Following these events, Wyatt dismissed Cashman from her advisory role, saying her position was “no longer tenable”.īut according to Josephine Cashman, there was a simpler reason Ken Wyatt sacked her. She produced a letter denouncing Pascoe from an Indigenous elder which the elder later withdrew and claimed was false.
Aboriginal businesswoman Josephine Cashman was among many to critique Pascoe - including his shaky claims of Indigenous ancestry.Īt the time she spoke up, Cashman was serving as a senior advisor to Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Ken Wyatt. Until recently, those who raised concerns about Bruce Pascoe and Dark Emu have been dismissed by the corporate media as agitators and even racists. In a new book, Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate, anthropologist Peter Sutton and archaeologist Keryn Walshe claim Professor Bruce Pascoe’s work is “littered with unsourced material”, uses selective quotations and exaggerates “weak evidence”… Two leading Australian academics have savaged the best-selling Indigenous history book Dark Emu for being riddled with mistakes, accusing its author Bruce Pascoe of lacking “true scholarship” and ignoring Aboriginal voices. The piece published by both The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald drew national attention: And this week, even the newspapers that once defended him have acknowledged as much. Dark Emu has since inspired a children’s book and a stage play, and is being taught in Australian schools.īut Pascoe’s scholarship is shoddy. The book sold a quarter of a million copies and attracted some of Australia’s most prestigious literary awards, including Book of the Year and the Indigenous Writers’ Prize in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing. Dark Emu even claimed that this history goes back 120,000 years - twice that of current scholarship. Pascoe’s book asserted that before European colonisation, Aboriginal communities were not ‘hunter-gatherers’ but used complex farming practices, baked bread, built houses, lived in large settlements and invented democracy. Written by Bruce Pascoe in 2014, Dark Emu claimed to recover a forgotten history of Indigenous Australia.
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