Trashing the Murdoch brand, as Bruce Pascoe becomes our guru

Did the ABC take over Rupert Murdoch's News Corp when I was asleep? First we joined the great global warming scare campaign, backing a net-zero target with fake arguments. Now news.com.au is campaigning to change the date of Australia Day, running an article that rewrites history and treats the untruths of "Aboriginal" Bruce Pascoe as gospel.

Bruce Pascoe

Wild. I thought I worked for Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, but it seems the ABC took it over when I wasn't watching.  

First we got on board the great global warning scare campaign, backing a net-zero target with arguments that were false.

I tackled some of those falsehoods here:

Now our news.com.au is campaigning to change the date of Australia Day:

January 26 is not a day for celebration – that’s why news.com.au is campaigning to change the date of Australia Day, so we can celebrate the best country in the world, without leaving anyone behind.

One danger with such campaigns is that they are a threat to good journalism and debate. Journalists will feel pressure to follow the company line, not the evidence or their independent judgement. They are drafted into a collective view.

What's more, campaigns like this are also likely to   dissuade editors and sub-editors from correcting convenient untruths in stories filed by young reporters and true believers who are then too eager to push the company's pet cause.

Take this latest effort from the news.com.au youth editor, so keen to damn Australia Day and the first white settlers:

  When I was at school, we had an Indigenous section of our history lessons every year from Kindergarten. Each year we were taught the same thing, on repeat.

Even though I’d already begun to realise something was off, it wasn’t until I started a law degree at university that I realised just about everything I’d been taught was wrong, or at least grossly oversimplified.

Actually, I suspect someone her age was much more likely to go through an entire schooling being told white settlement was brutal and Aboriginal culture uniformly glorious, but I interrupt:

The very first subject of my ultimately doomed law career was on the history of Australian law — and the giant big fat legal lie that allowed Australia to be “settled” in the first place… If a land was unoccupied, then you could claim it for your own…

By inventing the Terra Nullius myth — that I was taught as truth in school — around what would become known as Australia, “settlers” found a legal loophole by simply … looking the other way and playing very, very dumb.

From a former law student, this is an astonishing misrepresentation of the doctrine of Terra Nullius. No one at all pretended this land was “unoccupied”, and Terra Nullius does not assume it, either. The doctrine refers instead to the concept of a people - nomadic hunter -gatherers, in this case - having no hallmarks of permanent habitation or cultivation of the land, and no form of  land ownership, or none recognisable to the British.

In New Zealand, in contrast, the Maori did have such things  – hence the Treaty of Waitangi that was negotiated between Britain and the tribes, who were willing sellers of sovereignty, in exchange for Britain's help in ending the slaughter of tribal wars.

But in Australia, the British believed, rightly or wrongly, there was no one with whom they could likewise negotiate meaningfully over the ownership of territory.  This is an important distinction.

But that howler in this piece is followed by an even worse. We’re told the colonialists were so blind that they not only pretended not to see Aborigines were here, but failed to see these Aborigines were farmers. And the authority this journalist cites for this bizarre claim is … Bruce Pascoe:

If you’ve never read Bruce Pascoe’s book Dark Emu, then please do it, immediately…

Despite the backlash that’s inevitable when white people are faced with the despicable parts of our own history, the book was extremely non judgmental — it simply presents clear evidence and asks fair questions.

That evidence was page after page of physical artefacts and journals (that you can individually research on their own by the way, you don’t even have to take Pascoe’s word for it) proving not only that the “nomad” story of Indigenous people that I’d been taught was hugely wrong, but that white explorers saw this contradictory evidence time after time. They even noted it down in their travel diaries, but with the next sentence would wilfully decide it must have been some other explorer passing through who randomly decided to build a village and complex irrigation systems, for some reason.

This is astonishing. This news.com.au writer has clearly heard there’s now some debate about Pascoe and the accuracy his sources, but shows not the slightest sign of having checked who’s telling the truth. She just implies you’d have to be a racist or denialist to doubt Pascoe’s tale and his “page after page” of evidence.

In fact, Pascoe cannot even tell the truth about his supposedly Aboriginal ancestry, so why assume he's any more factual in denying the vast evidence - including the  family lore and traditions of Aborigines themselves, some capatured on film - and insisting Aborigines were not hunter-gatherers but farmers?

What’s more, writers, scholar and researchers of both the Left and Right have checked Pascoe’s sources and concluded that his claim that Aborigines were "farmers", living in "houses" in “towns” of “1000 people” with “pens” for animals and “complex irrigation systems” is false, based on false, invented, misinterpreted or wildly exaggerated evidence. For instance, not one of the explorers Pascoe claims saw these great towns actually said any such thing.

See for yourself here, here, here, here, here and here.

How has  Pascoe  responded to this clear evidence that he is a fake Aborigine telling fake history? With not facts but abuse and obfuscation:

Yet now all this evidence exposing Pascoe – actual journalism – is ignored or dismissed as “the backlash that’s inevitable when white people are faced with the despicable parts of our own history”.  Lazy, lazy, lazy.

But it seems that  believing an untruth about wicked white colonialists – even absurd claims that they  refused to see there were Aborigines, and that those Aborigines were farmers in "villages" – is actually now a sign of journalistic virtue.

In fact, the crazier the untruth, the more virtuous it is to believe it, and the greater the sin to insist on the truth instead. Only racists would insist on evidence, right? Certainly no journalist.

Not now. Not in 2022.