Andrew Bolt: ABC pulls every punch on Dark Emu literary hoax

The ABC’s film on the greatest literary fake we’ve ever known at least served to explain why so many people are so desperate to believe Bruce Pascoe and his made-up history.

The ABC on Tuesday finally came clean about Bruce Pascoe, the fake Aborigine behind our biggest literary hoax.

No, the film it screened, The Dark Emu Story, didn’t actually admit Pascoe isn’t Aboriginal, or show his family tree – 100 per cent from England.

It also refused to detail how Pascoe invented “evidence” for his massive best-seller, Dark Emu, to falsely claim Aborigines weren’t “mere” hunter gatherers, but farmers, living in “houses” and “towns” of about 1000 people.

But accidentally or not, this taxpayer-funded film, backed by Film Australia, did do us one great favour.

It explained why so many people are so desperate to believe Pascoe and his made-up history.

It’s the shame. Too many Pascoe fans seem embarrassed and ashamed that Aborigines were so technologically backward when whites first arrived.

Here are people supposedly here for 65,000 years, long before the last Neanderthal disappeared, yet in all that time did not invent even the wheel, or a written language.

But Pascoe rescued them.

He denied pre-colonial Aborigines were “mere hunter-gatherers”, as if that were shameful.

He absurdly insisted they were “farmers” instead, in big towns. Just like white people!

The Dark Emu Story ran with more of the same. They were the first astronomers, claimed one Aboriginal talking head.

Bruce Pascoe, authoer of The Dark Emu Story.

Another, a traditional owner, enthused: “For years people were saying Aborigines were only hunters and gatherers, right?”

He pointed at a very rare fish trap found in Brewarrina – lines of rocks in a small river: “Our people designed the fish traps which makes them architects, they built the fish traps which makes them builders … Genius engineering!”

Another activist added: “I would describe the fish traps as the oldest human-made structure in the world. Older than the Egyptian pyramids, older than Stonehenge.”

Later we were shown a few tangled branches, forming a shallow arch, and were told this was “the oldest standing house in Australia”.

There is desperation here to believe Aborigines were “better” or more “sophisticated” than “just” hunter-gatherers, a desperation Pascoe exploited. The Dark Emu Story, made by the Aboriginal-led Blackfella Films, showed that brilliantly. Here are some people testifying to Pascoe’s appeal to the ashamed.

Keryn Walshe, archaeologist and Pascoe critic, explained: “We want Aborigines to be agriculturalists, as if there is this need to make them into something we understand, recognise.”

Professor Emeritus Tom Griffiths, a Pascoe sympathiser agreed: “White Australians might think Aboriginal people seem to be like us. They had agriculture, they had farms, they had fish traps (White people) can imagine that and … identify with them.’’

Aboriginal activists in the film were also grateful Pascoe made tribal Aborigines look less like “savages”, as if they had to be farmers to qualify.

Marcia Langton, the Voice architect, claimed the success of Dark Emu was to “shift the racist paradigm in Australia from (Aborigines as) savage to fully-fledged human being”.

Marcia Langton labelled critics of Pascoe as “racists” and “proto-fascists”. Picture: Martin Ollman

Pascoe himself said he wanted “Aboriginal kids to know these things to have more pride in the old ancestors”, as if they couldn’t have pride in hunter gatherers, however ingenious.

Maybe that’s why The Dark Emu Story tried hard to keep the Pascoe myth alive.

Back in 2019, Screen Australia announced it would actually finance this project – a series, originally – to promote Pascoe’s theories: “It’s a chance to challenge the myth of pre-colonial Indigenous Australians being just hunter gatherers.”

“Just”. That word again.

But in the four years since, the evidence that Pascoe isn’t Aboriginal and his book isn’t true become too overwhelming to ignore.

The series was cut to just one film, Pascoe was dropped as a co-writer, and the allegations against him were – in fairness – mentioned.

But every punch was pulled.

Pascoe wasn’t asked for evidence for his most ludicrous claims, or asked, for instance, why he’d used false citations from diaries of early explorers such as Charles Sturt.

True, the film shows Pascoe confronted by anthropologist Peter Sutton, co-author of a book destroying Pascoe’s theory, but the heavily edited footage of their debate omitted any discussion of any example of Pascoe’s fakery.

The closest we got to seeing Pascoe’s technique involved him fantasising rather than fabricating.

The film shows him taking a single colonial drawing of Aboriginal women digging for yams as proof they also planted them as farmers.

Meanwhile, the film had Marcia Langton smearing Pascoe critics – notably me and Sutton, of the Left – as “racists” and “proto-fascists”, without right of reply.

Your ABC, screening such defamation, to defend the greatest literary fake we’ve ever known.