As eminent anthropologist Peter Sutton and archaeologist Keryn Walshe meticulously demonstrate in Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers?, released this week by Melbourne University Press, Dark Emu is “poorly researched, distorts and exaggerates many old sources, ignores large bodies of information that do not support the author’s opinions (and) contains a large number of factual errors”.
Highlighting instance after instance in which Pascoe doctors key quotes, misrepresents dates, places and numbers, and miscites crucial references, they expose conduct that would be widely considered unacceptable.

And the problems they identify are, if anything, greater in the educational material Pascoe has influenced or prepared, which, they write, would “seriously mislead” young people and “should be withdrawn by any educational authority currently using it”.

However, Dark Emu’s glaring flaws do not just lie in the distortions of fact and authority on which it bases its wildly implausible claims; even more troubling is its fundamental disregard for Indigenous culture.

In effect, what it presents as admirable in precolonial Indigenous society is not what makes it distinctive but what brings it closer to us: the alleged complexity of its technology; the scale of its tribal gatherings; the supposed durability and number of its dwellings.

Dark Emu’s rigidly ethnocentric conception of merit, in which quantity is confused for quality, is, as Sutton and Walshe wryly observe, resolutely “Texan”.

But to view Indigenous culture through that prism is utterly misguided. That culture was not oriented to material affluence, and even less to technological change.

Rather, Sutton and Walshe write, “for the Old People, making a living and obtaining materials for artefacts were inseparable from their commitment to a spiritual understanding of the origin of species, to conservative values in relation to change and to a cosmology in which economics had to be in conformity to ancestral authority”. They lived, in other words, in what philosopher Charles Taylor has described as a “world brimming with pres­ences”, in which the spiritual and the temporal, the natural and the supernatural, were fused within a cosmic order that was not to be manipulated and transformed — as it was in the West — but revered and maintained.

What we would now call faith was not a distinct sphere of life; it was inseparable from life itself, there forever, from the Dreaming, whose latent powers, including for the cyclical regrowth of plants and animals, were to be preserved through obedience to its demands. And where technologies — such as their Melanesian neighbours’ agricultural and horticultural methods — had not been sanctioned by the Dreaming, they rejected them, not out of ignorance but out of respect for the transcendent foundations of earthly existence.

In contrast, Pascoe’s caricature – which “consistently pushes the evidence of Aboriginal subsistence beyond what it can factually bear and into a European model of economic life … as if the more European the Old People can be made to seem, the better” – robbed that world of its spirituality. That certainly made Dark Emu all the more attractive to the staunchly secular “progressives”, who are its fiercest defenders; but it also made Pascoe incapable of understanding, much less explaining, the Indigenous world’s stability and persistence.

Ultimately, it condemned his book to being little more than “a popularised mythology of history” that “does not respect or do justice to” the societies it purports to admire.

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And this is the crux of the matter.

By using the indigenous title, he and WOKE sycophants attempt to deny the truth, facts and scientific review by screaming "RACIST" at any who deny the lies and fabrications.

Much the same as muzzos immediately jump on anyone questioning ANYTHING they say or do with their cult, Pasco followers jump and scream "BOGOT", "RACIST" stick their fingers in their ears and hum "tra la la I cant hear you" 

Truth, facts and honesty are furthest from their minds.
Most importantly is that they attempt to make Aboriginals out to be more than they ever have been.
Hunter Gatherers who had not even reached the stone age technology.
They did not build houses
They did not farm
They couldn't even lash a rock to a stick

Even the primitives of New Guinea were more advanced, and they had no materials that could have been mined to make metal weapons.

Why they need to do this is beyond me.
Why not simply accept the fact that Australian aboriginals were simply primitives, that was 200 years ago.
They have had ample opportunity to advance to the same as the more advanced colonizers who came and rescued them from extinction.
Or is it simply that they have no wish or drive to advance beyond parasitical life?

White abbos are the worst
Just enough aboriginal to know how primitive they were
and just enough white to be embarrassed and angry about it.

Brian Ross wrote on Jun 17^th, 2021 at 6:20pm:

You posting this same repetitious bs does nothing to support Pascoes plagerised, selectively interpreted fairytales. Tsk tsk tsk dearie dearie whatta wanker

Valkie wrote on Jun 18^th, 2021 at 8:03am:


And here's Matty, trying ever so hard not to reignite any culture wars.

Quite so, no?

Karnal wrote on Jun 18^th, 2021 at 10:23am:



Identifying you as "Anal K" correctly nails your balls to the floor, paki bvgger. Your developmental stuntedness is Bwianesque, as is your rejoicing in it.
Btw, you forgot to say "you?". Missed your verbal tick medication suppository?

Grappler Deep State Feller wrote on Jun 18^th, 2021 at 10:55am:


You said that already, dear. We suggested you prove it. You've been yeah-but-no-butting ever since.

The old boy held back from calling you stupid and mendacious. Most generous of him, no?

Quite so.

MY doctor is a nice dark chap from Nigeria. How many dark Aboriginal Doctors are there?