Australia has solved its Racial Inequity problem by decreeing that any white public intellectual who feels like it can declare himself an Aboriginal and the court system will come down like a ton of bricks on anybody who scoffs.
This actually seems like a pretty good solution for America. Why not let a bunch of WASPs like former Republican congressman Bob Barr, a near identical double for Obama spiritual adviser Rev. Jeremiah Wright, declare themselves to be undeniably black and thus spiritually superior?
In the New York Times, Kevin Spacey-lookalike Damien Cave, who is a truly terrible excuse for a human being, extrapolates on Bruce Pascoe’s Carlos Castaneda-like fantasy about Australian Aborigines:
He Wants to Save the Present With the Indigenous Past
Bruce Pascoe’s book “Dark Emu” sparked a reconsideration of Australian history. Now he hopes to use his writing to revive Aboriginal community.
By Damien Cave
Aug. 20, 2020WALLAGARAUGH, Australia — Bruce Pascoe stood near the ancient crops he has written about for years and discussed the day’s plans with a handful of workers….
“What happened in Australia was a real high point in human development,” he said. “We need to go back there.” Writing, he added, can only do so much.
“Dark Emu” is where he laid out his case. Published in 2014 and reissued four years later, the book sparked a national reconsideration of Australian history by arguing that the continent’s first peoples were sophisticated farmers, not roaming nomads.
Australia’s education system tended to emphasize the struggle and pluck of settlers. “Dark Emu” shifted the gaze, pointing to peaceful towns and well-tended land devastated by European aggression and cattle grazing. In a nation of 25 million people, the book has sold more than 260,000 copies….
Critics, including Andrew Bolt, a conservative commentator for News Corp Australia, have accused Pascoe of seeking attention and wealth by falsely claiming to be Aboriginal while peddling what they call an “anti-Western fantasy.”
Asked by email why he’s focused on Pascoe in around a dozen newspaper columns since November, Bolt replied: “Have fun talking to white man and congratulating yourself on being so broad-minded as to believe him black.”
Pascoe said “Bolty” is obsessed with him and struggles with nuance. He’s offered to buy him a beer, discuss it at the pub and thank him: “Dark Emu” sales have doubled since Bolt’s campaign against Pascoe intensified.
His fans argue that kind of banter exemplifies why he and his book have succeeded. His voice, honed over decades of teaching, writing fiction and poetry — and telling stories over beers — is neither that of an academic nor a radical. He’s a lyrical essayist, informative and sly.
Pascoe’s big rediscovery is that, according to some Australian explorers, some Aborigines lived in huts.
From Quadrant:
Bruce Pascoe’s Whoppers: In a Class of Their Own
27th May 2020 Comments (22)Peter O’Brien
‘When you’re on a good thing, stick to it’. Like most kids growing up in the Fifties and Sixties, Bruce Pascoe would have learned that adage. And it has stood him in good stead, certainly in recent years. On that principle he has managed to parlay the extraordinary success of his fictional history Dark Emu into a children’s version, countless speaking gigs and media appearances, a two-part ABC documentary to be screened later this year and a digibook on the ABC’s Education Webpage.
The same could be said of his Aboriginality. Why claim to be only Yuin, or Burnurong, or a Tasmanian Aborigine when you could be all three? A member of not just one but three mobs! You can’t get more Aboriginal than that, I wouldn’t have thought. But that’s another story. When I embarked on the Bitter Harvest project, I did so because both Keith Windschuttle and I were horrified at the idea that Pascoe’s faux history would establish itself in our classrooms. That was our prime motivation in exposing Dark Emu. Keith knew, from bitter personal experience, that facts don’t matter when it comes to much of what passes for history these days. But it certainly shocked me when, amongst others, the ABC, which has vigorously promoted Pascoe, simply ignored even the existence of my expose let alone any arguments I presented.
But, undeterred, we soldier on and now take a look at Pascoe’s ABC Education presence, which can be found here. It comprises a prologue and 14 four-minute video clips on various topics such as Sturt’s encounter with a large tribe of Aborigines at Coopers Creek. This is a short summary of an episode described in Dark Emu where Pascoe claims, untruthfully, that this encounter took place in the desert, that Sturt and his party were dying and that the Aborigines rescued them. In another one he covers Aboriginal housing wherein he first sets up a strawman along the lines that white people think Aborigines lived under a piece of bark leant up against a tree (many of them did, in fact). He then quotes from Sturt and Mitchell to show that the Aborigines built huts of varying styles and sizes, somewhat undermining his basic premise of white ignorance. He describes these dwellings as ‘houses’, which they clearly are not, at least not in the way we would think of a house. He seems to think that the fact they built shelters for themselves (an activity at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs) is somehow significant.
