Andrew Bolt: Melbourne University must own up to terrible mistake on Bruce Pascoe

Melbourne University’s failure to fire Bruce Pascoe, even after its own publishing arm printed a book that proved his theories were false, is cowardly.

MELBOURNE University made itself an international laughing stock by hiring fake Aborigine Bruce Pascoe as its Professor of “Indigenous Agriculture”.

Can this university sink any lower? Will it now hire Tim Flannery as its Professor of Martian Invasions? Louise Milligan as its Professor of Australian Witches?

Its decision to hire Pascoe last September as its expert in the bogus field of Aboriginal farming was already a scandal.

Its failure to now fire him after its own Melbourne University Press damned Pascoe shows something worse: a cowardly refusal to own up to an obvious and terrible mistake.

Even by last September, Melbourne University should have known Pascoe had not even told the truth about his supposed Aboriginality. Genealogical records showed all his ancestors were of English descent.

It should also have known Pascoe had told huge whoppers in his best-seller Dark Emu, claiming Aborigines had not been “mere” hunter-gatherers but “farmers” living in “houses” in “towns” of “1000 people”, noisy with the “whirring of hundreds of mills” grinding grain.

In fact, “Indigenous Agriculture” was a Pascoe fantasy, outside the gardens of the Melanesian people of the Torres Strait islands.

Dark Emu author Bruce Pascoe at the Ballawinne festival in Cygnet, Tasmania. Picture: LUKE BOWDEN

He’d made up or grossly exaggerated his evidence, as shown on the dark-emu-exposed.org website, in Peter O’Brien’s book Bitter Harvest, and by me in numerous columns.

But we were conservatives, and Pascoe was then a guru of the Left, an ABC darling and winner of the NSW Premier’s award for best book by an indigenous writer – a book even taught in schools.

So we were ignored, and Pascoe was made professor.

But the university cannot now ignore anthropologist Peter Sutton and archaeologist Keryn Walshe, who are of the Left and last month belatedly confirmed – in a book published by the university’s own printing arm – Pascoe’s theory of Aboriginal agriculture was false.

They added even more astonishing examples of Pascoe’s untruths. My favourite is where they ask why – if Aborigines were farmers – there’s no word in Aboriginal languages for things farmers do, like sow, plant or harvest.

They say Pascoe’s only attempt to show there were such words was to claim Lake Killalpaninna meant “harvest grass”. In fact, it means “in the vagina”, from a Dreaming story.

So why is Pascoe still at Melbourne University? Why is he a professor in a fake discipline in which he’s made so many fake claims?