Andrew Bolt: Dark Emu beer only confirms Bruce Pascoe’s fraud act

Why has Bruce Pascoe used Aboriginal religion to flog alcohol — a product that has devastated many Aboriginal lives?

Professor Bruce Pascoe reckoned a beer could make me think he’s not really a fake Aborigine, and he finally has the holy brew for that mighty job.

The Dark Emu author wrote in 2012 that I’d “pilloried” him for “deciding to be black” but he could straighten me out.

“I could have a yarn with Bolt over a beer,” said Pascoe, “except he doesn’t drink beer, I’m told, just good red wine”.

Actually, I had a beer with my T-bone just last night. Yet Pascoe still refuses to yarn with me about the fake stories he’s told about himself and our history.

But no excuses now. Pascoe at last has his magic beer to convince me he really is linked – as he’s claimed – to seven Aboriginal tribes in five states, even though genealogical records show all his ancestors are of English descent.

Bruce Pascoe with Sailors Grave brewer Chris ant the Dark Emu beer. Picture: Sailors Grave

Who knows, if I drank enough of his new Dark Emu Dark Lager I might even believe Pascoe’s baloney in his bestseller book that Aborigines were not “mere” hunter-gatherers but “farmers” living in “houses” in “towns” of “1000 people” – absurd claims long discredited by conservatives (me, author Peter O’Brien, Jacinta Price) and now by the Left (academics Peter Sutton, Keryn Walshe, Ian Keen, Victoria Grieve-Williams).

But bad news for Bruce. This Dark Emu beer – made with native grains from his taxpayer-assisted farm project – only confirms to me he’s a fraud who symbolises Australia’s cultural disintegration.

This beer Pascoe has endorsed comes in a can that uses Aboriginal religion – the Dreamtime story of Baiame, the giant creator emu – to flog alcohol. No wonder members of the Yuin tribe to which Pascoe claims to belong are outraged by the impiety.

The rest of us should be outraged that Aboriginal religion is used to sell a product that has devastated many Aboriginal lives.

But outrage? What outrage?

The move has outraged members of the Yuin community. Picture: Sailors Grave

The beer was brewed with native grains from Pascoe’s farm.

What appalls me is not Pascoe himself. He’s just a fantasist. No, it’s the unquestioning support he’s got from politicians, universities, judges, the ABC, journalists and philanthropic law firms – all supposedly in the truth business.

Yet anyone who loved truth would realise after just an hour of checking that Pascoe regularly tells untruths, even about his racial identity.

For instance, the ABC promotes his claims to be from a “Bunerong (or Boonwurrung), Tasmanian and Yuin man”, even when this is denied by the Boonwurrung Land and Sea Council, Tasmania’s Aboriginal Land Council and the Yuin-led Aboriginal Land Council of Eden.

The fakery is so obvious.

Pascoe used to tell how his mother’s grandmother Sarah Matthews was born in Dudley, South Gippsland, and “may have spent time at Cummererugunja and Ebenezer Mission” before “her daughter was taken from her as an infant” – the stolen generations, of course – and she chose to “become white, to merge with the master class”, even though she for some unexplained reason spoke the Wathaurong language of a tribe near Colac.

Only years later did Pascoe confirm what birth records say – Matthews was born not in Dudley, Victoria, but Dudley, England. Pascoe had invented a whole story from a fake assumption – just as he did in Dark Emu, inventing Aboriginal farmers from faked evidence from explorers.

Dark Emu author Bruce Pascoe. Picture: Luke Bowden

But it was too late for Pascoe to stop calling himself Aboriginal, or for the organisations that made him a messiah to stop, too.

Even today, Pascoe’s books are taught in schools in NSW and Victoria, and Victoria’s Curriculum and Assessment Authority teaches students he really is Aboriginal through his (English) great-grandmother.

Even today, Melbourne University pays Pascoe as its Professor of Indigenous Agriculture – a fake discipline he invented – and the NSW Premier has still not asked Pascoe to return the Indigenous Writer’s Prize he won in 2016.

The ABC still promotes Pascoe in videos to schools, and the Judicial Commission of NSW, which trains judges, still has “Uncle Bruce Pascoe” listed to teach judges and lawyers in September about “the cultural perspectives and experiences of First Nations people”.

What’s more, Federal Court judge Mordecai Bromberg still hasn’t apologised for promoting this fake Aborigine and his fake history by interviewing this “Bunurong, Yuin and Tasmanian man” for the Judicial College of Victoria.

I’d enjoy that apology, because Bromberg in 2011 ruled I’d broken the Racial Discrimination Act by arguing that some people chose to identify as Aborigines when, in my opinion, they had other choices.

People such as Pascoe, whose falsehoods sound so sweet to the Left that they call them true. Because truth – objective truth – is dead, and political “truths” now rule instead.