Hoaxes are very easy to pull off, but very tiresome to debunk.
Consider the Orson Welles radio broadcast of War of the Worlds: newspapers ran wild with claims that it sparked mass panic. That is absolutely untrue, yet the hoax is still widely believed. Crop circles immediately grabbed the tiny minds of New Age types. Even after the hoaxers admitted it and showed exactly how they did it, many refused to believe them.
Dark Emu may not be a conscious hoax. Perhaps Bruce Pascoe really believes his ludicrous taradiddle. But absolute baloney it remains nonetheless.
Yet it has swept the leftist academic world. “Intellectuals” like Marcia Langton swear by it. The ABC commissioned a big-budget “documentary” series. Worst of all, the book has been enthusiastically adopted by school curriculum-writers.
It’s like making Chariots of the Gods a set astronomy text.
Finally, some actual historians are calling out Pascoe’s preposterous grab-bag of bullshit.
Peter Sutton is one of Australia’s leading anthropologists. A gifted linguist, rigorous, sometimes controversial, a debunker of myths.
Sutton is just one of the academics brave enough to publicly call bullshit on Pascoe.
Pascoe argues that Aboriginal people in pre-colonial Australia were not “hapless wanderers across the soil, mere hunter-gatherers” – his expression – but were “in the early stages of an agricultural society”, were not “simply wandering from plant to plant, kangaroo to kangaroo in a hapless opportunism”, but were early farmers who tilled the soil, sowed crops that they irrigated, harvested and stored, altered the course of rivers, built dams, sewed clothes, and lived for long periods in substantial dwellings, sometimes made of stone.
Pascoe also claims that Aborigines invented democracy, built settlements housing thousands of people and cultivated more grain than modern Australian farmers.
This is all such obvious garbage that few in their right minds would be taken in for an instant. Unfortunately, people in their right minds are very few indeed among the Australian elite. But debunking nonsense is a lot more work than just making it up out of thin air.
And Pascoe is nothing, if not imaginative.
Pascoe claims to have discovered Aboriginal ancestors on both sides of his family, including the Palawa people from Tasmania, Bunurong from Victoria and Yuin from the south coast of NSW.
Except that Aboriginal groups have publicly rejected his claims and genealogical research traces all of his ancestors to England.
Peter Sutton is co-author of a new book which shreds Pascoe’s fake history. As they also point out, Pascoe is practising the worst kind of genuine cultural appropriation.
It is into this fraught arena that Sutton and his co-author, archaeologist Keryn Walshe, now step with Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate. And their rebuttal of Dark Emu, published next week by Melbourne University Press, is damning. In page after page, Sutton and Walshe accuse Pascoe of a “lack of true scholarship”, ignoring Aboriginal voices, dragging respect for traditional Aboriginal culture back into the Eurocentric world of the colonial era, and “trimming” colonial observations to fit his argument. They write that while Dark Emu “purports to be factual” it is “littered with unsourced material, is poorly researched, distorts and exaggerates many points, selectively emphasises evidence to suit those opinions, and ignores large bodies of information that do not support the author’s opinions”.
As hoaxes will, Pascoe’s has festered for years before attracting rigorous criticism by people who really do know what they’re talking about.
Peter Sutton did not see Dark Emu until 2016[..]It was not until 2019, when Dark Emu had taken on a celebrated status, that Sutton gave it his full attention. He was deeply unimpressed[…]
He was “stunned” that the book was “riddled with errors of fact, selective quotations, selective use of evidence, and exaggeration of weak evidence”, including the suggestion Aboriginal people have occupied Australia for 120,000 years. And he was “outraged” that school curricula were being changed to conform with the Dark Emu narrative, embracing Pascoe’s descriptions of an early agricultural society[…]
For her part, Walshe says that when she first read Dark Emu, she was so frustrated by its lack of scholarship that she didn’t finish it[…]
Sutton says it should be withdrawn from classrooms and rewritten.
For all that it is obvious claptrap, Dark Emu has been wildly popular with the left-elite.
Pondering why Dark Emu was so well received, Sutton and Walshe write that its success appears to indicate a profound lack of knowledge about Aboriginal people and history, “or an unconcern with facts and truth themselves, or a combination of these things”[…]
They also question why no one asked Aboriginal people still connected to traditional practices, or anthropologists, whether Pascoe was right.
The Age
Huh. What would they know?
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