The Critics of Bruce Pascoe and his book, Dark Emu
This blog post contains a summary of the critics of Bruce Pascoe and his book, Dark Emu.
Our website, Dark Emu Exposed, was close to the first place publicly where a detailed analysis of Dark Emu, as well as the claims of its author Bruce Pascoe, were publicized.
Other critics then appeared from mid to late 2019 starting with articles that appeared in Quadrant magazine.
Figure 1 - Results for a Search of ‘Dark Emu’ topics at Quadrant Online here
Figure 3 - Peter O’Brien’s book, Bitter Harvest, here
Figure 4 - Discussion on the errors inherent in Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu here
Figure 5 - A book by academics Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe refutting Bruce Pascoe and his thesis in Dark Emu here
What Drove Bruce Pascoe and his Thesis in Dark Emu?
In our opinion, the driving force behind Dark Emu was purely political. We believe that the political aim was to show that Aboriginal societies were not ‘mere’ hunter-gatherer societies in 1788, but instead Pascoe wanted modern Australians, particularly the young, to believe that Aboriginal societies were settled agricultural communities. If mainstream Australia could be indoctrinated into believing this, then we believe that Pascoe and his political allies would then push the narrative that the British had broken eighteenth-century International Law by siezing the land of an agricultural people without agreeing to a treaty first. Pascoe hoped to convince Australians that Australia was not ‘settled’ by colonisation, but rather it should have been ‘ceded’ by treaty.
This new Dark Emu narrative was believed to have been a major plank in the strategy for Constitutional Recognition. That is probably why Bruce Pascoe and his Dark Emu received such support from political Aboriginal heavy-weights, Professor Marcia Langton and Indigenous Affairs Minister, Ken Wyatt. Their support of Pascoe’s dodgy theory raised many eye-brows at the time given that, of all people, these two should have known the real history of their own ancestors better than Pascoe.
