DEAR SATURDAY PAPER: MY REPLY TO YOUR RUDE PASCOE QUESTIONS

The Saturday Paper sent me a rude and hostile set of questions about my challenging of  "Aboriginal historian" Bruce Pascoe. I have sent it this response, with questions of my own. It includes fascinating extracts from Charles Sturt's account that Pascoe didn't include, and which challenge Pascoe's claim  that Aborigines were "prosperous" farmers.

The Saturday Paper sent me a rude and hostile set of questions about my challenging of  "Aboriginal historian" Bruce Pascoe. I have sent it this response, with questions of my own. It includes fascinating extracts from Charles Sturt's account that Pascoe didn't include, and which challenge dreamy claims that Aborigines were "prosperous".

Among your many have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife questions was one that I think does deserve a response, because it will test you.

It is this accusation:

Are you aware that, in another column, you have misquoted Mr Pascoe in attributing to Sturt the encounter with a village he estimated to number 1000 in population? On p16 of Dark Emu that is attributed correctly to a member of Mitchell's party which is cited correctly in Dark Emu. How did you get this wrong?

I didn’t.

As I noted in one of my columns, Pascoe’s misquotations extend beyond just Dark Emu, and I included examples from lectures and interviews:

Pascoe, particularly in his lectures and interviews, has embroidered all that. He’s claimed that Sturt’s men had in fact “eaten all their horses but one” (false) when they met “nearly 1000 people” (exaggerated), in a “town” (exaggerated) — a “little model community with timber and thatch houses” (invented).

In a blog post I linked to the specific source of that “1000” quote. It is this, where Pascoe indeed attributes to Sturt the encounter with a “village” estimated to number 1000 in population:

There were nearly 1000 people living there, in this little model community with timber and thatch houses, beautiful dwellings, which Sturt describes quite well...  They climb a sand dune and look down. Sturt can hardly see by this stage, but they’re accosted by 1000 Aboriginal people who go ‘wayeeeeee’ – yell out to them – ‘hey what are you doing?’ You know, in language, but basically ‘What are you doing you buggers?’

You will notice, by the way, other Pascoe inventions in this retelling – the “wayeeeeee“ quotation, the “timber and thatch houses”.

In Dark Emu there is also this claim – albeit not pertaining to this particular community, but to another on the Darling:

Sturt himself saw a prosperous town of 1,000 on the banks of the Darling

I have read through Sturt’s account of his expedition of the Darling, Cooper Creek and beyond in his Narrative of an Expedition into Central Australia. 

I cannot find a reference to any “prosperous town of 1000” on the banks of the Darling or anywhere else. Instead, I find references like these, suggesting much lower numbers:

From this period to the 9th there was a sameness in our progress up the Darling... On the 5th we passed a tribe of natives, in number about thirty-four.

I had observed for more than twenty miles below us that the immediate precincts of the [Darling] river were not so rich in soil... This tribe numbered forty-eight.

  Toonda left us on our arrival at this place, to go to his tribe at Cawndilla, but returned the day Mr. Poole left us, with the lubras and children belonging to it, and the natives now mustered round us to the number of sixty-six.

If I except the tribe upon Cooper’s Creek, on which they are numerous, the natives are but thinly scattered over the interior, as far as our range extended. The few families wandering over those gloomy regions may scarcely exceed one hundred souls.

Thus, in the space of less than five miles, we were introduced to four different tribes, whose collective numbers amounted to seventy-one. The huts of these natives were constructed of boughs...

And then, near Cooper Creek, this unprecedentedly large group of up to 400:

On gaining the summit were hailed with a deafening shout by 3 or 400 natives, who were assembled in the flat below. I do not know, that my desire to see the savage in his wild state, was ever more gratified than on this occasion, for I had never before come so suddenly upon so large a party.  

So, here’s what I’d like to know from you. When you wrongly thought I had misquoted Pascoe on this “village” of 1000, you demanded an answer of me. You sneered that I was an “industrious protector of the truth” and asked if I would amend my columns and admit to “factual errors”.

Since I have demonstrated that this error was in fact Pascoe’s, can you tell me if you will now write to Pascoe himself in a similarly sneering tone and demand corrections and admissions? If not, why not?

I also want to point out another implicit error in your own assumptions. You suggest I may have been dishonest in not mentioning that a David Lindsay – nearly 40 years after Sturt – found in Arnhem Land, on the other end of the continent, “small enclosures as if some small game had been yarded and kept alive”.

Are you aware that there is a full quote in Dark Emu (p. 116) attributed correctly to David Lindsay on his surveys of Arnhem Land in 1883 where he says he "came on the sight of a large native encampment, quite a quarter of a mile across. Framework of several large humpies, one having been 12ft high: small enclosures as if some small game had been yarded and kept alive... This camp must have contained quite 500 natives."

Did you miss this firsthand account or did you choose to leave it out?

This, you apparently assume, justifies Pascoe in inventing his claim that Sturt saw “animal holding pens” in a “town” near Cooper Creek.

On the face of it, of course, your defence is absurd. But your implicit error lies in accepting that what Lindsay saw was unmistakably an “animal holding pen”. In fact, Lindsay saw no animal in them, which is why he merely speculated that they were “small enclosures as if some small game had been yarded and kept alive”.

Maybe they were animal pens, who knows? Arnhem Land has, after all, more game than Cooper Creek that might at a stretch be kept in a pen, although it is difficult to imagine what animals might have been kept. Wallabies?

You similarly seem to suggest that Sturt once finding a native well of “unusual dimensions” – “22ft deep” – somewhere else excuses Pascoe for inventing a much more massive well at Cooper Creek:

Are you aware that there are frequent other mentions throughout the original explorer accounts and journals of wells. Of one, Sturt writes: "we arrived at a native well of unusual dimensions. It was about eight feet wide at the top and 22ft deep, and it was a work that must have taken the joint strength of a powerful tribe to perform."

You seem to think this excuses Pascoe for turning Sturt’s account of a “pool” in a “channel” that had the explorer express “surprise” at its “smallness” into what Pascoe calls a “piece of engineering” at Cooper Creek – “a well which I think was 70 foot deep”.

Are you serious?

You end with an insult, implying I am racist:

Why does the presence of an evidently sophisticated and well-adapted First Peoples on the continent prior to British arrival offend you so?

First, you assume what you should question: that Pascoe’s “sophisticated” farming economy actually existed, when countless credible historians describe instead a predominantly hunter-gatherer economy.

As for “well-adapted”, that is only true in part. Yes, Aborigines showed incredible survival skills in an often hostile environment. Geoffrey Blainey’s Triumph of the Nomads is excellent on this point, and as a boy in the Northern Territory I heard many such stories and saw several demonstrations.

But how well Aborigines thrived, well, let’s go back to Sturt’s account and bits that Pascoe left out in describing a continent of “thriving villages” – his witnessing of blindness, starvation, cruelty and evidence of child-killing:

… I am sorry to say I observed but little improvement in the fairer sex. They were the same half-starved unhappy looking creatures whose condition I have so often pitied elsewhere…

… not only amongst these tribes but with those of Williorara and Cawndilla, we observed that many had lost an eye by inflammation from the attacks of flies. I was really surprised that any of them could see, for most assuredly it is impossible to conceive anything more tormenting than those brutes are in every part of the interior.

To my surprise, in about an hour and a half after, seven natives were seen approaching the camp, with the slowness of a funeral procession… I made them sit under a tree; a group of seven of the most miserable human beings I ever saw. Poor emaciated creatures all of them…

I think that generally speaking the native women seldom have more than four children, or if they have, few above that number arrive at the age of puberty. There are, however, several reasons why the women are not more prolific; the principal of which is that they suckle their young for such a length of time, and so severe a task is it with them to rear their offspring that the child is frequently destroyed at its birth; and however revolting to us such a custom may be, it is now too notorious a fact to be disputed….

Both the old man and the women wanted the two front teeth of the upper jaw, and as the former had worn his down almost to a level with his gums like an old horse, he looked sadly disfigured.

The group consisted of a very old blind man, led by a younger one, and five women... It is impossible to say how old the man was, but his hair was white as snow, and he had one foot in the grave…

Both Mr. Browne and myself observed a great disparity of numbers in the male and female children, there being an excess of the latter of nearly two to one, and in some instances of a still greater disproportion…

But with the women no improvement was to be seen. Thin, half-starved and emaciated they were still made to bear the burden of the work, and while the men were lounging about their fires, and were laughing and talking, the women were ceaselessly hammering and pounding to prepare that meat, of which, from their appearance, so small a proportion fell to their share. As regards the treatment of their women, however, I think I have observed that they are subjected to harsher treatment when they are members of a large tribe than when fewer are congregated together…

When the old man first came to us, we fed him on mutton, but one of the men happening to shoot a crow, he shewed such a decided preference for it, that he afterwards lived almost exclusively upon them. He was, as I have stated, when he first came to us a thin and emaciated being…

So, to answer your insult: I am not “offended” by the thought of Aborigines being “well-adapted” or “sophisticated”. How on earth would that be offensive to me? I in fact am determined to change policies and thinking that hold back so many Aboriginal communities that are now in poverty.

I am simply interested in the truth, and opposed to falsehoods. Aren’t you? If I’m “offended” by anything it is frauds.

Or let me put this in the same sneering (again) tone that you used: What is it about Aborigines being hunter-gatherers that so offends you? Where is the shame in how so many Aborigines lived, which makes you feel compelled to imagine them instead as just like good old white farmers – only black? Isn’t this refusal to accept the truth a little, er, racist?

Finally, back to my earlier challenge to you.

In this specific settlement near Cooper Creek that Sturt described, and which I discuss, Pascoe has at various times said there was a well 70 feet deep, hundreds of mills, the planting of seeds, the most delicious bread Sturt ever tasted, up to 1000 people, thatched houses, a town, an estate, people who went to bed at 10, animal holding pens, storage rooms and a tribe that was soon murdered. He also said Sturt reached this “model” community with one remaining horse, the others having been eaten.

Can you provide me with evidence for any of the above claims made by Pascoe, pertaining to this great “town” on the fringe of desert near Cooper Creek?

Can you also tell me the name of Bruce’s Aboriginal ancestor – the one he’s often said was his mother’s great-grandmother – given that all the records suggest his ancestors were entirely of British descent?

Members of at least two of his professed tribes wish to know, as they are about to announce.

If you cannot answer the above, can you tell me why you are criticising me and not Bruce Pascoe, the “Aboriginal historian”?

Deadline: 2pm.