Good Oil readers will no doubt be familiar with this: the previously lily-white individual who turns up claims – however spurious – of a single, remote, allegedly ‘indigenous’ ancestor and dives headlong into their new-found ‘identity’. Suddenly, it’s all moko, possum-skin cloaks, ‘whānau’ this, and ‘Aunty’ that.
And, purely coincidentally, a shameless grab for welfare and career opportunities.
The phenomenon seems to be particularly endemic to politics and academia.
Our universities seem overrun now with academics claiming to be Aboriginal, when even genealogical records suggest they’re not. Let me name two more. Add them to the supposedly Aboriginal academics I’ve mentioned before, including Melbourne University’s Professor Bruce Pascoe (the Dark Emu fake), Western Sydney University’s Associate Dean Professor Kerrie Doyle (of the unknown “Winninninni” tribe), the late professor Eric Wilmott (from the Australian National University) and the late author Mudrooroo Narogin (Murdoch University’s former head of Aboriginal Studies).
The thing is that, today, it’s easier than ever to do genealogical research. For professional genealogists, it’s a snap to ferret out peoples’ family trees. Spurred by the obviously dodgy claims of Bruce Pascoe, a team of genealogists founded the website darkemuexposed.org, dedicated to researching the publicly available records of professional ‘Aborigines’.
What they find, almost invariably, is… nothing but white folks, all the way down.
There may, of course, be an illegitimate skeleton or two rattling about in the family closet. In which case, logically, the onus is on the claimant to provide proof.
Don’t hold your breath.
Instead, it’s all threatening lawyer’s letters or ooga-booga handwaving about ‘white man’s records’.
I wrote to [Margo Neale, an adjunct professor of the Australian National University, and senior Indigenous curator at the National Museum of Australia], asking: who is your Aboriginal apical ancestor, the first one from whom you base your claim to be Aboriginal?
She replied: “Aboriginal histories, as you know, can indeed be tricky particularly if one relies on western records during the long period of disruption and displacement… Aboriginal births, deaths and marriages were largely unrecorded outside missions and pastoral properties in earlier days at least, or inaccurately recorded.”
I asked again: so which Aboriginal ancestor had their birth inaccurately recorded? She never replied.
This may all seem, pardon the pun, academic – were it not that these people are reaping in arms-full of taxpayer money and enjoying privileged status and power. All on the basis of their just-so claims.
At the same time, they’re depriving genuinely Aboriginal Australians of lucrative opportunities.
It’s also not a small problem, either.
The 2021 Census reported a 25 per cent increase in the Indigenous population in the five years since the previous census.
This compares with Census figures showing the total Australian population increased by 8.6 per cent between 2016 and 2021.
Either Aborigines are pumping out litters of babies at a rate to make a puppy-farm blush, or something else is going on.
In a phenomenon University of Sydney post-graduate student and Wiradjuri woman Suzanne Ingram described as “race-shifting”, people, who for the bulk of their lives have identified as non-Indigenous Australians, are now “box-ticking” ‘Indigenous’ as their identity in the Census, at workplaces, within cultural institutions and in educational settings, to name just a few.
Unlike, say, Native American tribes, Australia’s race industry requires not a shred of hard evidence of descent for claims of ‘indigenous’ status.
Critiquing the validity of the beyond birth rate increase in the First Nations population, Ms Ingram argued, if the newly identified group were to be tested against the three-point criteria, from the 812,728 people who self-identified as Indigenous, “there has been data to suggest that [the population] should actually be about 300,000 less.”
Especially here in Tasmania, where, despite the well-documented historic collapse of the indigenous population in the face of mass migration, the state somehow records twice as many ‘Aborigines’ per head of population as the rest of Australia.
But I can’t end this post without including this howler from an SBS story about fake Aborigines.
University of Melbourne Professor, Bruce Pascoe, the award-winning author of Dark Emu, agreed this is a serious issue, telling Insight special host Karla Grant that he has witnessed the First Nations community change dramatically since he began identifying as a Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian man decades ago.
“I think we are in dangerous times, with that explosion of people identifying.”
Mr Pascoe now holds the opinion that some who identified later in life “need to pull their heads in a bit.”
Bruce Pascoe never claimed to be Aboriginal until his 40s. At least two of the groups he ‘identifies’ with have rejected his claims.
Perhaps he should take his own advice?
