Bruce Pascoe's Story Fact Checked

Andrew Bolt: ... but first, and speaking of the ABC, there has been a very interesting response to the amazing story I told you last week, and that the so-called Aboriginal historian Bruce Pascoe and his prize-winning history dark EMU.

Now Pascoe himself has responded about whether he really is Aboriginal and whether his book is based on misquoted sources and basic inventions. ABC journalists have also responded.

But before I get onto all that, I better give you some background for those who didn't see last week's show.

Pascoe, Bruce Pascoe has repeatedly claimed that one of his great-grandmother's was Aboriginal and his book claims that Aborigines, before the whites came, we're not what historians have said: primitive hunter-gatherers. He says they were in fact sophisticated farmers living in houses, in towns of up to 1,000 people. He says there's complicated dams and wells, huge fields of crops and silos three meters off the ground each with a ton of grain... But whites then smashed all that.

Now this reinvention of our history has won the New South Wales Premier Award for best book and for Best Indigenous Writer. A new children's version is now being handed out to children by politicians including labour MP Tim Watts, who said well this is grateful giving them out for school prizes. And the ABC is right behind Pascoe and his book. It's promoted him heavily already in interviews and profiles like this for its education unit for schools:

1:40

[Video clip]

Bruce Pascoe: My name is Bruce Pascoe and I'm a Eora, Bunurong and Tasmanian man. And I'm a writer.

My family didn't know a lot about the Aboriginal heritage in the family, or didn't say much about it anyway. I started learning about the fact that Aboriginal people had agriculture. I had no idea about tha. And suddenly I was turning up these facts in the history books I was reading. And I thought, how come I never learned about this at school. How come I never learned about it at university.

Andrew Bolt: And as I told you last week, the ABC is going to go even further in promoting Pascoe and his history by showing a two-part documentary in which this Aboriginal historian explains his brand-new story of their past. But there's a huge problem with this.

2:36

For a start, where is the evidence that Pascoe really is Aboriginal? About 20 amateur researchers fact-checked Pascoe's claims for months on their website "Dark Emu Exposed. And to a genealogist and the family tree experts have also trolled through birth certificates, like this one from his family, as well as the death notices, graveyard records... They can't find one single Pascoe ancestor who is Aboriginal. Every one of them seems to have come from English immigrants.

As I said, the researchers may have made a mistake. Maybe there's an illegitimate birth somewhere, but Pascoe has refused to come on the show to explain, and he will not answer my written questions.

But yesterday, a development, he went on the ABC Statewide program in Victoria and was asked about what I had said about him: Why was there no record of any Aboriginal ancestors of his. Here is his response:

[Recording] Bruce Pascoe: Well it's no surprise that they didn't find Aboriginal people in that search that they followed, because they weren't following the entire family. It's a bit ingenuous of Bolt to say that. My family is Aboriginal. Goes back to our great-grandmothers.

Andrew Bolt: Well that's not actually true. All Pascoe's recent ancestors, as I explained last week, and in my column this week in the papers... all of them were checked and it's a pity that Pascoe was not asked the obvious follow-up question, as in, well what relative exactly was Aboriginal Bruce? Because here are Pascoe 's four great-grandmother's, which Pascoe claims includes somewhere an Aborigine.

And as far as the records show, each one of them was born in England or of English descendants. Every single one.

4:34

Now fortunately Pascoe in a very soft a BBC interview yesterday, was also not asked about the mistakes which have pointed out in his book. And talks about his book, that those claims that Aborigines had huge overhead grain silos and nine miles of stooped grain crop. Stooped this... And how we'd actually totally rewritten the sources he claimed to have.

Well tonight, let me give you a fresh example of our Pascoe doesn't just misquote his sources in his prize-winning book but simply makes stuff up. So that aboriginal society looks far more advanced than white settlers far crueler.

Charles Sturt was one of our greatest explorers and he wrote about his deeds in works such as 'Narrative of an Expedition into Central Australia' which Pascoe repeatedly claims is one of his sources. But let me show you what Sturt actually wrote, and then how Pascoe then... he writes it... or just adds stuff willy-nilly.

So for instance, writes that in the desert in the 1840s, his exhausted expedition was something halted by three or four hundred and natives... Aborigines. But our horses, he said, horses plural, could not have broken into a canter by the end to save our lives. But luckily the Aborigines offered tham all food and water and then said the Explorers could sleep in one of the larger Hut's which Sturt doesn't actually describe. He calls them 'huts' but not much more than that.

But Pascoe rewrites all that. This is what he actually claims:

Claims that Sturts men were down to just one horse, having eaten the rest. He claims that there were a thousand Aborigines not three or four hundred, and he said they greeted the explorers in what he calls a 'little model community with timber and thatched houses— beautiful dwellings.' And he says first Europeans were then offered the pick of the houses. Note they're houses now, not huts, in a new estate. I guess like a housing estate.

He even claims that these smaller huts were full of stored produce and that yards attached to these storehouses were used as animal holding pens. Now those are all details Sturt never ever mentioned. And Pascoe never explains why he does or which animals were kept in those animal holding pens.

What animals would they've had? To keep their dingos maybe? A pen of dingos. A pen of kangaroos. A pen of koalas. It all seems like a total invention.

7:26

And Sturt goes on to say that the smallness of the Aborigines' water holes... quite a matter of surprise for him. But Pascoe rewrites that too... he claims that Sturt in fact found the Aborigines had dug a well about four ... seventy foot deep. Seventy foot deep! And that's an engineering feat, he says. In fact it's a total invention.

I could give so many more explanations but time is short. Here's one more:

8:15

Sturt describes how the Aboriginal women in this place beat some local seed for cakes. Crushing them between two stones. And says the noise of that was exactly like the working of a loom factory back in England. But Pascoe rewrites this in 'Dark Emu', to claim that Sturt had described not Aboriginal women crushing grain between two stones but in fact the whirring of hundreds of mills grinding grain into flour. Hundreds of Mills! Two stones become hundreds of Mills.

[The details of this meeting with Aborigines is given in volume 2 of 'Narrative of an Expedition into Central Australia' pages 75, 76, 77, 78, 79. Click the page number to see a scan of the page.]

And we must ask... we must... why haven't the hundreds of historians and history teachers that we pay in this country called out this trash. Why didn't the judges of the New South Wales Premier Award check out if their book of the year was actually true and not a complete farrago and invention.

And why did the ABC think that yes, this invention is exactly what the national broadcasters should now teach to children particularly, as the history of this nation.

I actually have part of the answer. The reaction of some ABC presenters. That's the answer. Because when I expose the holes in Pascoe's story, I also wrote about it in my newspaper columns this week, I thought let's say: 'oh my goodness, there is something suspicious here.' Instead, ABC host Patricia Karvelas just tweeted an insult of me. So did Virginia Trioli who retweeted a tweet calling me a racist. It's apparently racist to fact-check the false claims of an historian claiming to be Aboriginal.

9:53

And Benjamin Law, another ABC presented, said the mere fact that I'd created this book was exactly why it should be given to people for Christmas. Again, forget the truth, pick a tribe. Because yes, this is indeed a modern poison of identity politics. The truth does not count. What counts is the tribe, and particularly if you can smash the white one. Your ABC eh! What a shameful example of Australia's intellectual rot

 

 

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