Andrew Bolt: The Voice will merely serve to worsen giant fakery

Gary Johns has copped it for calling for Aboriginality blood tests for welfare payments — but fauxborigines will just increase with a Voice in our constitution.

Aren’t you sick of the angry yammer about the Voice? So let me tell some jokes about it instead.

I’m not just doing this for the laughs. See, I can’t believe there are still people demanding Gary Johns resign.

Yes, they insist the former federal Labor minister quit as a leader of the No campaign for saying people claiming special benefits for Aborigines should have blood tests to show they really are Aboriginal.

Boy, Johns has copped the full bucket. He’s “racist”, “offensive”, “odious”, “appalling” and trying to repeat what Nazis “did to the Jews”.

But what I haven’t heard from his critics is a better idea to tackle a huge problem that’s already given us a comic gallery of rogues and grifters, and will get worse with a Voice in our constitution that’s meant to represent only Aborigines.

The problem is this: Activists such as Suzanne Ingram, of the NSW Aboriginal Housing Office, claim up to 300,000 of the 810,000 Australians saying they’re Aboriginal are fakes. Fauxborigines.

Activists such as Suzanne Ingram, of the NSW Aboriginal Housing Office, claim up to 300,000 of the 810,000 Australians saying they’re Aboriginal are fakes. Picture: Britta Campion

The funniest thing about them is that the people they fool most are our supposedly intellectual class – academics, writers, artists, journalists and educators.

Take Melbourne University, which actually appointed Bruce Pascoe as a professor of “Indigenous Agriculture” and hailed him as an Aborigine, even though genealogical records show he’s 100 per cent of English descent.

It even has a ludicrous page on its website advertising the Roberta Sykes Scholarship, for students identifying as Aboriginal.

It describes Sykes as “the first Indigenous Australian to graduate from an American university”, and stars “Aunty” Kerrie Doyle, Professor of Indigenous Health at Western Sydney University, enthusing how this scholarship “allowed me to attend Oxford University”. The joke: neither woman is Aboriginal. Not according to genealogical records.

Sykes, who co-founded the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, had European and African-American ancestry.

Doyle claims her own Aboriginality from a man who was actually her stepfather and wasn’t Aboriginal anyway. Her “Winninninni” tribe is unknown to textbooks.

If I’m wrong, Doyle refuses to tell me how. Same with her university, and such eyes-wide-shut gullibility has been going on for decades.

If you were in school in the 1970s or ’80s, you may have studied Wild Cat Falling, hailed as the first novel by an Aborigine.

Author Bruce Pascoe calls himself Aboriginal and reviewers adore him. Picture: Lillian Watkins

The author, Colin Johnson, later called himself Mudrooroo Narogin, and our professional intellectuals fell at his feet. Johnson was appointed to universities and the Australia Council. But finally his sister and Aboriginal groups blew the whistle. Johnson wasn’t Aboriginal.

No, he wasn’t of the “Stolen Generation”, either. Never mind!

In 1978, along came another Aboriginal writer – B. Wongar, whose book, The Track to Bralgu, was hailed by novelist Tom Keneally as the voice of authentic Aboriginality.

Sadly, B. Wongar turned out to be white Serbian immigrant Srreten Bozic.

Try again. In 1995, the arts world got their first female Aboriginal novelist, Wanda Koolmatrie, author of My Own Sweet Time. But hoaxed again. Koolmatrie turned out to be a white male taxi driver, Leo Carmen.

Still, in between, in 1988, appeared another book – and the start of something massive. This was Fox, about a man’s search for his Aboriginality, by a budding writer called Bruce Pascoe. It didn’t start well. A reviewer in the Canberra Times complained Pascoe “is, after all, imagining the psyche of an Aboriginal person”, but couldn’t really succeed as “a white man”.

Easily fixed. Before long, Pascoe was calling himself Aboriginal, and reviewers have adored him ever since. The ABC promoted him. Universities hired him. Schools taught him.

That’s how easy it is to fool our supposed best and brightest.

But, down the food chain, there’s another feeding frenzy, and this, too, has been going on for decade after decade. Take Allen Appo, from Bundaberg. For 30 years he claimed he was Aboriginal, and 100 of his relatives soon did the same. It was worth millions to them. Some got Abstudy grants, meant for Aboriginal students. Others got discounted home loans, business loans, Aboriginal legal aid, jobs and university positions.

But then fishery officials caught Allen Appo with undersized crabs.

He protested: Fishery laws didn’t apply to Aborigines like him! But Queensland’s Department of Primary Industries checked and – goodness me – Appo was actually Sri Lankan.

That was in 2000, but who dares check today? Certainly not our universities. And so this gigantic fakery continues, with Pascoe still hired by Melbourne University.

Hmm. A blood test is sounding not quite so outrageous at all. Roll up your sleeve, Bruce.

Originally published as Andrew Bolt: The Voice will merely serve to worsen giant fakery