Wrong rewrites of our history won’t add up to respect
It’s frustrating watching Bruce Pascoe desperately trying to keep his ‘Dark Emu’ show on the road after a pair of uni academics exposed many of his inaccurate claims about Aboriginal history.
It’s even worse watching the left contort themselves trying to be polite after his nonsense was debunked – or ignore the fact altogether.
Turns out there’s no basis for his claims that Aboriginal people lived in villages of thousands, built stone houses, sowed fields of crops, or were the world’s first bakers.
Not that we needed to be told again. Commentators like Andrew Bolt have been pointing out the problems with Pascoe's book for years. Peter O’Brien’s book Bitter Harvest also went through all of Dark Emu’s sources.
But none of this stopped Pascoe finally returning serve.
“I think what is happening … is that we’re having a difference of opinion about history,” he said.
“We’re looking at the same facts and we’re having a difference of opinion about the facts. That’s not a bad thing.”
It’s not a difference of opinion, it’s fact over fiction.
He reckons he is talking to “a lot of archaeologists and anthropologists in Australia and overseas and they keep sending me corroborating material”.
Pascoe can claim to have contact with unnamed anthropologists and historians, but he has no connection to Aboriginal people who still live connected to land, culture and language.
This modern problem stems from the romanticism of Aboriginal culture by those who are completely removed from it.
It is deeply insulting when those who are completely removed from Indigenous culture unashamedly rewrite our history and the woke accept it just because they can make unsubstantiated claims of Aboriginal descent.
At the same time, Aboriginal people with no other ancestry but Aboriginal ancestry are continually ignored, disregarded and are among Australia’s most marginalised – all because they do not have the luxury of an education and all because they are completely misrepresented by people like Pascoe.
This has to stop. It removes us further from the truth and it contributes to the demise of the marginalised.
This is not respect.
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