Andrew Bolt: Will ABC use taxpayers money to promote Bruce Pascoe’s fake history
So-called Aboriginal writer Bruce Pascoe’s fake history has been criticised by Australia’s greatest historian. Now the big question - will ABC go to air with a series that promotes Pascoe’s bogus claims, writes Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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Geoffrey Blainey, Australia’s greatest historian, is just as astonished as I am by the Bruce Pascoe scandal.
Why has the fake history of this “Aboriginal” writer been repeatedly promoted on the ABC and in schools, even winning a NSW Premier’s literary award?
Pascoe, whose genealogical records show he has no Aboriginal ancestors, is the author of the bestseller Dark Emu, and star of a two-part television series the ABC plans to run this year.
(Pascoe refuses to release evidence of any Aboriginal ancestry, and two Aboriginal groups deny his claim to be of their tribes.)
In his book and lectures, Pascoe claims Aborigines were not hunter-gathers at all, but farmers. Past historians allegedly covered up the truth.
He says Aborigines before European settlement in fact lived in “houses” with “pens” for animals, in “towns” of “no less than a thousand” people.
As I’ve written before, Pascoe, now a professor in the Aboriginal studies department of the University of Technology, Sydney, bases this on misquoted and invented citations from the writings of explorers like Thomas Mitchell and Charles Sturt, and on wildly misrepresented evidence.
Blainey, author of the superb Triumph of the Nomads, says there is actually “no evidence that there was ever a permanent town in pre-1788 Australia with a 1000 inhabitants who gained most of their food by farming”.
He adds: “No European explorer ever found such a town …
“I think I have read, in the last 50 years, every book written by an early European explorer of Australia. They do not support Pascoe in any way.”
Nor have archaeologists found ruins of Aboriginal towns.
What’s more, Blainey says recent research suggests Australia’s climate in most crop-growing areas was once too dry and erratic to support farmers. Ice-core samples suggest, for instance, we had a 39-year drought from 1174. How could farmers survive?
So why are many journalists so keen to promote Pascoe’s theory, and so blind to evidence that it’s nonsense?
Blainey suspects it’s driven by shame that Aborigines were seminomadic, even though “it was a very ingenious way of life”.
But there are two other important questions.
Why do facts count so little to so many journalists and academics?
And will the ABC still screen the series it commissioned to promote Pascoe’s claims; will it really use taxpayers’ money to push such fake history?