OPINION
In an entry of his sadly discontinued Black Steam Train blog, Dallas Scott recounted the experience of appearing on SBS-TV alongside a panel of pale-faced ‘box ticker’ fauxborigines. I watched young, white identifiers roundly proclaim their connection to, and knowledge of, their ‘culture’, then turn around not five minutes later and abuse Aboriginal culture by speaking over an elder. Even worse, the city-based, glaringly white “Aboriginal activists” were clearly fixated on pet causes that had nothing to do with improving the welfare of Aboriginal children.
It was hard not to become enraged when bringing up the living conditions of some of the children on missions or in remote communities, only to have the subject changed time and time again to a pet passion topic.
These pale activists, Scott says, are a “liability… to the Aboriginal cause”. Not least because of their propensity to spout “bullshit”.
White. Liability. Bullshit.
He might have been talking about Bruce Pascoe.
Pascoe is most famous as the author of Dark Emu, which claims that pre-1788 Aborigines lived in large towns, and invented not only agriculture but democracy. Whether they accompanied the Maori on their supposed voyage of discovery to Antarctica, Pascoe doesn’t say.
But perhaps Pascoe’s most brazen fabulation is his claim to “Aboriginality”.
Pascoe claims to belong to three different Aboriginal groups, all three of whom vehemently deny it. With astonishing chutzpah, Pascoe also states that, I don’t believe in self-identification: I think people ought to be able to provide some documentary evidence of their identity.
So, where is his? He claims to have “documents”, but, strangely, nobody seems to have actually seen them.
I remember how Professor Marcia Langton sponsored him qua Aboriginal into Melbourne University’s top ranks four years ago to become Enterprise Professor in Indigenous Agriculture. She vouched for his Aboriginality because he’d told her he had “documents”. She hadn’t seen them but who at Australia’s top university would run due diligence on Bruce’s identity? […] Bruce’s genealogical documents seem a bit like Lasseter’s Lost Reef – existence rumoured but never confirmed.
On the other hand, genealogists have diligently scoured actual documents, and – quelle surprise – concluded that Pascoe is as white as the driven snow.
The line of all of Bruce’s forebears originated from England. [Roger Karge] has asked Bruce to correct the website genealogy if necessary: Bruce hasn’t responded. Melbourne University itself has stopped calling Bruce “indigenous”: it now bills him officially just as “writer and farmer”.
Bruce has been earnestly trawling to locate his apical (oldest) black ancestor for nigh on 40 years – for no visible public success – and he must have enough documents to fill the woodshed at his hobby farm near Mallacoota, Vic.
On another SBS show on Aboriginality, activist Steven Hagan had a sly dig at Pascoe. Asked, “What about people who can’t identify their apical ancestor but are self-identifying?”, Hagan responded:
They can just sign a stat dec and they are “in”; they can take on a $200,000 job anywhere they want.
Hagan may have been alluding to Pascoe’s cosy sinecure as “Enterprise Professor in Indigenous Agriculture” at Melbourne University: $200,000 full-time, plus perks, for just one day a week.
Pascoe has also trousered millions of taxpayer dollars to run a “charity” that flogs such essentials as kangaroo grass flour at hundreds of dollars per kilo.
As SBS host Karla Grant (ex-wife of notorious Nugget enthusiast Stan Grant) responded to Hagan:
Why would people lie? – Oh, financial gain of course. People are growing rich on our misery.
Quadrant Online
No wonder Pascoe vows never to go on SBS again and spends pages on his latest book whining about how they done ’im wrong.
He knows that they’re on to him.