cont'd ...

Marks tells us that Andrew Bolt who rose to prominence
during the early 2000s by attacking the Australian Human
Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's 1997 "Bringing
Them Home" Report into the Stolen Generations wrote his first
"Dark Emu" column for the "Herald Sun" on November 17, 2019.

Marks says that in it and many since, Bolt relies heavily on
an anonymous website, "Dark Emu Exposed" which Marks tells us
purports to "expose" and "debunk" what it asserts are the books
many myths, exaggerations and "fabrications".

In the same vein as regular "Quadrant"contributor Peter O'Brien
produced a book - "Bitter Harvest: The Illusion of Aboriginal
Agriculture in Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu" published in Dec. 2019
by Quadrant Books.

So here we have how Australian intellectual life now works.
On the one side Marks says - sit those who see the need to
synthesise Indigenous and settler experience, hitherto
about as divergent in our histories as one can imagine.

On the other, those who strive to resist this synthesis and
retain pride in the colonial story, This has dramatically
re-organised our national culture. But all this attacking
does not resolve the issues. And will undoubtedly
continue for quite a while.

The Dank Emu is at best a work of fiction. The "evidence" that Pascoe uses is apocryphal at best and the conclusions drawn are tenuous.

That this novella is being panned by respectable researchers is unsurprising.

Farmers of Hunter Gatherers?

"Dark Emu" is actually not being panned by researchers,
certainly not by Sutton and Walshe. They treat it
quite respectfully with the twin virtues of
rigour and readability.

The "Dark Emu"debate needs to be read carefully,
keeping an open mind. The book's focus is on both
material and spiritual economies and their misinterpretation.
Despite racist commentary of some, this is not an
exclusively right or left wing issue of a bunfight.

Bruce Pascoe's "Dark Emu" will continue to be granted
recognition, if not immortality.
Sutton and Walshe's "Dark Emu Debate" will undoubtedly be
acclaimed as a critique of Pascoe's book. Which I do
intend to read once it becomes available.

Those of us who read Dark Emu without the jaundiced I-want-this-to-be-true bias always knew it was a load of rubbish. It took a particular gullibility to accept even its less controversial assertions as anything other than mindless codswallop.

Its nice to see that the academic community has roused itself enough to now address the issue. Way too late, but that's how academia works.

The problem is that original hoopla over the lies in the book are already well embedded in the 'thinking' of those of a certain leaning and will remain there irrespective of the revelations now confirmed. Indeed, such is the media these days that many who were exposed to the lies will never hear of the truth.

“Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” Swift.

""Dark Emu" is actually not being panned by researchers,
certainly not by Sutton and Walshe. "

Struth....

" In page after page, Sutton and Walshe accuse Pascoe of a “lack of true scholarship”, ignoring Aboriginal voices, dragging respect for traditional Aboriginal culture back into the Eurocentric world of the colonial era, and “trimming” colonial observations to fit his argument."

"it is “littered with unsourced material, is poorly researched, distorts and exaggerates many points, selectively emphasises evidence to suit those opinions, and ignores large bodies of information that do not support the author’s opinions”.

Not being panned??...honestly, the lengths some will go to self-deceive.

Foxy,

Given that academics typically use tactful language, the commentary on Dank Emu is about as damning as it can get:

https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/author-bruce-pascoes-bestselling-aboriginal-history-book-dark-emu-debunked/news-story/2f0e0da56ce70a008a6cbe3aa836a9af

"Other experts have also raised doubts, including Australian National University anthropologist Ian Keen, who described the evidence for farming as “deeply problematic”, and renowned historian Geoffrey Blainey, who said there was “no evidence that there was ever a permanent town in pre-1788 Australia with 1000 inhabitants who gained most of their food by farming”, as claimed in Dark Emu.

Now two leading experts – anthropologist Peter Sutton and archaeologist Keryn Walshe – have taken aim at Pascoe in a new book, Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate, set to be released by Melbourne University Press next week."