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The Forum > Article Comments > Emus cannot fly > Comments

Emus cannot fly : Comments

By Les Louis, published 14/1/2020

If Bruce Pascoe is a charlatan, he should be prosecuted...and his claims that Aborigines were not hunter/gatherers should be exposed as bunkum.

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Well, he has been referred to the Federal Police, so he could very well face prosecution, as of course he should if there is a case against him.
Posted by ttbn, Tuesday, 14 January 2020 8:54:12 AM
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Les Louis,
Well said !
Posted by individual, Tuesday, 14 January 2020 8:58:53 AM
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The past is a foreign country. Every nation advanced or still relatively primitive came from some stone-age culture that used fire to assist hunting.

This doesn't work on ground overgrown with feral weeds that burn hotter than ground soaked in kero! Or where average wind speeds have increased markedly.

There is plenty of evidence-based research that confirms for the non-brainwashed, that this is just more of the humbug of folk wanting to reoccupy country and practise their traditions without interference including the taking of child brides by tribal elders whose word is law!

Cool burns never ever leave the country better for the burn!

Yes, this may clear some of the fuel load but that same fuel load is better reduced by intensive cell grazed animal that doesn't bake the soil and send tons of new CO2 into an atmosphere already overloaded with record CO2 way up in uncharted territory.

Some hare-brained decision-makers are taking notice of humbug!

Mosaic burning may reduce the fuel load. But it also destroys all the non-fire-tolerant species not able to outrun the flames, i.e., most rainforest tree species and many crawling insects.

We've burnt enough of the land already, changed it for the worse with millennia of this practice which progressively removes scarce irreplaceable soil nutrients and trace elements which go up in smoke and out to sea, to never ever return.

And the soil bakes and hardens with millennia of repeated annual burning to the point of becoming impervious to the rain which then runs off as flash floods and massive erosion instead.

Whereas, intensive cell grazing available around the year! does the opposite breaks open the soil to allow the rain to penetrate and deposits nutrient that can then adds carbon to the soil!

If Aborigines had any skill as alleged farmers they would know this from hard-won practice and the power of observation!

There is not a white way or a black way, just a right way. and there is always a better way
Alan B.
Posted by Alan B., Tuesday, 14 January 2020 10:14:12 AM
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well it will soon be 26 January. Lets just thank God and celebrate we live in a great country.
Posted by runner, Tuesday, 14 January 2020 10:28:47 AM
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All Pascoe has to do is find just one Aboriginal person who says that they are related. So far, zero.

Anybody who has knocked around with Aboriginal people knows that you can establish links, no matter how tenuous, with pretty much any Aboriginal person, even a whitefella like me. All it takes is a minute or so:

"Where you from ?"

"Up around X."

"Yeah, my wife's uncle lived up there for years, had a couple of kids - he lived with So-and-so."

"Yeah, that's my wife's aunty, Z, I think I remember him, a So-and-so, nice bloke."

"What, she's a sister to So-and-so ?"

"No, a cousin of hers, I heard her husband shot through and worked on the railways in the south, I heard he lived down near Y."

"Yeah, my brother-in-law has lived down that way for twenty years now."

And so on. Sort of mosaic genealogy.

Yonks ago, I proposed in a local mag, after the Mabo Decision, that groups should move quick to put together genealogies (they were quite big down this way in those days), to identify who could legitimately be involved in land claims. Nobody took any notice.

And nobody does yet. Christ, how long does it take for the simplest and most obvious idea to get off the ground ? Now it's a generation later, and knowledge of ancestors is getting more stretched.

By the way, for any Indigenous person really interested in their genealogy, get in touch with the SA Museum (check it out on Google) and ask to speak to Ali Highfold, and to have access to the Tindale Collection. Mountains of family information from all over Australia, just lying there going mouldy.

Hey, maybe Pascoe could try that :)

Joe
Posted by loudmouth2, Tuesday, 14 January 2020 10:52:10 AM
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Perhaps now we shall see the dark emu enlightened?
Posted by Is Mise, Tuesday, 14 January 2020 11:05:04 AM
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There is a multitude of information held in state archives relating to aboriginal ancestry.
When my husband died without leaving a will, in 1991, the law at that time decreed than any person who was more than 1/4 aboriginal, who died without a will, had to have the Public Trustee as the executor of their estate. In my husbands case, as he was on the executive committee of the Aboriginal Legal Service when died died, was deemed to have the right to have his estate, such as it was, handled by ALS.
This led to a long dispute between the Public Trustee and ALS and involved a search of records to determine if he was more than 1/4 aboriginal.
Copies of the records accessed from public records were sent to me as proof of his status and I was stunned by the amount of information on his family, going back to 1900.
The point of this ramble is to show that pretty well all aboriginal people would have a paper trail showing where they originated from. I know many who were adopted or fostered out as babies yet were easily able to track their families and get in contact with them.
Bruce Pascoe should have no problem proving his claim.
Posted by Big Nana, Tuesday, 14 January 2020 11:11:35 AM
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"Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton has asked the Australian Federal Police to consider the veracity of an allegation that celebrated author and academic Bruce Pascoe has benefited financially from fraudulently claiming to be Aboriginal, The Weekend Australian reported on Saturday.

The allegation was levelled against Mr Pascoe in an email written by Worimi businesswoman Josephine Cashman that was received by Mr Dutton on December 11, the Weekend Australian reports".
http://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/2020/01/11/dutton-refers-matter-bruce-pascoes-identity-federal-police

Worimi.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worimi
Posted by Is Mise, Tuesday, 14 January 2020 11:11:49 AM
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White settlement in the Kimberley occurred much later than over east, many missions just starting up around 1900, so when I arrived in the Kimberly in 1970, there were still people around who remembered life before white contact and many were still practising traditional hunting and burning.
My father in law spent his childhood in a very remote mission that saw white people for the first time in 1912 and his stories of their culture were fascinating and horrifying.
I have been told by many aboriginal people, including my husband and father in law, that burning bush was done for hunting purposes.
The benefits were many. The initial burn flushed out animals into the waiting spears, boomerangs and clubs of combined tribes in a communal hunt. After the fire had cooled, there were some edible, dead animals in the burnt area, waiting to be collected by the women.
The long term benefits were that the undergrowth was cleared away, making hunting much easier. After a few weeks, small green grass shoots appear in the burnt area and these attract insects like grasshoppers. The insects attract bush turkeys, goannas, etc.
As the grass gets longer, the larger animals appear. Kangaroos, wallabies, emus etc.
So one burnt area provides an ongoing food supply for some time. Not once did I hear anyone speak of any other reason for burning off.
Posted by Big Nana, Tuesday, 14 January 2020 11:25:15 AM
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Hi Big Nana,

Down this way in SA, attempts by whitefellas to gain some benefit assumed to be available to Indigenous people, are two a penny. All they have to do is walk into some Indigenous agency, claim they're Indigenous, and bingo, they're on their books, another state-funded customer.

A long time ago it seems, I worked in Indigenous student support at universities and every year, one or two would try it on. They usually got past the Indigenous organisation validating stage.

One bloke, blue-eyed and ginger (not that I've got anything against that) claimed to be a TS Islander; then, using dodgy-looking photocopies of birth certificates, claimed that his great-great-grandmother AND great-grandmother, were both Aboriginal - with a statement written on them (one supposedly in 1865, and one in 1888, strangely in the same handwriting) that the original names of the mothers of his gr-grandfather and grandfather were recorded incorrectly by the doctors involved, that the real mothers were both Aboriginal.

Perhaps doctors can get confused about whose legs they're looking up, even if - as in these cases - the 'original mothers' were both high-society ladies who they may have known socially (you may remember the names Bagshaw of Horwood-Bagshaw, and Chapman, the Name of the State).

As it happened, there was a biography upstairs in the uni Library about this bloke's gr-gr-grandfather, an early settler and landowner on a huge scale all over SA and later in the NT, and of his descendants. No mention of any Aboriginal wives, however. The men of the family tended to graduate as engineers, one later in charge of the Goolwa Barrage construction.

That bloke was later accepted into another, slacker, Indigenous program. It pays to keep trying.

Joe
Posted by loudmouth2, Tuesday, 14 January 2020 11:46:04 AM
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maybe the problem is making it so profitable to 'identify' as Indigenous. Wherever there is Government money numerous hands go up whether entitled or not.
Posted by runner, Tuesday, 14 January 2020 12:58:33 PM
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A simple DNA test is all that is required to establish aboriginal ancestry given the real deal will have no Neanderthal ancestry way back when, as do Europeans!

Mixed race will have some dilution of both characteristics And given the remnant Neanderthal gene is predominant they should not qualify as Bona Fida Aboriginal for special benefits or land rights, but be treated for all practical purposes as whites with white ancestors regardless of skin colour!

Given all the dodgy claims there needs to b a definitive test that'll stand up in court, otherwise, every boy and his dog is going to claim some Aboriginal or TS heritage?

And all the benefits and land rights that may accrue. Other than that folk of genuine aboriginal ancestry need to make out a legal will transferring any native title or portion thereof, as how they chose! And shouldn't allow elder humbug to change their rights!

There's so much humbug and a lot of it claimed as L.A.W. law!

Agree with big nana that the tradition of Mosaic burning had nothing to do with land management, just done for primitive hunting purposes and nothing more!
Alan B.
Posted by Alan B., Tuesday, 14 January 2020 2:54:17 PM
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Hi Alan,

Everybody in the world has some Neanderthal ancestry in their DNA except Africans - anybody whose distant ancestors travelled through the Middle East or Europe, including East Asians, Native Americans and Australian Indigenous people.

But yes, a DNA test would be conclusive, any Indigenous ancestry would be easily detected.

There are some amazing researchers who follow all this: Peter Bellwood, David Anthony, David Reich, the late wonderful Luigi Cavalli-Sforza - check them out on Google Scholar.

My bet is that Pascoe's DNA would show nothing but ancestry from northern Europe, specifically England.

Weird. To some people, you can just choose your DNA, whatever you wanted it to be. For others, people are simply what you would like them to be. I don't think it works quite that way.

But I'm looking forward to seeing how Ken Wyatt et al. twist and turn to 'prove' that Pascoe is Indigenous - or that it doesn't matter, anyway, because he might as well be because he says nice things about Blackfellas.

Joe
Posted by loudmouth2, Tuesday, 14 January 2020 3:20:49 PM
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so refreshing to read Big Nana and Joe's comments on this issue. Maybe we could set up a new class of people headed by Elizabeth Warren. Maybe just maybe some whitefellas luv the land as much as the blackfella.
Posted by runner, Tuesday, 14 January 2020 3:46:56 PM
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Well written concise expose of one on many charlatans who make similar claims. Having worked on supply remote communities with water and sewerage services, their world is very different from Urban Redfern or Leichardt (Sydney luvies are the 'mob' of urban 'avo toast' eaters live there, where they can be seen gathering their Avo's and sourdough from local trees early each morning). David Attenborough is soon to release a documentary on this wonderous species!

I only read Pascoe's fictional book to deal with colleagues who were parents of kids fed Pascoe's earthshattering words at school. What BS, and 'how dare they!' feed this to innocent kids as an alternate history that is "THE truth".
Posted by Alison Jane, Tuesday, 14 January 2020 5:42:12 PM
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Joe has laboured to establish a remarkable archive, and I hope Big Nanna is keeping a record of first hand experience of aboriginal society, at least to apply some check on baloney. The pre history of Australia dismissed by Pascoe was written after decades of rigorous field work and scholarship by archaeologists and anthropologists of international stature, including John Mulvaney, Isabelle Mc Bride and Rhys Jones.
Today, universities see a proliferation of professors and lecturers of “Indigenous Studies”. Bruce Pascoe a writer of literary fiction, non-fiction, poetry, essays and children's literature is Professor, Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research, University of Technology Sydney. And with Dark Emu, he has supplied/sold a text book for “Indigenous Studies”. Les Louis
Posted by Leslie, Tuesday, 14 January 2020 6:38:07 PM
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I have sensed a definite decline of general interest in matters indigenous here on OLO. Has the subject reached saturation point ?
Has Bruce Pascoe inadvertently done indigenous Australians a disfavour ?
Posted by individual, Tuesday, 14 January 2020 7:20:19 PM
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Hi Individual,

Yes, the AFP is supposed to be investigating the Pascoe Fiasco.

And yes, what Pascoe has done, both by fraudulently taking Indigenous positions and awards, AND with the forged documentation for his bogus research, will sooner or later be condemned as directly against the interests of Aboriginal people. But I fear not for a long time yet.

Actually, as for information, yes, there is an enormous amount around. I was just checking out a document from Queensland, 1933-1941, on:

http://www.cifhs.com/qldrecords/CPA-Correspondence%20Index.html

and was amazed to read again of the hundreds of places where Indigenous people (named in the thousands) were receiving rations or some other services. I put it on my web-site, www.firstsources.info , on the Queensland Page. The value of just this document - where names are associated with places, i.e. people are associated with country - is an indication of what's available.

Joe
Posted by loudmouth2, Wednesday, 15 January 2020 12:44:25 PM
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Loudmouth2,
re Name, Place, year, Number, Reason....
I'm lost with that, what do these relate to exactly ?

Are these names of people claiming Aboriginality/Indigenous status ? Is the year the year of Birth ? What is meant by Reason ?
Posted by individual, Wednesday, 15 January 2020 2:09:26 PM
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Loudmouth2,
You still there ?
Posted by individual, Saturday, 18 January 2020 7:55:28 AM
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Sorry, Individual, I didn't bookmark this thread.

http://www.cifhs.com/qldrecords/CPA-Correspondence%20Index.html

is a summary of the Card Index of the Qld Chief Protector of Aborigines from 1933 to 1941, of all Indigenous people who came to his attention for some reason, where they were at the time, and the year. And of course, if anyone was interested and could get to the Queensland Archives, they could find those cards.

My interest in this file is to do with the much larger range of places than would be expected if everybody had been rounded up and herded onto the dozen or so missions. In other words, Indigenous people were everywhere in Queensland, just like they were down here in SA, not in just a handful of places, mainly Missions. As well, the linking of place (country) and names (genealogy) is quite significant.

If you check any surname that you're familiar with, it may well corroborate what you know of where those various families may have been living in 1933-1941, whose descendants may still be living in those areas. Amongst the hundreds of surnames, there was one Pascoe, Jenny, living on Thursday Island in 1936 (does that mean anything significant in your area ?) Maybe Professor Pascoe could trace some link with her, and claim her as a distant cousin. He could gamble that nobody would know otherwise.

Joe
Posted by loudmouth2, Saturday, 18 January 2020 11:21:23 AM
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Loudmouth2,
cheers for that. My interest was aroused when I saw family names that are to this day not of Indigenous blood but claim indigenous heritage because they have been in the area for two or three generations ! Many however, are now of mixed blood & Land Rights & all other benefits for indigenous are demanded.
Posted by individual, Saturday, 18 January 2020 12:22:41 PM
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INdividual,

That's interesting, that the CPA included names of people who were not Indigenous ? So fraud has been around for a long time ?

Joe
Posted by loudmouth2, Saturday, 18 January 2020 12:56:50 PM
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fraud has been around for a long time ?
Loudmouth2,
Oh yes, and, almost as long as inaction by those entrusted at great expense to weed out fraud !
I suppose Superannuation etc is far too great an incentive for disincentive !
Posted by individual, Sunday, 19 January 2020 12:08:22 PM
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Great article Les Louis. I have read a lot about this saga including the two most relevant books and in my opinion Dark Emu is fiction from one end to the other. Furthermore, the aborigine ancestry of Mr Pascoe would seem to have been comprehensively debunked by a family tree with back up official documentation. This is deception on a grand scale that has been used to indoctrinate children with false and misleading information about aboriginal Australians. This must be rectified asap and if money and prizes were wrongly awarded there must be compensation and penalty paid.
Posted by Pliny of Perth, Monday, 20 January 2020 11:48:37 AM
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Wow! Professor Marcia Langton has said on face book in a full video interview that Pascoe (That is professor Pascoe to you hicks!) is certainly of aboriginal heritage as decided since the 1970's. Now my memory is that Gough reckoned anyone who was obviously aboriginal said someone else was aboriginal then that was good enough! Of course anyone who is aboriginal cannot be questioned about any facet of anything they say, sixty thousand years of experience should be enough surely?
Interestingly in the 1920's the judge in a Charlie Chaplin paternity case (Mum was very, very young) outright dismissed blood type proof that Charlie could not be the Father and found in favour of the young Miss. Have we progressed to this aboriginal DNA thingy yet? Beyond me I am afraid.
Posted by JBowyer, Monday, 20 January 2020 3:26:26 PM
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