BRUCE PASCOE A YUIN MAN? YUIN PEOPLE SURPRISED

The ABC is promoting "Aboriginal historian" Bruce Pascoe and his wild claims that Aborigines were actually farmers living in towns. Pascoe says he's a Yuin man, but this surprises Yuin people like the family of lawyer Josephine Cashman. UPDATE: the 1988 review that suggested Pascoe would be a better writer if he were Aboriginal.

The ABC is promoting "Aboriginal historian" Bruce Pascoe and his wild claims that Aborigines were actually farmers living in towns.   Pascoe says he's a Yuin man, but this puzzles Yuin people like the family of Josephine Cashman.

Bruce Pascoe is not Aboriginal. My son is Yuin and his father doesn't know who is. 0ur communities find this offensive. Shame! #darkemuhttps://t.co/MJ0pOyfa5p

— Josephine Cashman (@Josieamycashman) November 23, 2019

From the site of Pascoe's publisher:

Bruce Pascoe is a writer of Tasmanian, Bunurong and Yuin descent. 

From the National Library of Australia:

Bruce Pascoe is Bunurong/Tasmanian Yuin man 

From a profile in The Australian:

Pascoe says he found indigenous ancestors on both sides of his family, tracing them to Tasmania, to the Bunurong people of Victoria and the Yuin of southern NSW.

I don't state as fact that Pascoe is not Aboriginal. What I say is that genealogical records suggest every one of his ancestors is English or of English descent, and Pascoe refuses to tell me which one is not. A mistake might have been made, but I can't find it.

 Pascoe won the NSW Premiers award for best indigenous writers in 2016. Wonder what the people he beat think of this.

UPDATE

From a profile on Pascoe  in The Australian this year:

By the time he was 40, he had fully identified as Koori.

That means 1987. But in 1988 came a review in the Canberra Times of a Pascoe book that seems significant.

A researcher for dark-emu-exposed.org  writes:

[I] have spent a little time looking at old newspaper articles over past few hours. I was trying to see if I could find a date when Pascoe started claiming indigenous ancestry. Looking at articles up to the mid 1990s there appear no claims of indigenous ancestry....

Yet looking at a 1988 review for his book FOX in the Canberra Times it clearly states he has a white background...

"One is conscious that the ideas, fears and longings of Fox are, as here, described for him, from the outside, and with an overlay of a white author's interpretation. Pascoe is, after all, imagining the psyche of an Aboriginal person; and it is not possible for him to convey all that the concept of 'my people' would mean to, say, Colin Johnson or Sally Morgan. He writes as a humane, informed liberal, but as a white man as well." 

Hmm. If only Pascoe had been Aboriginal. He'd be critic-proof.

Ironic, by the way, that the Canberra Times reviewer praised Colin Johnson and Sally Morgan for being Aboriginal writers with a right to talk of "my people".

In fact, Johnson, the much-praised author of the "first Aboriginal novel", Wild Cat Falling, turned out not to be Aboriginal at all.