At the end of 2018 Bruce Pascoe was in the spotlight for yet another honour, this time at the National Dreamtime Awards, a premier event celebrating Indigenous achievement and broadcast by National Indigenous Television (NITV).
Pascoe’s award for person of the year was the climax of the night, recognising the Dark Emu author for his “significant contribution” to the advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait people. Of all the awards he’d received, this one, he said, made him the most proud because it came from “our people”.
Amidst the glitter and the black tie splendour of the awards at Sydney’s Star casino, Pascoe made light of his shambolic ways. He hadn’t owned a suit in all his then-71 years, he said, and only got one because he was told he needed “something formal”. “I have gone out my way for you mob,” he joked.
Warming to this theme he told NITV: “I can’t wear ties. I just feel like I’m being choked and enough of our people have had that experience, so I’m not going to be the next.”
Pascoe’s words bonded him powerfully to the shared pain of Indigenous dispossession and the tragedy of Aboriginal deaths in custody and youth suicide. It was also an audacious leap from his own experience: Pascoe had grown up white in inner Melbourne in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, missing the profound hardship and discrimination experienced by Aboriginal Australians. When he was a student at university, Aboriginal people were not even counted in the census.
How important is Pascoe’s identification as Indigenous? That night it was everything.
“Bruce Pascoe says Aboriginal blood matters only as much as you want it to. It matters a lot to Pascoe,” journalist and author Stan Grant wrote in The Monthly. “There are many Australians with Aboriginal ancestry who don’t fashion that into an Aboriginal identity. Indeed, some may think it impertinent — if not offensive — to do so.”
Grant observes that, along with his bushy white beard, Pascoe has “taken to being photographed with a red headband, a traditional signifier of the Aboriginal man of high degree” as part of “carefully cultivating” his public image.
Grant says he doesn’t want to interrogate whether Pascoe is Indigenous or not. The interesting thing to him, he says, is the construction of the “Pascoe identity”.
“You can’t separate the man out from the book,” Grant told Crikey. “Dark Emu is a myth to the construction of identity for Bruce Pascoe and for Australia.”
Others see any questioning of Pascoe’s claimed ancestry as unconscionable, offensive and/or a waste of energy. They don’t want to be caught up in what they consider to be the political agendas of conservative commentators. Establishing identity is also fraught with practical difficulties because of the destruction of records or because ancestors might have hidden their aboriginality.
For others, though, it matters a great deal.
Pascoe routinely describes himself as a Bunurong, Yuin and Tasmanian Aboriginal man. It’s how he has been introduced for several years and is, self-evidently, a powerful claim to the lived experience of being Aboriginal. It is also how he described himself in a sworn affidavit he made for a Copyright Tribunal hearing constituted by a Federal Court judge, seen by Crikey, dated November 2019.
However, two of those communities, Bunurong and Tasmanian, have flat-out denied Pascoe’s claims. As well, Crikey’s investigation now raises serious questions about Pascoe’s claim to Yuin ancestry too.
Our investigation also shows that Pascoe has claimed an additional family connection to the Wiradjuri people of NSW.
Outside the golden halls of the Star casino there are Aboriginal people with and without a media voice who decry the identity which they consider Pascoe has built for himself.
Back in 1987 Pascoe set up shop on land in Cape Otway, 220 or so kilometres south-west of Melbourne. The former teacher turned writer was publishing the work of other authors through his business Pascoe Publishing. Corporate documents show that Pascoe, age 40 at the time, described himself as a journalist.
Living here, Pascoe came into contact with trailblazing Indigenous artist Lin Onus. The two were born a year apart. Onus would later be honoured by the Victorian government’s Aboriginal Victoria department, as “an artistic revolutionary” who was “first and foremost an activist”.
His paintings and sculptures had drawn attention to the stark realities of life in Aboriginal Australia, while “challenging audiences to take action”.
Lin Onus died in 1996. Such was the bond between the two men of art and literature that 20 years later Pascoe would be invited to deliver an oration to honour Onus’ life.
According to Crikey‘s sources, Onus’ Indigenous identity and political activism were a powerful model for Pascoe.
The Bunurong
It’s unclear when Pascoe began to claim ancestry with the Bunurong (also written as Boonwurrung) people of Victoria. However in early 2020, when questions swirled around his identity, the Boonwurrung Land and Sea Council publicly shunned Pascoe and his claimed ancestry. (Pascoe has claimed the link may have been through his great-grandmother.)
The council’s chairman Jason Briggs issued a statement to The Age saying the organisation had “a sophisticated ancestral database of all peoples and families who can rightfully claim to be of [Bunurong] descent”, and that Pascoe wasn’t on it.
Briggs reaffirmed the council’s rejection of Pascoe when contacted by Crikey.
“We’re running a native title claim and I’ve got more reports on my desk than I care to mention,” Briggs said. “In a community like ours we all know who each other is. We don’t accept Bruce Pascoe as part of our community.
“We’ve had enough.”
Tasmania
After the Bunurong community rejected Pascoe in 2020, next came the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania. Chairman Michael Mansell has reaffirmed Tasmania’s rejection of Pascoe in a detailed statement to Crikey, pointing to gaps in Pascoe’s story when it comes to claimed family links to Tasmania.
Mansell referred to “the pattern of Pascoe’s elusiveness on challenges to his identity claims”. There were “no names, no direct statement about from whom he gets Aboriginal heritage, all general and vague — but powerfully suggestive, leaving the reader to conclude there must be something there”, Mansell said.
Crikey has confirmed that Pascoe attempted to gain proof of Tasmanian Aboriginal ancestry at the end of 2013 in the months before Dark Emu was first published in March 2014.
The Wiradjuri connection
Crikey is aware that in an application made to the Elders Council of the Tasmania Aboriginal Corporation, Pascoe claimed he was told by an uncle that the family was Aboriginal when he was 16 years old.
Pascoe also claimed his family had recently learned of a connection to the Wiradjuri people of central NSW — a claim not previously reported.
Claims of Tasmanian Aboriginality have been notoriously difficult to establish. A major factor is the sheer scale and brutality of the assault on Tasmanian Aborigines by white settlers, colonial authorities and subsequent governments. Another is the destruction of records.
Notwithstanding that, Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre Heather CEO Heather Sculthorpe told Crikey that Pascoe had not provided the information to persuade them that he had Tasmanian Aboriginal ancestry.
Sculthorpe also took aim at “the high profile people” who, she said, associated any questioning of Pascoe’s claims to Aboriginality with being “a fascist or a Bolt supporter”.
“The intellectual laziness of the commentators astounds me,” Sculthorpe told Crikey.
The Yuin claim
There is a three-part definition usually applied to claims of Indigenous identity: self-identification, recognition within community, and documents that confirm descent.
According to Professor Bronwyn Carlson, head of Indigenous studies at Macquarie University, the three-part definition is a government initiative, generally used in relation to government programs and services. It was not a requirement for Indigenous people to obtain, nor did the definition allow for “the range of experience that Indigenous people have had and continue to have in relation to their identities”.
“The court in Australia has found that in the event of unstable or unsatisfactory evidence of descent that community recognition would suffice,” Carlson told Crikey.
“In regard to what organisations are the authority, the government placed the authority in the hands of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community … where the person lives, came from or is accepted by.”
Carlson says that the lack of a clear definition of an authority means that it is “really about whether Aboriginal people accept his claim and accept him as being a member of the community”.
Ultimately Bruce Pascoe’s claim to Aboriginality has been accepted by some members of the Yuin community, based on the NSW south coast.
Yet as Crikey can reveal, a key community organisation, the Aboriginal Land Council of Eden, does not accept Pascoe’s claim.
Yuin man BJ Cruse, who has chaired the land council for most of the last 40 years, told Crikey that he couldn’t back Pascoe’s claim.
“As chairman of the ALC I definitely can’t and won’t say that he is an Aboriginal person. I can’t say that he is not, but I can’t say that he is,” he said.
“I can’t say anything about his character. I can commend him in a lot of ways for his strong beliefs. He’s a decent man and I do respect him for his staunchness raising issues for the Aboriginal people.
“But as chair of the council and as a born-again Christian I have to obey the law.” he said, “And I don’t have the power to accept him as Aboriginal.”
Cruse’s stance as ALC chair undercuts Pascoe’s claim to identity, which has otherwise been based on the support of three individual Yuin elders.
One of those has been Cruse’s own father, Ossie Cruse, a pastor of an Aboriginal evangelical church in Eden. Pastor Cruse is now 88 years old and was part of the early generation of Aboriginal activists who took political action in the 1960s.
“I trust Bruce Pascoe as a human being,” Pastor Cruse told Crikey. “It’s his prerogative if he wants to identify with Aboriginal people.”
Pastor Cruse said that challenging someone’s “nationhood” was “not a good thing”.
“I don’t see the reason for it. No one’s got a right to hurt other people,” he said. “As a minister my labour is love. I love everyone.”
Pascoe’s second public supporter is Max Dulumunmun Harrison, a Yuin elder of the Ossie Cruse generation. Last year Dulumunmun Harrison told NITV that Pascoe had been “initiated into Yuin” and that he “carries Yuin law”.
“That’s all you need to confirm,” he said.
Crikey has established that Dulumunmun Harrison had a cameo in the 2019 federal election as a “cultural adviser” to the anti-vaccination Informed Medical Options Party, which fielded candidates in the Senate. The party opposes “forced medication”, “compulsory or coerced vaccination” and “fluoride in our water”.
Pascoe’s third public supporter is Noel Butler who runs cultural enterprises on the NSW south coast. Butler last year told NITV that as far as he was concerned Pascoe “is my cousin — I identify him as my cousin”.
“If someone tells me they’re a horse, OK then, I’ll treat them like a horse,” he said.
“If somebody tells me their identity and I’ve known them for quite a while on that basis, then I have no reason to doubt someone’s identity or connection to my family, none at all.
“I don’t believe anybody has the right to question anybody on your identity. You are who you are and unless somebody has walked in your footsteps, as I said to Bruce, how can they tell you more about you than what you know?”
Butler also sits on the board of Pascoe’s Indigenous agriculture enterprise Black Duck Foods, which operates from Pascoe’s farm in Gippsland. As Crikey reported in this series, Black Duck Foods is a registered charity with tax-deductible gift status and is backed by First Australians Capital on the basis that it has a majority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander members of the board.
Pascoe has strong ties to the local Yuin community, providing employment for some via Black Duck Foods. He is also a director of the not-for-profit Twofold Aboriginal Corporation, which provides services to the homeless, disabled and poor in the local Aboriginal community.
It has been more than 40 years since Pascoe began piecing together his ancestry. He has one further avenue to pursue, through a land title claim lodged by the Yuin. Already the NSW native title agency NTS Corp has put together genealogies of the Yuin people to support the claim.
In the meantime Pascoe’s publisher Magabala Books continues to describe its prize author as a Bunurong, Tasmanian and Yuin man, despite two of those communities having rejected his claim more than 18 months ago.
I call on the Crikey editorial team to explain their decision to run a week of attack pieces on Bruce. Justifying them on straw-man arguments is all I’ve seen here, and I’m frankly disgusted.
The narrative that Hardaker et al are exposing a charlatan is hidden as subtext underneath a veneer of well-written just-doing-my-job-holding-truth-to-power journalese about ‘the issues’.
This is Newscorp-level bullshit. Hardaker and Crikey owe us a genuine, honest, explanation of their agenda. So far nothing I’ve read from either even begins to match Bruce Pascoe’s honesty.
Shame on you, Crikey.
What I feared when a read the editorial introduction to the series, click bait journalism came to mind as the response could easily be predicated from that seen elsewhere. It isn’t Bruce that needs truth to power journalism but the circus around an author and his book first published seven years ago now.
Ben, I share your disgust on this attack on Bruce.
It carries the familiar pernicious attacks by Murdoch/Newscorp on attacking the man/messenger instead of the ball/message!
My memory has been jolted back to a similar attack on one of our greatest historians, Manning Clark.
The Courier Mail tried to attribute Clark as being awarded the Order of Lenin medal, which turned out to be untrue.
Interestingly, one of their motivations was his prosecuting of – “Australia’s origins as a colonial – settler state based on the forceful and genocidal dispossession of the Aboriginal people”.
I leave you with this link –
https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/manning-clark-smear-exposed
I don’t see what you see.
“attack pieces”. There have been no attack pieces, although several have suggested Pascoe might not be quite the figure his more ardent fans wish he was. Rather more of the content has addressed his book and how well it stands up to scrutiny. All fair enough.
“straw-man arguments” What straw-man arguments? Give some examples. Show us the straw-men. This should be easy enough for you, you say that’s all you’ve seen, so you must be spoiled for choice.
“The narrative that Hardaker et al are exposing a charlatan is hidden as subtext underneath a veneer of well-written just-doing-my-job-holding-truth-to-power journalese about ‘the issues’.” You apparently do not see how revealing this criticism is. Reading these articles leads you to suspect Pascoe might be a charlatan, so your emotional reaction is to reject the articles and abuse the author and publisher, even though you can see they are well-written just-doing-my-job-holding-truth-to-power journalese about ‘the issues’.
I was not aware before this week just how much Pascoe and Dark Emu are sacred cows, but it’s very clear now from the comments here.
Nice psychological analysis of other people’s reasons for not liking these articles. How many did you actually talk to to arrive at such conclusions?
I have only responded to the detail of Benmarshall3000’s comment, and in a very general way to the large number of other comments that decry Crikey’s coverage of this topic. Where and what is this “psychological analysis” you have detected?
Don’t hold your breath.
This lot never explain, never apologise.
They just take the subscriptions and ignore the CUSTOMERS.
Thank you. I did the same. Rang & let them know what I thought. Cancelled my subscription. Been back a week now. Any more stunts like this & I’m gone for good. Just as we were going into a lockdown (only one week luckily) they start this awful attack on identity. For what purpose?
I was so angry & upset that Crikey would stoop to this. Identity is complex. Its not something to throw onto the table for every arsehole with a racist opinion to throw their two bobs worth in. It hurts. Its touching on generations of pain & stolen identity. The path home is fraught with problems. Its taken me over forty years to find out my ancestry. Its gentle steps home. Those who know me know who I am.
I am also struggling with this series. Part of the reason I subscribe to this publication is to be challenged and this series is doing just that. But it is making me extremely uncomfortable because I don’t quite understand the why behind all of this. It is just feeling a little too personal.
OK, I claim to be Jewish. as it happens, I have no social connection with the Jewish community, nor religous nor dietary connection, nor do I speak Hebrew or Yiddsh (I can sing Huvah Ngillah). Yes, I believe in the holocaust and am anti-facist and anti-nazi and I hope an anti-racist. My claim to be Jewish hinges on my ancestry, my Mother was Jewish. Easily established, and, this does not depend upon her social or religious community, although Mum loved Jewish culture and food.
And, as far Hitler was concerned, I, my children, my grandchildren and my great grandchildren (when I have them) are Jewish. I assume, these days, he would use a genetic test to show that.
I loved Dark Emu , it is a wonderful book. How accurate is it? I cannot judge.
As far as Pascoe’s claim to be of first nations blood, well, again, may be a genetic test can settle that. As far as his claim to be “part” of the first nation’s people, I am less certain. He has made a great contribution, but, while I am not an expert, I am familar with the idea of indigenous people adopting others into their systems. All he needs to show is that one group do that.
But,it doesn’t really matter as far as Dark Emu it will stand and fall on its scholarship..
I’m in complete agreement with you Jess. I don’t want to exclusively read material that agrees with my slant on the world. I want to be challenged and provided with a range of considered views. These recent articles on Pascoe have been little more than highly opinionated attacks on him.
In other words, it’s all been a bit of a sideshow.
I understand why.
Because people have to tell the truth.
If you think the truth doesn’t matter, and your brain can only take people being ‘nice’, regardless of truth, then you will probably disagree.
Whose truth? There are as many truths as people.
And there, in those last seven words, is the worm in the bud of modernity, post Enlightenment.
If ever I board a 747, I want to be sure that everyone involved, from the engineer to the pilot, agreed on the truth of tensile strength, combustion expansion and the uplift of air across a shaped surface.
An alternative question is why this truth? Assuming it’s true, that is. There are tens of thousands of arguably important stories being created every day around the world, but only a handful get reported, and it’s not unreasonable to ask why it’s those particular stories and not others. In the case of this story, I guess the editors decided to run it because of the publicity that’s already been generated around the matter by the recent publication of a book about it. Maybe that means it’s now familiar to a lot of people and therefore more people will click on promotions of this story – creating more income for this business. Or maybe there’s some other reason. I doubt we’ll ever know.
The obsession with Pascoe’s ties to aboriginal communities is fascinating but profoundly irritating.
If Pascoe had said that the conclusions he drew from his research were based on his aboriginal identity then that would be fair game but, unless I’ve missed it, I can’t find any such reference in his book.
By all means question his research, his sources and any conclusions he draws from that research but enough about his aboriginal ancestry.
I like the quote from the elder “ If he says he’s a horse I treat him like a horse”
I’ve worked with members of the stolen generation who didn’t find out they had aboriginal ancestry till they were in their 60s. They had no connection to country or mob but to deny their ancestry as aboriginal would be absurd.
“I like the quote from the elder “ If he says he’s a horse I treat him like a horse””
I think it one of the silliest things I have ever heard – If I told you I was a God, would you treat me like a God?
Of course I would. Are you a God?
So your argument is: people of the stolen generation were removed. So Bruce Pascoe may not be able to prove his aboriginality, but then neither could the stolen generation, so he should be believed, and anyone questioning his assertions are plain wrong.
I think that is a bad argument.
I don’t really understand why people are being so upset by this article.
I think it is because people know that identity CAN be a scam. A great big scam. We can’t talk about this though because then it will threaten the whole ‘identity’ movement. If anyone can say they are anything, well, where does that leave identity?
I mean, really, does this article stop you loving his book? I liked it. I appreciated it for bringing attention to our ideas of what Australian history is. His book started a conversation about it.
If he has jumped on an identity bandwagon to advertise his book, then he was pretty, pretty, pretty smart to do so, because it worked.
I was deeply impressed by Dark Emu well before hearing anything about Bruce Pascoe’s identity claims.
I note that he used early invader information as the sources for his description of Indigenous agricultural practices. The wider community would not have given oral history from Indigenous people any credibility!
The thing I find most astounding is the anger & fervour to destroy a person who has claimed a deep connection with Aboriginal people. Pascoe may be a non rigorous historian and he may wish for an enriched ancestry, but has he done anything harmful towards his claimed people? Anything? He has ignited a keen consciousness in how the south east corner of our country used to be. Before the scourge of introduced toxic plants& animals destroyed it. Give him a break.
Truth is required, if the gains you see him making, are to be enduring, Sheridan.
The difficulty with relying on “truth”, JA, is that we each have a different interpretation of selective facts that we hunt and gather in order to justify a narrative we claim as “truth”.
In the case of Dark Emu, the evidence Pascoe curated was deliberately chosen from one type of source – the notebooks of the first colonial explorers, particularly Mitchell and Sturt.
Pascoe explained in his TED talk that he used this evidence base for Dark Emu precisely because so many scholars had dismissed his thesis because it was only attributable to non-white sources who had no academic standing.
https://www.ted.com/talks/bruce_pascoe_a_real_history_of_aboriginal_australians_the_first_agriculturalists
Have you read Dark Emu, JA?
Have you read the original source material from the pens of Mitchell and Sturt?
This series smacks of ol’ fashioned Aussie tall poppy syndrome. Old bloke from Mallacoota writes a good book and it goes gangbusters. The racists pile on first because they do. A couple of years later the academics and journos join in with pious claims of needing to defend their professions and The Truth! BS! It’s as Aussie as meat pie.
Yes, crikey doubles down after yesterdays comments critique. I’m actualy finding it interesting, and feel I do now have a more balanced understanding of the issues, but I’m not up for pages of reading on it for days. Maybe once a week. And a little less strident.