Andrew Bolt: Bruce Pascoe’s begging email should embarrass Melbourne Uni

Fake Aboriginal Bruce Pascoe wants more donations to save his Black Duck Foods business, in a move that should deeply embarrass the gullible Melbourne University.

Fake Aboriginal Bruce Pascoe sent followers a begging email two weeks ago that should deeply embarrass the gullible Melbourne University.

Pascoe wants more donations to save his Black Duck Foods business, which sells Aboriginal food grown on his tiny farm in Victoria’s far east.

“To be honest with you Black Duck Foods is currently living hand to mouth,” Pascoe writes.

“We need your help to keep going … Together we can re-centre Indigenous knowledges and agricultural practices at Australia’s heart to secure a strong, resilient and sustainable future.”

Let me say here that I don’t hate Pascoe, author the prize-winning bestseller Dark Emu, which falsely claims Aboriginals were originally farmers, raising crops and living in “houses” in “towns” of 1000 people.

He seems well-meaning, and I hope he keeps his farm. If you like him, please donate.

Indigenous author Bruce Pascoe is asking for donations to save his business. Picture: Andy Rogers

No, my fascination here is really with the many people of the Left – and institutions such as the ABC – who have insisted Pascoe really is Aboriginal and his history isn’t as fake, either.

It’s so telling that they so desperately want to believe what’s so clearly fake, just because it suits their anti-West and anti-colonial ideology. Never mind all the evidence that I and others have published, showing Pascoe’s genealogy is 100 per cent British, and his “history” has been debunked.

Most frightening is that even Melbourne University fell for it, and made Pascoe not just a professor, but one of its very exclusive Enterprise Professors. It even claimed he was a member of no fewer than three Aboriginal tribes, despite two of those tribes calling Pascoe a fake.

What’s more, it made him an Enterprise Professor of Indigenous Agriculture, despite overwhelming evidence that Aboriginals weren’t agriculturalists but hunter gatherers. It institutionalised Pascoe’s fake history, as if hunter gatherers were shamefully primitive.

Pascoe’s appointment gave him yet another platform for his quackery. Now he was preaching that we should grow and eat more Aboriginal food, like the flour made from native grasses from his farm, rather than the settlers’ wheat and beef.

“Why do we eat wheat? Because our grandfather did,” he scoffed.

Melbourne University made Dark Emu author Bruce Pascoe an Enterprise Professor of Indigenous Agriculture. Picture: Luke Bowden

But our Western agriculture “is highly destructive of soil health” and its “economies are largely mythical”.

Oops. Pascoe has now had to confront a tough truth: It’s “Aboriginal agriculture” that has mythical economies. The real reason we grow wheat rather than native seeds for food is that we’d starve if we didn’t.

See, Pascoe just can’t make Aboriginal food pay. The yields of native grasses are just far too low.

A Sydney University study last year worked out that average wheat yields in northwest NSW ranged from 3 to 4 tonnes per hectare, but native grasses produced just 0.1 and 0.5 tonnes a hectare.

I wonder if Pascoe teaches that at Melbourne University.

You can’t feed millions of people with “Aboriginal crops” that produce so little energy. Nor can you sell it at prices most people can afford, as Pascoe has shown.

He’s had little to sell in his online shop for many months, but once was selling a kilogram of his kangaroo and spear grass flour for $360, and dancing grass flour for $220. In contrast, Coles sells a kilogram of wheat flour for just $1.40.

Pascoe’s business is in strife. Picture: Andy Rogers

The poor, including poor Aborigines, could never afford the Aboriginal food Pascoe grows. It’s only Western ways that lets them eat well – another benefit of the colonialism we’re taught is so evil.

That’s why Pascoe’s business is in strife. Tony Thomas, a finance writer and columnist at Quadrant Online, checked with the Charities Commission and found Black Duck Foods raised $2.2 million from donations and taxpayer-funded grants up to June 2023, but spent most of it on Pascoe’s farm.

That included wages for its three to five Aboriginal workers, a plump $149,000 rent to Pascoe for use of his farm and $61,000 in fees to accountants and lawyers.

After all that, the Charities Commission records say sales from Black Duck Foods were just $38,000.

Enough. Melbourne University should finally show it still had academic standards.

Four years ago it announced it was hiring this “Indigenous author” to “build knowledge and understanding of Indigenous agriculture”.

But Pascoe is not “Indigenous” and can’t make this so-called “Indigenous agriculture” pay, even with handouts, mass publicity and admiring videos sent to schools by the ABC, in a project titled: “Bruce Pascoe: Aboriginal Agriculture, Technology and Ingenuity:

Shouldn’t Melbourne University now face facts and stand for truth, reason and Western civilisation, the great gift to humanity, and sack Pascoe?