges’ of the Chinese people?

Conversely, how does Professor Foley explain why Indians (i.e. the Aboriginal peoples of India) have been described as amongst the most racist in the world in a survey that also found that the colonial power Britain, and its colony of Australia, were amongst the least racist?

One of main problems we have with the ‘pseudo-profound bullshit’ statements from Professor Dennis Foley, as well as from other ‘academics’ such as Professor Bruce Pascoe, is that they are so highly offensive to both Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal people - ordinary Australians of good will who do not have a racist bone in their body.

Consider the case of Nganyinytja who is a Pitjantjatjarra woman from South Australia. As a young woman she did not know of the white man, so she and her life are a perfect proxy for the First Contact between the British (Australian) colonial powers and Aboriginal peoples.

Neither she nor the ‘whites’ had at First Contact, as Professor Foley would say, an ‘understanding of each others cultural layers of thought’. Neither would they have understood each others ‘indigenous knowledges’ - she had no understanding of Western science or medicine; we had no understanding of the incredible Indigenous knowledge required to survive in the harsh desert country.

Are we both condemed therefore, as Professor Foley would have us believe, to a life of ‘racial inequality’?

In Professor Foley’s twisted mind perhaps, but as Nganyinytja tells us with an Aboriginal language fluency that Dennis Foley can only dream of, there is a dogged determination in this highly intelligent woman to teach herself the intricacies of blood-cholesterol managment that she realises will save her life.

Similarly there is a concerted effort by the ‘colonisers’ to ‘understand the cultural layers of thought’, and provide the taxpayer funds, needed to establish a successful medical clinic in Nganyinytja’s remote community, and to wean her back onto enough bush-tucker to control her cholesterol.

The parties in this situation are not interacting with each other on a ‘foundation of racial inequality’ - that idea is just ‘pseudo-profound bullshit’ from Professor Foley.

Watch Nganyinytja from 07:04

**Figure 5. - Excerpt from Pennycook, G. in** ***Judgment and Decision Making*, (Vol. 10, No. 6, November 2015, p. 549)**

Example 4

There is some debate in the Dark Emu Exposed office as to whether the following paragraph by Dennis Foley is, just ‘bullshit’ (i.e. he is just making it up and doesn’t know the truth), or is ‘pseudo-profound bullshit’ (he is trying to communicate something, namely that he is an Aboriginal victim of a ‘breeding-out-the-colour’ government policy, or if in fact it is a ‘lie’ (he knows that his family doesn’t look Aboriginal but thinks he can get away with it by not including in his book copies of the A.O.Neville photograph and a comparative photograph of his own family as a group).

On behalf of Dennis, we have constructed some comparative photographs so our readers can decide for themselves.