The great Richard Feynman warned that “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool”. The problem, though, is that some people want to be fooled so very, very badly.
So they’ll happily believe the most obvious nonsense, if it’s what they desperately want to believe.
It’s as true of the Royal Society, which publishes obvious nonsense about Maori discovering Antarctica, as it is of the mainstream media and “public intellectuals”, who are happy to believe, well, anything.
So when Bruce Pascoe published a work of staggering, obvious bullshit, the mainstream media and the “intelligentsia” ate it up like ice cream.
The fabrications and distortions of Pascoe’s Dark Emu have been relentlessly exposed (though that hasn’t stopped it from being placed on school curricula), but what about Pascoe himself?
Namely, Pascoe’s claim to be “Indigenous”?
In its rush to be part of the Kingdom of Wokeness, Australian academia and media have discovered, like the Hans Christian Andersen folktale, their King Bruce has no clothes […]
How was the University of Melbourne so easily conned into appointing Pascoe as Enterprise Professor in Indigenous Agriculture?
Identity being the first and last principle of the modern left, Pascoe’s claim to Aboriginality is central to his success. But, like so many Billy-Come-Latelies, Pascoe’s claim is even shonkier than his fiction.
Pascoe has not been challenged by academia and the media because they think he’s Aboriginal. But this has also been credibly challenged. In letters to the Koori Mail in the 1990s trying to identify his Aboriginal ancestry Pascoe sought information on his great-grandmother, Sarah Matthews, whom he said was born in Dudley, South Gippsland, in 1848, also (inconsistently) “may have come to South Gippsland on a sealing vessel” and may have lived on the Cummererugunja and Ebenezer Mission.
Inconsistencies and vagueness seem to be Pascoe’s stock-in-trade. For instance, he claims that an “afternoon tea” with a mysterious group of historians spurred the writing of Dark Emu. Pascoe has never named them and no one has ever come forward. It’s almost like it never happened.
Confronted with questions of his alleged Aboriginal ancestry, Pascoe invariably resorts to waffle and deflection. Mainstream journalists, of course, let it all go straight through to the keeper.
Others are not so willing to be fooled.
Genealogists say Matthews’s marriage certificate states her birthplace as Dudley, England, and have produced research that all Pascoe’s ancestry can be traced to England. Pascoe has not addressed this and has been persistently vague about who his Aboriginal ancestors are and where they came from. Difficulties in tracing Aboriginal ancestry due to dispossession, Stolen Generations, racism and so on are cited as excuses for this.
I used to head NTSCorp, the peak body representing NSW native title claimants, whose anthropologists, historians and genealogists conducted research and evidence-gathering supporting native title claims and claimant group membership. Aborigines in NSW were among the earliest disrupted and dispersed by colonisation, yet we could trace and establish Aboriginal descent to a legal standard, including in families affected by forced removal.
Pascoe claims to be of Tasmanian, Burnurong and Yuin descent. Two of those groups have explicitly rejected this claim. Yet his ABC bio, for instance, still boldly claims that he is “a Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian man”.
Bottom line, if you can’t identify a known Aboriginal ancestor, how can you claim Aboriginal descent? And if your ancestors can all be traced to other countries you certainly cannot. Pascoe wrote an incorrect Aboriginal history and avoided scrutiny because of claimed Aboriginality, protected by academia and the media, especially the ABC, two groups supposed to engage in curious and critical inquiry. They’ve forgotten their role in truth telling and become a modern equivalent of the Dark Ages alchemist. I give them an A+ for woke but a big fat F for facts.
The Australian
Pascoe is, of course, merely the biggest festering boil on the flabby arse of Australian identity politics. He’s merely the most (in)famous of a legion of Fauxborigines making spurious claims to “Indigenous identity”.
As Australia’s census figures show, Aborigines are one of the fastest-growing groups in Australia: three times faster than any other, and far faster than natural population growth would allow. Clearly, thousands of Australians are suddenly “discovering” Aboriginal ancestry, however spurious.
And why wouldn’t they? As the Pascoe saga shows, growing a bushy beard, claiming to be Aboriginal, and spinning a few tall tales can be very, very lucrative indeed.
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