Four weeks ago, Dark Emu author Bruce Pascoe suffered a blow to his credibility that few would survive. With scholarly rigour, anthropologist Peter Sutton and archaeologist Keryn Walshe demolished key parts of Dark Emu’s thesis — a thesis hailed as a revelation by many, positing that Aboriginal people engaged in agriculture, irrigation and construction before European invasion, and were not solely hunter-gatherers.
Sutton, whose anthropological research underpinned the historic Wik native title claim 25 years ago, alleges that Pascoe’s scholarship is “indefensible” and, further, that some of what he has written is “pure fiction”.
Journalist and author on Indigenous affairs Stan Grant has weighed into the debate, describing Pascoe as a “conjurer” who “invites people to disbelieve their eyes”.
“The white man vanishes and behold, the black man appears,” Grant wrote. “It doesn’t work on Aboriginal people; we’ve seen it before. He seeks — and receives in some quarters — a black imprimatur. But he knows he has nothing new to reveal to us.”
Pascoe appears to so far unscathed. His supporters, though made quiet by the detailed dismantling of his work, have not publicly abandoned him. The man is rolling with the punches, saying in effect that all contributions are welcome. He is said to be working through the criticisms of his book, and wasn’t available to speak to Crikey. We have twice asked Pascoe for his answers and have invited him to contribute a piece.
There are plenty of Pascoe sceptics, white and Indigenous, and as they have it Pascoe’s rise may represent the most extravagant con in Australia’s literary history: that of an allegedly white man distorting black history for white people and making fools of the arts and cultural hierarchies, as well as a gullible media on the way through.
Whatever the case, at age 74 Pascoe has attained what he could barely ever have dreamed of as the child born into a poor inner-Melbourne in the immediate postwar years. From that humble beginning Pascoe has become too big to fail.
There are a host of reasons for this. Many revolve around money.
The business of being Bruce Pascoe
Should the colossus of Bruce Pascoe come tumbling down it would have mighty reverberations.
Dark Emu was published in 2014 but started to take off in 2016, the year it won the top prize at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Now the sky’s the limit. Pascoe has reached that magic moment of transformation from a successful author known (mainly) for his fiction works to a fully fledged merchandisable and bankable brand — a marketing force crossing into tourism, food and lifestyle.
For some years he has had the support of influential Indigenous figures including, notably Professor Marcia Langton. Now his backing has mushroomed to take in the most powerful business figures and organisations in Australia.
Here’s how Dark Emu launched fortunes and careers and forged networks of influence.
Literature
WA-based Magabala Books has its own “before and after” Dark Emu story. Between 2014 and 2017 Dark Emu sold a total of 77,000 copies. In 2018 Magabala relaunched it, and through 2019 sales shot up to 140,597, making it the number 10 national bestselling title for the year.
A spin-off called Young Dark Emu aimed at primary school children sold 46,432 copies. Together the Pascoe books accounted for 60% of the publisher’s 316,000 book sales and made Magabala the fastest-growing small publisher in Australia. Little wonder the company calls it “the unstoppable Dark Emu“.
Magabala started with an initial print run of 800 copies. According to the tracking system Bookscan, total sale stand at close to 250,000 for Dark Emu, with a further 60,000 for Young Dark Emu. The books are also a staple of school curriculums. From its own small beginnings Magabala now describes itself as Australia’s leading Indigenous publisher.
Documentary
In 2019 Screen Australia funded development of a two-part Dark Emu documentary to be fronted by Pascoe as he takes audiences on a “revelatory and inspiring journey” across Australia. It is due to be screened on the ABC next year and is being produced by Blackfella Films, a production company led by filmmaker Rachel Perkins. (Perkins, the daughter of the famed Aboriginal rights activist Charlie Perkins, was invited to deliver the ABC’s prestigious Boyer Lecture in 2019.)
Dance
In 2018 the Indigenous dance company Bangarra took its Dark Emu stage production nationwide.
Travel
Publisher Hardie Grant’s travel division acquired world rights to Pascoe’s book Loving Country: a guide to sacred Australia, which seeks to show areas where evidence of Indigenous history has not been highlighted. The book was published in 2020.
Cuisine
Pascoe was awarded Gourmet Traveller‘s “Outstanding Contribution to Hospitality Award” in 2016; the editors cited Pascoe’s eloquent, persuasive revelations, which had inspired his audience to accept, appreciate and adopt Indigenous ingredients and food culture.
Beer
A brewery in Orbost, East Gippsland, collaborated with Pascoe last year to produce a Dark Emu beer made with Indigenous grain. The result was said to be “amber-coloured, clean, roasty and tangy”.
Academia
Last year Pascoe was appointed an enterprise professor in Indigenous agriculture at the University of Melbourne. The role, created for him is a so-called Level E appointment, for those with specialist knowledge. (A full-time salary is about $200,000 a year). His appointment was announced by Langton, an associate provost at the university and its foundation chair of Australian Indigenous studies.
Pascoe had previously been a professor at the University of Technology Sydney in its Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research.
A move into agriculture
Pascoe has jumped out of the arts and into the world of agricultural production, focusing on Indigenous seeds and other traditional foodstuffs via an enterprise called Black Duck Foods Ltd. (The black duck is the totem of the Yuin nation, to which Pascoe claims ancestry.)
The move places him at the centre of a network of Australia’s largest businesses and philanthropists.
Black Duck Foods is run from Pascoe’s 60-hectare property at Mallacoota in the south-east corner of Victoria. The venture is registered as a charity with (the much sought after) deductible gift recipient status, meaning donations are tax-deductible.
ASIC searches show the venture was registered in October 2019. Its six directors include four members of the Pascoe family including Bruce and his son Jack (who also claims Indigenous ancestry). The two non-Pascoe members of the board are Yuin elder Noel Butler and his wife Patricia.
Black Duck’s major backer is First Australians Capital (FAC) which works with top tier Australian firms who provide financial support and valuable business nous to Indigenous-run enterprises. These include law firms Minter Ellison and Arnold Bloch Liebler, as well as philanthropic organisations the Ramsay Foundation, the Cages Foundation, the Baker Foundation, the AMP Foundation and Equity Trustees.
The Cages Foundation is the good works vehicle of Paul Salteri, co-founder of giant construction company Paul Transfield. Equity Trustees is chaired by Melbourne businesswoman and philanthropist Carol Schwartz. It provided a $500,000 grant to FAC last week.
Other Black Duck partners listed on its website include lawfirm Ashurst, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and the Australian government’s Indigenous Land and Sea Corporation. It is also a research partner with the University of Melbourne (engaged in accordance with university policies, it told Crikey).
The venture is a new chapter in Pascoe’s own story. There is plenty of competition for philanthropy money — climate change and cancer research are two that dominate — but the Pascoe name is a drawcard for Indigenous projects.
Magabala Books also operates with the support of philanthropic foundations. The Ian Potter Foundation, named after the late Melbourne businessman and manufacturing titan Sir Ian Potter, is one. Another is the Jon and Caro Stewart Family Foundation, set up with the near $2 billion proceeds of the sale of Perth company Aurora Oil and Gas in 2014. That fund gave direct financial support to the manuscript development of Young Dark Emu.
The gush of philanthropy and impact investment money shows that Pascoe’s backers go well beyond the progressives and ABC types targeted by his pursuers. Not just a darling of the left, he is at the centre of a large pool of social change money and a celebrity magnet for boardrooms looking to improve their “purpose” metrics.
However flawed his facts might allegedly be, and whatever question marks that hang over his ancestry, there is a strong vested interest in keeping the Pascoe dream alive.
Was this attack piece necessary? Reference an as-yet unsubstantiated accusation directed at an author then leap to the unconnected financial consequences of the book he wrote – almost all consquences of which have nothing to do with Bruce’s reportage of what he found in early white colonial journals and letters etc.
Setting up a metaphor that covertly compares Bruce to a corrupt GFC-era bank is a deliberate choice of the author, and buries the real accusation in weasel words, the subtext of which is that Bruce is a con-artist called out by brave real indigenous fella Stan Grant and real historians Sutton and Walshe, and now his stupid leftie readers have too much riding on his lies to change their minds.
As one of the ‘stupid lefties’, I’m fed up with those attacking Bruce according to their own personal issues. He wrote a book about what he found in others’ writings, made some points, and speculated about them while pointing to the gaps in available knowledge. That’s a simple reality Hardaker and Grant et al seem to have missed. My question is ‘why’.
― Anaïs Nin
You seem to have misunderstood the piece. It is describing the businesses involved in exploiting Pascoe’s book, not Pascoe, and the influence of their financial interests in promoting and defending Dark Emu. That’s good journalism, but if you prefer to be uninformed you don’t have to read it.
It is deeply ideological; the language is loaded. If Sutton’s research is so rigorous, there’s no need to pre-assert it. Demonstrate it.
Given a choice between agreeing with Stan Grant and Andrew Bolt on one side and Marcia Langton on the other I’d take Professor Langton any day.
Having read Dark Emu twice I’m puzzled by the attacks on Pascoe. He sites what seem to be verifiable first person accounts from early settlers, government officials etc. Either he fabricated these references or they’re genuine. It should not be difficult to prove or disprove either way.
He then draws logical inferences from those sources and questions prevailing wisdom. From my reading none of those inferences are particularly far fetched or outlandish. Of course they’re open to question as are many facets of our history. To quote Churchill “history is written by the victors”
For example, in the 50s we were taught of the doomed nobility of the Burke and Wills expedition and how they gallantly perished. However it now appears that Burke, in particular, was a racist idiot, To quote Belinda Tromp (The Aboriginal Story of Burke and Wills: Forgotten Narratives. CSIRO Press):
“Burke had little respect for indigenous people and their knowledge.
In one incident he ordered his men to fire over the heads of Aborigines who tried to offer the explorers fish”
If the teaching of the story of Burke and Wills could be so comprehensively wrong then there may be reason to doubt much of our accepted history.
There is also a tendency to lump all precolonial aboriginal history into one hunter-gatherer stereotype. To me this is as logical as treating Europe as an amorphous whole. Australia is a larger land mass than continental Europe if you exclude European Russia. There is a view that precolonial Australia was at least as ethnically and linguistically diverse as Europe. The view that all aboriginal history and culture was the same seems to me as ridiculous as assuming that Greek, Scandinavian and British history and culture are the same.
Whether Pascoe is Aboriginal or not and whether he has profited from his book are, to me, irrelevant. His claims to be of Aboriginal descent are a matter between him and the communities he claims as his heritage. It is certainly not for the Andrew Bolts of this world to site as a reason for discrediting the book. Similarly, if he has profited from the book that is of no consequence to its veracity. Bolt profits from peddling idiocy and division however that is his right. I can’t imagine there are too many authors or journalists who would forgo profit in the interest of academic purity.
By all means question Pascoe’s sources and his conclusions but leave his ethnic and cultural heritage and his desire to make a living out of it.
How do we know the sources he cites told the truth? They are all white and were immigrants.None of his sources are Aboriginal. I cannot understand how people cannot see how insulting this could be. A “more Cornish” man writes a book debunking previous history as written by white men but using other white men’s alleged accounts which may or may not be accurate and it is demanded the world accepts this without question..I respect Marcia Langton but she does not speak for all Indigenous folk nor claims to and is not the arbiter of what is true Aboriginal history and I suspect she encourages the ongoing debate abouit Aboriginal history as a good thing and she’s probably right.
You clearly havn’t bothered reading the book or you’d know why he used journals of white ‘explorers’ & settlers. As Gamage did. Strange that no one is going for Damage who drew the same conclusions from the same material.
Anyone can use the National Library Archive to verify all or any of Pascoe’s sources, as Rick Morton did in The Saturday Paper, in a systematic examination of Pascoe’s citations. Every source and citation is transparent. That they form a pattern seems to be the basis of this bi-partisan moral panic.
Yep. Marcia gets my vote. Stan is so disappointing. He is so clearly interested in being part of the establishment. He sold out eons ago.
So true Ben, especially your noting Hardaker’s “unconnected financial consequences of the book he wrote”.
I look forward to Hardaker explaining how “The business of being Bruce Pascoe” is going to be a “celebrity magnet for boardrooms looking to improve their “purpose” metrics” will fit? Notably in the boardrooms of the likes of Rio Tinto, Glencore, Whitehaven Coal and Adani.
Their damage to land/country, water and Aboriginal culture continues unabated.
Thank you Bruce Pascoe for providing a badly need bridge, however rickety, to cross the divide.
“He wrote a book about what he found in others’ writings” yet they were all white men either passing through as ecplorers or settlers often hostile to the Indigenous and possibly with a colonial attitude. Why no Aboriginal sources? They are there- 1000s who speak their history as handed down by elders.
History necessarily needs to be explored from the perspectives of various sources, a huge task not able to be sufficiently applied in one book. The line that Pascoe draws, a kind of ‘ sand talk’ is an incredibly worthwhile contribution to knowledge, and like all arguments cannot be all things to all people. No-one has all the knowledge.
TRY reading the book. Groan.
Because those who shriek that farming in Oz is and always has been all white, are most persuaded by whitefella testimony, and find themselves hoist on their own petard. These are observations of white settlers, explorers, naturalists, surveyors. Hardly captured by Aboriginal interests.
Could the ‘why’ be something to do with with this LNP government? Didn’t they try it before in regard to keeping out indigenous history? (2006?).
Where do academics acquire unquestionable credibility? Spare me Bolt!
Bruce Pascoe has been a teacher, a publisher, a farmer, a brilliant writer of fiction, non fiction and history. Yet to Sutton and his ilk, he is but an “amateur” whose work is hardly worth reading. I read Dark Emu in 2015, then Gammage’s “Biggest Estate”, then enrolled in Anthropology and Indigenous Studies units of study at SydneyUni because of the revelations drawn out by these books. What i learned from uni is that social anthropology is in a state of internal conflict as a discipline and that historically, “anthros” have traditionally been the tools of the establishment – it seems nothing has changed. Rintoul’s Good Weekend article was littered with “straw man” arguments and an astonishing lack of understanding of the meaning of interactions between coloniser and Firrt Nations people in the early years of settlement. It does demonstrate though how afraid academia and the political class is of the fire that Pascoe, Gammage and others have started. Sadly it seems that Truth telling is a long way off.
It would be interesting to see your response to Sutton’s book. I think you’re right to emphasize the importance of truth telling here – the most important issue of all. It’s unfortunate that some of the articles in Crikey almost suggest that Pascoe is a fraud. Not helpful for calm discussion and unnecessary. Sutton’s book is a passionate defence of the value of indigenous culture and I found his rejection of the colonialist mindset that he argues underpins Pascoe’s hierarchy of civilizations thinking in Dark Emu to be quite powerful. This doesn’t make Pascoe a liar – he appears to me to be a well meaning man who, in trying to convince his audience of the worth of indigenous culture, has, through lack of knowledge, lack of research and exaggerated rhetoric, undermined his own intentions.
You can forgive Bruce Pascoe a lot. What he lacks in scholarship he makes up for with his benevolent demeanour, his concern for proper recognition of our first people and his apparent willingness to accept criticism. He has mined the goodwill of people on all sides of politics. He has reminded us of the deep cultural connection that our aboriginal people have with the land and the complex system of totems and stratification in aboriginal society. He has become a sort of mythical figure like Father Christmas with his sack of conjectures and tall stories: not necessarily true but fun for beginners. While there are echoes of the furore surrounding Helen Darville’s ‘The Hand that Signed the Paper’, Pascoe does not seem to have not set out to deceive but rather to shape things by selective quotation in a way that matches his preconceptions. Pascoe’s slant is not borne out by quality scholarship and should not be be presented in the education curriculum as fact, but rather as one colourful viewpoint amongst many.
Presumably this is sarcasm. When you look at the man’s history, including the number of times he has changed his story about where his aboriginality came from, there is only one conclusion to make. He is a grifter.
A man making up stuff by manipulating history and the goodwill of a nation grappling with reconciliation has no place on an education curriculum because he has a “colourful viewpoint”. Under that criterion, we should be teaching them about David Iriving.
I have a Lithuanian great grandfatherbut it doesn’t make me an expert on matters Lithuanian and I’d be a fraud and insult the citizens of Lithuania if I claimed it somehow entitled me to write their history.
You didn’t grow up there. Not the same at all.
Genealogy is an evolving understanding especially for those whose records were under the control of a hostile state. The stolen generations, the leaving of Liverpool, all the kids sent ostensibly for war evacuation, whose families were lied to, even adoptions with poor record keeping, lots of people have had their genealogy obscured. Why is that hard for so many to grasp?
I’m puzzled. Do we have a tall poppy thing going on here? All those things listed in this article that spun off from his book – there’s no nasties happening that you’ve identified here? Have I missed something? Someone disputes his premises – big deal – not exactly a new thing in academia? You’ve listed a number of indigenous leaders who supported his work. That some other leaders have a different view is also not so surprising, is it not?
I can’t remember if I finished the book, but I remember feeling uplifted by the aspects that I remember, which is that explorers failed to give credit to aboriginals for the food caches that saved some of their lives, that their way of life was ntelligent and thoughtful, that native foods were more successful and that we’ve failed to acknowledge that at least some of those foods have been vastly under-rated and are more suitable to our climate and environment.
I don’t get it – where’s the nasties in this?
Bill Gammage’s excellent book on the same subject garnered nothing like that attention or cynicism.
There must be a reason, I just can’t qwhite put my finger on it.
Honestly, Idk. I think in the end it may have just been a concerted strategic RW attack on an historical reality they just didn’t want to hear.
Dark Emu was so obviously someone finally telling the truth that it is no surprise to find an army of haters trailling along behind him. Galileo annoyed the crap out of the Church too. I must be an ABC type – I just love the truth.
Elderly journos spreading division are part of the problem. About 90% of it.
It’s a shame that all it’s sources are white men. One would have thought Aboriginal histopry as passed down via elders would feature.
You have really missed the point here.
“I just love the truth”
You have a strange way of showing it.