As Aboriginal as His Old Dad

As I wrote recently, Native Americans take the issue of ‘Pretendians’ very seriously. So much so that they have a body specifically dedicated to sniffing out fakes and frauds. From ‘Sacheen Littlefeather’, to Elizabeth Warren, to Buffy St Marie, no matter who you are, if you’re falsely ‘ticking the box’, they’ll call you out.

Just ask famed “Indian” writer and academic Thomas King – now outed and cancelled as a fake Cherokee.

Canada has always had less patience with what’s now called “Pretendians”, who’ve been notorious ever since the great Indian ecologist Grey Owl was revealed after his death in 1938 to be the not-so-great English impostor Archibald Stansfeld Belaney.

On the other hand, the Aboriginal Industry in Australia doesn’t just tolerate obviously fake ‘box-tickers’ – it valorises them. For instance, the pasty-white ‘Uncles’ and ‘Aunties’ shamelessly pocket small fortunes for equally fake ‘Welcome to Country’ ceremonies at the opening of a paper bag.

Then there’s the emperor of the box-tickers, Bruce Pascoe.

Pascoe first publicly claimed he was Aboriginal some time after a Canberra Times reviewer in 1988 said his novel “Fox”, imagining an Aboriginal hero, would have been better had Pascoe been Aboriginal, too.

Soon he was, to immense success. Pascoe won a NSW Premier’s award for best indigenous author. He was fawned over by writers’ festivals and our ABC, which also promoted him in videos for children.

His “Dark Emu” was even taught in schools, despite citing bogus sources to claim hunter-gathering Aboriginals were actually farmers. Melbourne University even bought into this nonsense by hiring Pascoe as its Enterprise Professor of Indigenous Agriculture. Governments gave him grants to grow Aboriginal crops.

The only problem with all this is that Pascoe’s ‘Aboriginality’ is as fake as his ‘history’, and as scarce as the ‘Aboriginal crops’ he pockets millions in government grants not to successfully grow.

He kept changing his story about his supposed Aboriginal ancestors – first, they were on his mother’s side, then on his father’s – and to this day refuses to give any proof.

Professional genealogists from the darkemuexposed.org website have since confirmed his ancestry is 100 per cent British, and Pascoe even admitted on SBS that “many” of his own family didn’t accept they were Aboriginals.

Not all his family, though. Some are pretty keen to get in on the grift.

Calling himself Aboriginal has paid off for Jack Pascoe. Bingo: he’s won an $860,000 taxpayer-funded grant meant for Aboriginal researchers.

Excuse me? Jack Pascoe?

Yes, Bruce’s little boy has jumped on the ‘Aboriginal’ gravy train.

Already a winner of the university’s Excellence in Diversity Fellowship for Aboriginal scholars, he’d now also won this Australian Research Council grant to “integrate Traditional Ecological Knowledge into the management of Maar Country”.

As the ARC notes, this is a Discovery Indigenous grant to back research “led by Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander researchers”, and Jack was the recipient and a chief investigator.

Except that his mother does not identify publicly as Aboriginal and his dad has been repeatedly exposed as a fake. This bloke is as white as my hairy arse.

So I wrote to him, asking him to name his apical Aboriginal ancestor or give any genealogical evidence of his Aboriginality, given that this $860,000 was public money meant for researchers of Aboriginal heritage.

Jack did not reply, but Melbourne University’s dean of science, Professor Moira O’Bryan, did.

The only problem was that she conspicuously didn’t answer the question.

Her reply is so extraordinarily evasive, that I quote it in full: “Dr Jack Pascoe is a valued and respected member of the academic community and his extensive knowledge and experience makes a significant contribution to public knowledge and land management. Dr Pascoe fulfilled the requirements for his Australian Research Council Grant.”

I wrote back: “You realise, of course, that you have not answered a single question I put. Is there a reason for that? A concession that Jack Pascoe is not Aboriginal or cannot prove it?”

He’s far from the only fake Aborigine scarfing up taxpayers’ hard-earned.

For instance, I asked the University of Western Sydney why its associate dean of indigenous health, Kerrie Doyle, claimed to be of the “Winninninni tribe”, even getting an Aboriginal scholarship to Oxford.

‘Winninninni’? Surely they’re just making this shit up, now?

Indeed, they literally are.

There was no evidence such a tribe ever existed, and when genealogical records indicated she was of entirely European descent.

But there’s nothing so obviously a lie that you can’t slap some RapidTan and a bit of ochre on it and the ‘intelligentsia’ will lap it up.

Undaunted, Doyle has since been recorded by students singing a welcome to country song she claimed was recorded by the warrior Pemulwuy – who actually died in 1802.

No doubt Pascoe’s next bestseller will claim that Aborigines invented the gramophone a hundred years before Emile Berliner.