ANOTHER JOURNALIST IGNORES THE FACTS TO PUFF BRUCE PASCOE

Yet another journalist - this time Kylie Northover of the Sydney Morning Herald - does a gushing interview with Bruce Pascoe without asking him the questions she knows have been asked but won't spell out. Where's the evidence that he's Aboriginal? Where's the evidence for his absurd claim that Aborigines were farmers? Speaking of which...

It never ceases to astonish me.  Yet another journalist - this time  Kylie Northover of the Sydney Morning Herald - does a gushing interview with Bruce Pascoe without once asking him the questions she knows have been asked but which she refuses to spell out.

 

Where's the evidence that this white man is Aboriginal, as he claims? Where's the evidence for his absurd claim that Aborigines were settled farmers, living in "houses"in "towns of "1000 people"?  

This is Northover's only hint that Pascoe has questions to answer - and note that she not only refuses to ask those questions but refuses to say what they are:

He might not look professorial but after 2014’s Dark Emu, which drew on historical sources to show Aboriginal people have for thousands of years engaged in complex agricultural life, he was embraced by the mainstream, ushering in a new era of thinking about First Australians.

A former schoolteacher, he still talks at schools, and in 2019 he released Young Dark Emu, a children’s version of the book, which comes with teaching resources.

While some still see Dark Emu as controversial (perhaps none so much as NewsCorp’s Andrew Bolt), the book is now in its 40th reprint.

What is the reason for this wilful avoidance of the truth? 

Fear of somehow seeming racist by saying a white man isn't black? Fear of upsetting a useful myth? A total post-modernist indifference to facts? 

I assume that for some journalists, there is also a desperate desire not to admit that the awful Andrew Bolt was right.  Even a pleasure in denying it, as if I will somehow be outraged and frustrated at being robbed of a prize.

Let me assure them that the opposite is true. The  mass denial of the truth simply confirms my thesis that truth is dead in journalism, and white guilt rampant. 

By the way, over my break I read a fascinating book from 1819, A Statistical, Historical, and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and Its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land, by the  Australian explorer, journalist and politician William Wentworth.

Unlike Pascoe, Wentworth was no fantasist. Unlike Pascoe, Wentworth, who was part of  the expedition which found a route across the Blue Mountains, saw Aboriginal encampments soon after white settlement -and in some cases before colonialists had settled nearby. 

And unlike Pascoe, Wentworth saw - or invented - no evidence at all that Aborigines were the town-living farmers of Pascoe's vivid imagination.

Here is what Wentworth wrote in his 1819 book:

The aborigines of this country ... have neither houses nor clothing; they are entirely unacquainted with the arts of agriculture; and even the arms which the several tribes have, to protect themselves from the aggressions of their neighbours, and the hunting and fishing implements with which they administer to their support, are of the rudest contrivance and workmanship. 

Try to square that with Pascoe's romantic reinvention of Aborigines as a kind of English yeomen, peacefully tilling their fields and living in "towns". As the gullible Rick Morton of The Saturday Paper put it in his error-riddled defence of Pascoe:

Pascoe... takes the European ideal of farming and architecture, and thoroughly white notions of success, and applies them... to Indigenous Australians.

Pascoe's work, then, is deeply political and polemical. It is propaganda, not history.

But there is something very racist about the Left's embrace of this spectacular reinvention. It's as if many white Leftists think Aborigines deserve more sympathy if they are imagined as more like white settlers than what they actually were - hunter gatherers.

In fact, these whites would rather believe that an Aborigine is just like the white Pascoe, and feel rather threatened if he isn't.