Young Dark Emu and Bruce Pascoe's Eve Pownall Award

Today, the Children’s Book Council of Australia announced that Bruce Pascoe’s Young Dark Emu was the winner of the Eve Pownall Award for information books. Earlier this year, bigots associated with a magazine called Quad Rant (or some such) started a withering fire, directed at the CBCA for daring to shortlist the book for the prize. It was wrong, they said, without evidence, so it wasn’t an information book. Keep this unsupported allegation of a dearth of evidence in mind, as it’s common practice among bigots to make claims like this. It seems that if they disagree with something, it isn't evidence.

The CBCA must withdraw the shortlisting, they demanded. Now it has won the top prize, I imagine they will be foaming at the mouth. At the back of their complaint was the fact that author Bruce Pascoe says, from the viewpoint of an Indigenous man and scholar, that the life of the first Australians was a lot more complex than we had been led to believe by the spotty Europeans who had invaded this land. But Pascoe wasn’t expressing opinions about what was right and what was wrong: he looked at what the whitefellas had reported, and dealt with facts, whitefella facts, recorded by whitefellas.

That's hard to get around, and in the Culture Wars, bigots don’t like that. They call people like me “Black-Armband-Wearers”, but that’s OK: we say they’re all wearing white blindfolds, so the honours are even. The other, and nastier side is what they don’t dare say up-front: Pascoe looks like a whitefella, so he can’t be a blackfella.

I’m clearly a whitefella, albeit one of mixed race, and I’m a trained biologist so I know quite a bit about race and culture. I also write Australian history, so I know a lot of things that get left out of Australian history in our schools, like the items Pascoe has dug out, so I’m well-placed to examine his evidence, and see if it stacks up.

School history is commonly a matter of learning lists of names, dates and bullet points. School history as it relates to explorers rarely mentions the Indigenous men, women and boys who accompanied the explorers, except when they can be cast as “faithful servants”. School history never mentions that most of the explorers followed what they called “native roads”, and how many people know that this began in February 1788?

Those who have read my works of history will know about this sort of thing. My books have been published at various times by Allen and Unwin, Murdoch Books (Pier 9), Five Mile Press and in the last decade, the National Library of Australia.

I began my working life, fully intending to be a pre- and post-Islamic Mediaeval Javanese historian, but when the 1965 coup in Indonesia banjaxed my hopes, I became a botanist instead (as one does), but I retained the synoptic viewpoint of the historian and carried it into my scientific work.

As a writer (I don’t call myself “an author”, it’s too pretentious), my writings have mainly dealt with either science and technology, or with Australian history. If people are going to criticise the Eve Pownall judges’ decision in Young Dark Emu, because somebody claims the judges lack historical training, I must be considered well-equipped to assess both the work, and the judges’ decision. Quick answer: I endorse both, totally.

I have a policy of not arguing with creationists, climate deniers, anti-vaxxers or bigots, because life’s too short to waste trying to rescue sub-humans who cannot connect their other neuron or express themselves clearly. This is a statement of fact, and what follows is a set of facts, not opinions.

The Eve Pownall awards are for information books, and they come from the Children’s Book Council of Australia. I know a fair amount about these awards, because I won one in 2010, I was runner-up in 2007, and I have been “long-listed” a number of times since then, including this year, when I missed the short list. I didn’t mind missing out, because the book I saw as the pick of the crop, Young Dark Emu, was there.

I’m a harsh critic of bilge, and my other main professional skill is in spotting fraud and dishonesty. Because I have written in great detail about Australian history, I was more ready than most to assess Young Dark Emu, and I did so early this year, knowing that assorted Quadrant gibbons were hurling lumps of whatever gibbons hurl.

I attacked his sources and the premises as a conscientious Devil’s Advocate, even though I agreed with Pascoe’s general position. He and his book passed my audit with flying colours, and I have a spreadsheet that demonstrates this. I will share my spreadsheet with supporters and critics of Pascoe, but I will require proof of professional standing from the critics.

I say this because the lead stirrer in this matter seems to be a Queensland housewife (a dismissive pejorative that I stand by) who claims to be a retired teacher, although looking at some of her letters to the Canberra Times in the 1980s, when she appears to have sold dinghies, I am inclined to doubt this. She does not engage in reasoned debate—consider this 2018 letter she fired off to The Australian (a newspaper for which I worked, 30 years earlier):

‘Dave Sharma says “like most Australians, I accept the evidence for man-made climate change” (“The swing with a sting in its tail: why Wentworth was such a painful lesson”, 27/10). The assumption that most Australians agree with him is unsupported.’

Some two thirds of a century ago (yeah, I’m approaching advanced middle age), I was a debater, and enjoyed nothing more than massacring the sort of idiot who relied on assertions that red was blue. They follow this up with a truculent “So there!”, and try to change the subject: this may work in schoolyard bullying, but rebuttal-by-thuggish-denial fails dismally in intellectual circles.

Hackett calls herself “an author” on the strength of a single book, a travel memoir, published in 2002 by New Holland, a reputable publishing house. Apparently she has also self-published six booklets of local history.

Riffing on Martin Amis’ infamous comment about writing for children firmly, I suppose if I were brain-damaged, I might write a local history, though even then, I would draw the line at letters to the editor, or writing for Quadrant. I want the 50-odd books I have had published to be my memorial, not some vile drivel in a hate mag funded by shady sources.

Hackett does not engage in scholarship of any sort: rather, she takes in the washing of others. She cites somebody called Russell Marks who (according to her) criticised an account of an event involving Charles Sturt: the objection is about ascertaining the latitude and longitude of an event. Pascoe had credited two friends with identifying the location, but the Quadrant gnomes didn’t like it, because it struck them as unnecessary.

‘His [Sturt’s] journal also records that the incident took place on the 3-4 November, as anyone who had actually read the journals would know. These details can be verified on pages 70 and 71 of Sturt’s Narrative of an Expedition into Central Australia. Put another way, there is no way that Pascoe’s researchers could not have stumbled upon the fact that Sturt had done their work for them.’

The event is described on Sturt’s page 76, the location was identified on page 70 (not “pages 70 and 71” as stated), and more to the point, if you are going to play the nit-picking pedant game, you need to win your spurs first. Sturt's Narrative was in two volumes,  the text referred to here is to be found in volume 2! (Now do you see why I don’t waste time on these people?)

While we are at it, the Marks objection, as cited by Hackett, is said to be to a footnote to a statement on page 98, but it isn’t a footnote at all: what they cite is plain text on pages 100 – 101. Any Year 8 of mine who made a hash of citations like that would soon be set straight, but why did Pascoe’s friends determine a date and place for Sturt to be fed on roast duck and bread in the first place?

Marks is clearly unfamiliar with Sturt’s eminently readable but slightly sprawling style. Items which are six pages apart in the journal, like (a) the estimated position and (b) Sturt’s feast might have been near each other or not. That was the way Sturt wrote, and I know, because over several years, earlier in this century, I read all of the published explorers’ journals, and even some of the unpublished ones. I created a massive database, and that allowed me to assess the content of ‘Dark Emu’.

The simple fact is that most of the early writers didn’t ‘get it’. ‘Blacks’, they thought, were savages who did nothing and knew nothing. The “dispersals” (killings) went on, as Emily Creaghe noted in 1883:

‘Mr. Watson has 40 pairs of blacks’ ears nailed round the walls collected during raiding parties after the loss of many cattle speared by the blacks.’

As a scientist, I am aware of the shortcomings of the Australian biota as agricultural material: without imported plants and seeds, farming as we invaders know it wasn’t possible, but land management was, and Pascoe reminds us of just how far this went. It was far more than firestick farming: there was careful cropping, and even planting in places.

Of course, what we are ignoring is the elephant in the room: Pascoe doesn’t ‘look black’, they say, so he must be a fraud! I am 25% Scots, but I have a Scots name, and my heart lifts to the skirl of the pipes, because I was brought up that way. Culture is learned at the parental knee, not inherited in the DNA.

My father knew an Indigenous piper whose party trick was to play ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That’. My party trick was to sit at my Scots/Welsh father’s feet at Hogmanay, as he warmed up the pipes. I’m a bleepin’ Scot and I’ve got a sgian dubh for your black heart if you say otherwise!

Now just to play the Hackett bluff-them-with-denial game, she says: “No qualified scholars or reputable academics agree with Pascoe’s claims. The accepted scientific and academic view is that the Australian Aborigines were hunter-gatherers.”

This qualified scholar says “bollocks”. So there.

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