Andrew Bolt: Anti-white ABC film a grim sign of our intellectual decay
A film based on Bruce Pascoe’s award-winning Dark Emu book is the kind of anti-white story that the woke now loves. But has the Left fact-checked extraordinary claims by the “Aboriginal historian”, asks Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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Truth is now what activists say it is. Proof: the ABC will next year screen a two-part “history” by “Aboriginal writer” Bruce Pascoe.
Based on Pascoe’s prize-winning book Dark Emu, the film will make an extraordinary claim.
No, Aborigines weren’t primitive hunter-gatherers, but sophisticated farmers with an “agricultural industry” — tilled fields, big villages and huge overhead granaries. That is, until it was destroyed by wicked men as white as, er, Pascoe’s face.
This is the kind of anti-white story that the woke now loves, and so Pascoe was given the NSW Premier’s Prize for Book of the Year and another for best indigenous writer. The Australia Council gave him a lifetime achievement award.
He’s even been made a professor in the indigenous faculty of the University of Technology Sydney.
But wait. Pascoe has repeatedly said he’s Aboriginal, although he conceded it’s “only a remote Aboriginal heritage, going back to my mother’s grandmother”.
Still, he loves being Aboriginal: “It does my soul good to go back and talk words that my great-grandmother would have spoken.”
So who is this great-grandmother? I asked Pascoe on to my TV show to discuss this. He said he wouldn’t, despite telling journalists he’d love a “yarn” with me.
I wrote twice more to Pascoe asking him to name his great-grandmother or any other Aboriginal ancestor. He didn’t.
But about 20 amateur researchers, led by scientist Bruce Karge and publishing on dark-emu-exposed.org, have fact-checked Dark Emu. They’ve also checked Pascoe himself, examining birth certificates, death notices, graveyard records and newspapers.
How odd: they cannot find a single Pascoe ancestor who is Aboriginal. All are descended from English immigrants.
For instance, Pascoe’s great-grandmothers on his mother’s side were both English, and only one — Sarah Matthews — lived in Australia.
On his father’s side, all great-great-grandparents were born in England.
Sure, maybe there’s a mistake, or an illegitimate birth somewhere. If so, Pascoe isn’t telling.
Equally dubious is the evidence for Pascoe’s claim that Aborigines were actually farmers.
For example, Pascoe claimed that explorer Thomas Mitchell wrote that he once “rode through nine miles of stooked grain” — sheaves of grain cut and heaped on end to dry.
In fact, Mitchell, in his 1848 Journal of an Expedition Into the Interior of Tropical Australia, wrote that he’d “counted nine miles along the river, in which we rode through this grass only, reaching to our saddle-girths”, and that “dry heaps of this grass, that had been pulled expressly for the purpose of gathering the seed, lay along our path for many miles”.
The grassland is what reached for nine miles. The “stooks” were just heaps of grass along the route, as you’d expect from hunter-gatherers.
Pascoe misquoted his source. I asked him about that, too, but got no response.
Pascoe has also told of huge seed granaries built by Northern Territory Aborigines and looted by an explorer’s brother.
“Ernest Giles’ brother … came across huge stores of what he discovered was grain stored up in platforms, three metres off the ground. Each of those stores weighed a ton …
“It didn’t stop him stealing it, because, once again, he was an explorer. He was lost and he was angry.”
In fact, it wasn’t Ernest Giles’ brother, but an unrelated Giles, Christopher, who found a single wooden platform near the Finke River while preparing for the telegraph line.
Giles wrote: “This was a rude platform built in a tree, about 7 or 8 feet [2.44m, not 3] from the ground.”
On it, Giles found bags made from clothes Aborigines had stolen from his men: “They contained different kinds of grain … [in] the legs of our trousers and the sleeves of our shirts, tied up at each end.”
That would not add up to a ton, and Giles’ men didn’t steal it: “I would not allow this, nor permit anything to be removed.”
Again and again, Pascoe misquotes sources in ways that boost his claims.
He claims Aborigines had elaborate dams and irrigation systems, and writes that Ernest Giles in 1875 “found a dam near Ooldea, South Australia” that had “a bank 1.5 metres high” with “an overflow channel”.
But Giles’ 1872-1876 journals describe Ooldea having only a “soak” — “a shallow native well” which they “had to dig out” to find water at “a depth of between three and four feet”.
This is the “Aboriginal historian” and “history” the ABC will next year present as authoritative.
What a grim sign of our intellectual decay.