Andrew Bolt: Ken Wyatt is wrongly defending what he should denounce

Rather than defending Bruce Pascoe and playing the race card, Ken Wyatt needs to apologise for his role in pushing the greatest literary scandal in our history.

Ken Wyatt last week played the race card to defend fake “Aboriginal historian” Bruce Pascoe, and played it like a shifty man. How can he now stay as our federal Indigenous Affairs Minister?

Last week I called on Wyatt to apologise for his role in pushing the greatest literary scandal in our history.

In 2019, I’d produced overwhelming proof that Bruce Pascoe was white – there’s not one Aboriginal ancestor in his genealogical record – and had fabricated evidence for his false claims in his bestseller Dark Emu that Aborigines were “farmers” living in “houses” in “towns” of “1000 people”.

Wyatt back then defended what was clearly a hoax.

“If Bruce tells me he’s indigenous then I know that he’s indigenous,” he said, sounding like bait for every conman in his field. Worse, Wyatt was just as gullible about Pascoe’s book, insisting Pascoe had quoted sources that “would probably substantiate those points that he makes”. A simple check would have confirmed what I’d documented: Pascoe made up some of those sources or wildly misrepresented them.

But worst is that Wyatt, an influential minister in the Morrison government, urged that the plainly fake claims of this fake Aborigine be taught in schools – that they be “reflected in some of the teaching that occurs”. Which Dark Emu now is. But since Wyatt’s intervention, Pascoe has also been belatedly denounced by academics of the Left.

Ken Wyatt needs to apologise for his role in pushing the greatest literary scandal in our history. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

Even Melbourne University, which shamefully made Pascoe a Professor of Indigenous Agriculture, last week published a book by noted anthropologist Peter Sutton and archaeologist Keryn Walshe which debunked Dark Emu, saying it “distorts and exaggerates many points … and ignores large bodies of information that do not support the author’s opinions”.

Both authors demanded Dark Emu be withdrawn from schools. But Wyatt, asked to respond to my call for a public apology, just dug in deeper. It seems this is not a minister influenced by facts or a desire for the truth.

First, Wyatt suggested that Pascoe’s (false) claims to belong to three Aboriginal tribes – the Boonwurrung (or Bunerong), the Yuin and a Tasmanian tribe – were not our business: “Determining these connections is a matter for Mr Pascoe.”

Well, no. No one has a monopoly on deciding what’s true. That’s even more so when Pascoe’s claims to be Aboriginal have helped him to get jobs and prizes based in part on his supposed race: Two professorships, a NSW Premier’s Award for best book by an indigenous author, and a government grant for Black Duck Foods, founded by Pascoe, to supposedly “re-establish the traditional agricultural methods” of Aborigines.

Then Wyatt started to play the race card, first whingeing how sad he was that questions about “Mr Pascoe’s identity have played out publicly instead of being dealt with as they should have been – by the relevant communities”.

Is Wyatt really so ignorant?

Dark Emu author Bruce Pascoe. Picture: Luke Bowden

Again, it’s not just the business of Aborigines when a white man falsely claims to be white.

But Pascoe’s claim to be of the Boonwurrung people was indeed denied by the Boonwurrung Land and Sea Council. His claim to be Tasmanian Aboriginal was denied by the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania.

Aborigines did deny Pascoe was Aboriginal, but our Indigenous Affairs Minister chose instead to believe the white Bruce Pascoe.

But Wyatt last week played the race card like it was trump: “Media never question the ethnicity of any other Australian.”

What a goose. First, we’re actually questioning a white man here, not Aboriginal.

Second, has Wyatt never heard of Helen Demidenko? This supposed Ukrainian won Australia’s richest literary award with a book she said borrowed the wartime memories of her Ukrainian relatives. But then she was exposed as Helen Darville, with ancestry as English as Pascoe’s. Big scandal.

Third, people claiming to be Aborigines are more likely to be challenged as fakes for a simple reason: there’s more reason to fake it. No other ethnicity comes with so many legal, welfare, professional and moral privileges. In NSW, for instance, a woman with no known Aboriginal ancestry claiming to be of the “Winninninni” tribe, of which no record exists, won an Aboriginal scholarship, and then fame and jobs as an Aboriginal academic.

How can Wyatt defend what he should denounce? This is not just about defending truth. He now wants Australians to back a change in our constitution to give special rights to people claiming to be Aborigines, like Pascoe. How can we trust Wyatt when he says this will be good for us? That this, too, will not be abused?