A Philosopher, an Economist and an Aborigine walk into bar....
Posted 28 September 2026
By The Professor
"Can a soufflé rise twice?"
- Paul Keating 1989
“Pascoe is a fascinating and unique writer. Pascoe is widely touted as Australia’s most influential Indigenous historian. It is a role he seems to revel in, carefully cultivating his public image. His white hair has grown out, his beard is longer. He has an air of self-conscious mysticism, a Zen-like aura that I’m sure many believe adds to his authenticity. Pascoe has taken to being photographed with a red headband: a traditional signifier of the Aboriginal man of high degree…
The storyteller is the embodiment of the story itself. This personification is why people come to listen. The crowd falls under the storyteller’s spell. The storyteller is transparent to the transcendent. The light on our dark path. The storyteller takes us to a land of magic and wonder to reveal essential truths…
Pascoe is shrewd. I can see in him something of the oldtime carny. He’s a spruiker in a travelling medicine show. He is a conjurer. Pascoe invites people to disbelieve their eyes. The white man vanishes and behold, the black man appears…This is an illusion for a white audience. Crucially, the conjurer is not a conman. Pascoe is not deceiving his audience. Far from it. They believe because they want to believe.
Pascoe knows this… Listen to how he describes his Aboriginal awakening: “as if I have been led at night to a hill overlooking country I have never seen”. He is smart enough to play on the mythical archetype: the hero called to the forest, who must find the grail and return to save others.
Pascoe has spun his own myth, replete with days in the wilderness; overturning the gatekeepers of received wisdom; his moment of revelation; and, crucially, his heroic return. He’s had a vision and through him we can be led to his Australia never-never land.”
- Stan Grant, Shifting Ground, The Monthly, May 26, 2021
The Guardian Online have published an article on Bruce Pascoe’s latest book, The European Mind.
Contrary to perhaps Pascoe’s expectation, the Dark Emu Exposed team will not be paying attention to this new book, beyond this post and the note that we wish him well.
We fully appreciate the dedication and work that goes into writing any book. Our policy is to give authors 5/10 for writing the book - how the rating goes after reading it - towards ten if it is good, or towards zero if it is a dog - depends on the author. Is that barking I hear?
If anyone reads The European Mind and wishes to provide their review, we will be happy to publish it.
ps: Dark Emu Exposed’s very strong critiques of Pascoe’s prior books, Dark Emu and Young Dark Emu , were due to the political nature of those books and what we perceived as the highly immoral and unethical, and indeed potentially racist belief that a “white-man” * would deign to tell Aboriginal people that they were farmers and not, as they knew, members of hunter-gathering societies.
*According to the publicly available genealogical records it appears the Bruce Pascoe is mistaken to believe he is, as he claims of “Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian ancestry .”
