Will his latest nonsense finally get Bruce Pascoe sacked as Melbourne University’s Professor of ‘Indigenous Agriculture’?

Facts have never been Bruce Pascoe’s strong suit and he has rowed his boat out even further with his latest book, claiming Aborigines were here for 100,000 years.

Fake Aboriginal Bruce Pascoe has already proved there’s almost no lie or fantasy about Aboriginal history – or his own – that’s too much for our politicians, academics, writers festivals and the ABC to swallow.

Yet he’ll now test their credulity to breaking point with a new book about his farm: Black Duck: A Year at Yumburra.

Pascoe writes that Aboriginals ran this country “perfectly for 100,000 years” – yes, 100,000 years – and to end their disadvantage we must “develop a truly Australian cuisine based on the old food production techniques”, and pay them for the produce.

Indeed, Pascoe boasts, “we actually perform these miracles” on his farm near Mallacoota.

Bruce Pascoe writes that Aborigines ran this country ‘perfectly for 100,000 years’.

As if. Let this book be the final test of our cultural elite that has promoted and protected Pascoe for so long, selling him as an Aboriginal when genealogical records show all his ancestors are of British descent, and showering him with praise and prizes for his fake history, Dark Emu, in which he falsely claims pre-colonial Aboriginals were really farmers living in houses in towns of 1000 people.

But let’s look at how Pascoe has rowed his boat out even further with this latest book, starting with his claim that Aboriginals were here for 100,000 years.

Pardon? Activists today boast Aboriginals were actually here for 65,000 years, taking strange pride in claiming this is the “oldest continuous culture on earth”, as if the rest of the world were losers for having seen the rise of great empires – the Egyptian, Chinese, Athenian, Roman, British – and been changed by all they discovered and built.

Hear it from the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese: “The historic fact that Australia’s story is 65,000 years old remains a source of national pride and remains a fact.”

Pascoe’s new book about his farm.

Pascoe has been showered with praise and prizes for his fake history.

Well, actually, even 65,000 years of Aboriginal settlement isn’t really a “fact”.

It was long thought Aboriginals were here for no more than 45,000 years, until Professor Chris Clarkson and others claimed in 2017 to have found a hearth at Madjedbebe, in the Northern Territory, that showed the occupation of Australia by “modern humans out of Africa … began around 65,000 years ago”.

Pardon? Two papers since, by Professor Emeritus Jim Allen and by nine scientists led by Distinguished Professor Emeritus James O’Connell, say they don’t believe it.

Why was this 65,000-year date confirmed only by testing the sand grains around the hearth, and not the carbon residue? Why does no other site of Aboriginal occupation come within 15,000 years of this new date?

Hadn’t the hearth simply been settled deeper in very sandy soil, deeper into the older levels, by the heavy rainfall of tens of thousands of years of wet seasons, plus the burrowing of the termites so common there?

In fact, it’s generally accepted that human beings like us – and Aboriginals – with our telltale genes from interbreeding with Neanderthals spread across Eurasia from Africa and Southwest Asia only about 50,000 to 55,000 years ago.

A group of 18 Aboriginal men even had their DNA tested with Family Tree DNA, and found their common ancestor lived 65,000 years ago, and not in Australia but probably still in the Horn of Africa.

Still, facts never were Pascoe’s strong suit. He sells dreams, and this time he dreams Aboriginals will finally thrive when the rest of us eat “truly Australian cuisine”, and “think nothing of eating … kangaroo grass bread”. He and his family already “perform these miracles on the farm”.

Some miracle. Even if you like the taste of kangaroo grass, it still costs a fortune because its yields are so low. One kilogram of wheat flour at Coles costs just $1.40, but one kilogram of kangaroo and spear grass flour from Pascoe’s farm is $360 – despite charities and taxpayers giving Pascoe more than $2m to help make it.

But watch. Will his latest nonsense finally get Pascoe sacked as Melbourne University’s Professor of “Indigenous Agriculture”? Will the ABC now disown its hero?

Pascoe is testing again our cultural elite’s commitment to telling the truth. I’m betting on another fail.

Originally published as Will his latest nonsense finally get Bruce Pascoe sacked as Melbourne University’s Professor of ‘Indigenous Agriculture’?