Steele,

“As I siad(sic) his book 'Dark Emu' is badly written, badly edited and , to be charitable, somewhat mishandles the truth.”

Good on you, you picked up on 'siad' and used 'sic' correctly, which indicates that you might be better than Pascoe.

Shew me where Mitchell writes about towns of a thousand; Pascoe's farming claim is the most demonstrably false of his often weird assumptions.

Steele,

"He refers to the 1848 journal of Thomas Mitchell recounting that he 'rode through nine miles of stooked grain' - sheaves of grain cut and left to dry.

Mr Pascoe has stated that it was this journal, which he picked up for $8 at a second-hand bookstore, that kicked off the research that led to the book.

However, what the journal actually said was that Mitchell: 'counted nine miles along the river, in which we rode through this grass only, reaching to our saddle-girths.

'Dry heaps of this grass, that had been pulled expressly for the purpose of gathering the seed, lay along our path for many miles.'"

Perhaps you'd like to comment on the above claim?

Looks like hunter gatherers at work not farmers.

What is a town ? According to Pascoe, it's a conurbation of, say, a thousand people, plopped down anywhere. In real life, as anyone knows working or driving in country areas, it's a conurbation surrounded by perhaps miles of productive enterprises, usually farming, fruit-blocks, wheat-farms, etc. i.e. where many of the people in the town - and out on those properties - work. A town does not exist out of nothing.

Pascoe writes of Captain Sturt coming across a 'town' (Sturt doesn't refer to the gathering that he met as a 'town') somewhere up between Lake Frome and Cooper's Creek. Currently there would no actual town within hundreds of kilometres of there, except the mighty metropolis of Innamincka. In fact, in that quadrilateral between Alice Springs, Birdsville, Innamincka and Marree, there are current no towns unless we count sheep stations as towns.

Towns exist for a reason. They don't just magically appear out of thin air. In most early peasant societies, and even many today, they are represented by what one might call hamlets, of fifty or a hundred people, usually related, with everybody working on the surrounding land.

Many of our ancestors, like Pascoe's, are descended from English and Welsh and Irish and Scottish migrants, who came from such out-of-the-way hamlets where work opportunities were withering in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, impelling them to migrate. Pascoe's all seemed to have been free men, not convicts, which suggests that they were relatively affluent, able to afford six months at sea and then setting up in one of the colonies. No doubt destroying all evidence of previous towns in the process, somehow.

Hence, according to Pasoe, no evidence of any towns around Lake Frome (salt, by the way, Bruce, with not even sheep stations nearby) and Cooper's Creek.

Maybe it IS possible to fool all of the people for at least part of the time.

Joe

Still haven't made up your kinds?

Dear Is Mise,

It seems all you are arguing is the use by Pascoe of the word 'stooked' to describe the “Dry heaps of this grass, that had been pulled expressly for the purpose of gathering the seed”.

Here is a stock photo of some stooked grass.

http://stock.adobe.com/sk/images/a-stook-of-barely-piled-together-for-harvest/254807879

Certainly looks like dry heaps of grass gathered for the purpose of gathering seed.

What is your issue?

Steele,

You miss the point entirely and as you are obviously not stupid, you must be missing it deliberately.

Pascoe said that Mitchell wrote that he rode through nine miles of stoked grain.
That is not what Mitchell wrote, Mitchell said that he saw grass pulled for removal of the grain during a nine mile ride through such grass.

Pascoe, as an educated man, should also know that grain is not stocked, the grass is stocked but it is impossible to stock grain, a small point but valid in the context of poor writing and poor editing, it'd never get through in an Undergraduate's essay without the welding of the red pencil.