The COVID-19 pandemic and Delta Variant outbreak reveal that the Morrison and Berejiklian governments policy responses with regard to vulnerable populations appear to come from Australia's 18th Century colonial past rather than the 21st Century

 

The Guardian, 30 August 2021:

The federal government was warned 18 months ago of the urgent need to protect the Covid-hit town of Wilcannia, leaked correspondence seen by Guardian Australia shows, with an Aboriginal health service pleading for immediate help at the time to prevent an outbreak.

The Maari Ma Aboriginal health corporation wrote to the Indigenous Australians minister, Ken Wyatt, in March 2020, outlining “grave fears” for the far western New South Wales town if Covid were to spread to the vulnerable population there.

“Warnings from around the world are clear: the earlier we prepare and act, the better the outcomes will be. We cannot wait until the first case turns up in the community, or worse, the first hospital case presents,” the letter said.

“Basic mathematics says that by the time our first hospital patient presents, around 100 cases will already exist in the community, and this is based on best case modelling.”

The health service says its warnings appear to have been ignored, with no “tangible plan” put in place.

As of Monday, Wilcannia had recorded 69 coronavirus cases in a population of 720, the highest transmission rate in NSW.

A second letter from the health service, also seen by the Guardian, was sent last week to Scott Morrison, calling on him to take control of the “unfolding humanitarian crisis” in Wilcannia.

It said contrary to assurances by Gladys Berejiklian that the situation was under control, it was in fact “chaotic, and the mistakes and problems are mounting”.

“We do our work quietly, and try to fly under the radar of media and public attention as much as possible,” the letter to the prime minister said. “We cannot, however, sit quietly while the catastrophe in the Far West, and western NSW more broadly, continues to unfold.”

The second letter was copied to the NSW premier and the federal health minister, Greg Hunt..

The remote town of Wilcannia has been ravaged by the Covid outbreak in NSW.
Photograph: Chris Graham/New Matilda

.....Maari Ma has confirmed the contents of the letter, and that it was sent in March last year. Friday’s letter to the prime minister was also copied to several other state and federal politicians.

In that second letter, Maari Ma laid out its frustrations that its warnings to the federal government had been ignored. It said it had also written to Berejiklian last year.

“Disappointingly, no tangible plan was in place prior to this outbreak that could have been easily implemented. As a result, we’ve been playing catch up from day one,” it said.

“Our systems and services are ill-prepared, actions are too slow to be implemented, our responses have been sub standard, existing resources and expertise is not sufficient, new resources and expertise (for example the Army and Ausmat) are not being used to their full potential.”

Read the full article here.

March 2020 Maari Ma Health Aboriginal Corporation letter to the Australian Minister for Indigenous Australians & Liberal MP for Hasluck Ken Wyatt.

Maari Ma Health Aboriginal Corporation letter addressed to the Minister for Indigenous Australians, Hon Ken... by clarencegirl on Scribd

As of last Tuesday, it was reported that the predominately Aboriginal resident population of Wilcannia township in the Far West Local Health District had recorded 73 locally acquired COVID-19 cases in a population of 720, the highest transmission rate in NSW.

According to The Guardian on 31 August 2021:

The peak group representing all Aboriginal health services in NSW said both governments’ response to the Covid outbreak in the west of NSW “is becoming a joke”.

Aboriginal health groups met with the head of the federal government’s Covid vaccination program Lt Gen John Frewen on Monday afternoon to discuss a national Indigenous vaccine strategy, but the NSW Aboriginal health and medical research council was surprised there was not already a strategy in place.

Closer to home.......

In a media release on 31 August 2021, the Northern NSW Local Health District advised:

NSW Health is investigating whether there are any potential venues of concern in Northern NSW after a person tested positive to COVID-19 several days after visiting the Casino area.

This person is not a resident of Northern NSW Local Health District and is no longer in the area.

At this stage, NSW Health can confirm the case was infectious in the community on Saturday 21 August, and investigations are continuing.

NSW Health will announce any close contact locations if and when they are determined.

As a precautionary measure, a mobile testing clinic is being set up at Muli Muli Aboriginal community on Wednesday 1 September. People in this community are urged to come forward for testing if they have symptoms of COVID-19 or are concerned they may have come into contact with the case.

National Parks & Wildlife consulting over future of Wollumbin summit track

 

Wollumbin
IMAGE: Visit North Coast NSW

Echo NetDaily, 22 January 2021:

A number of traditional custodians of the sacred site have called for non-Indigenous people to refrain from undertaking the five-hour trek.

Up to 100,000 people climb the mountain each year, according to tourism data. However, some leave rubbish such as soiled toilet paper by the side of the track and at the stunning peak.

The track has been closed for much of the past year owing to COVID-19, and it now appears it may stay that way.

A safety audit and an engineering assessment conducted during the closure have identified significant safety issues with the final climb to the Wollumbin summit.

These include an ‘extreme risk of landslide, rockfall and failure of the chain section of the track’.

A spokesperson from the National Parks and Wildlife Service said the current closure had been extended, at least until May.

Tellingly, the spokesperson also said that the future of the summit track was now under consideration.

This was being done in consultation with various key stakeholders, including the traditional owners of the site.

‘We understand that locals and visitors may be disappointed by the extended closure, however our main priority must always be to ensure the safety of visitors and staff,’ the spokesperson said.

‘We will now consider the future of the Summit track, in consultation with key community and tourism stakeholders, including Aboriginal Elders and knowledge holders.’

Wollumbin, which means ‘cloud catcher’ in some Aboriginal languages, is a traditional place of cultural law, initiation and spiritual education for the people of the Bundjalung Nation.

Under Bundjalung law, only certain people can climb the summit.

The National Parks and Wildlife Service asks visitors to respect the wishes of the local Indigenous mob and ‘avoid climbing this very difficult track’.

Perspectives on Prime Minister & Liberal MP for Cook's one-word change to the 36 year-old* Australian national anthem

Luke Person writing at Indigenous X on 1 January 2021:

Last night the Morrison government announced that they were changing the national anthem, to be more inclusive of Indigenous peoples and of migrants (the not white ones anyways), by changing a single word, ‘young’. It’s now ‘one’.

We are one and free.

We are One Nation.

Pauline must be stoked.

This, from the same political party who every Invasion Day assure us that Indigenous peoples aren’t interested in meaningless symbolic gestures like Australia no longer throwing a party on the anniversary of invasion, are now confident that Indigenous peoples will be so excited about this meaningless symbolic change that presumably we will no longer refuse to sing it at national sporting events.

Changing the anthem from ‘young’ to ‘one’ is not only problematic because it’s symbolic tokenism aimed at silencing dissent that completely misses the nature of the dissent in the first place, but it’s also problematic because it’s the same wrongly labelled ‘one’ as the one made famous by ‘One Nation’.

The original version of ‘we are one’ was a view of multiculturalism which tried to encourage white Australia away from its traditional view of a fair go meaning ‘if your skin ain’t fair, you gots to go’ and to accept instead the notion that we could be ‘one nation with many cultures’.

This was quickly co-opted by racist ideologues who replaced that sentiment with the assimilationist idea that one nation meant ‘one culture with many races’ and that was quickly cemented into the national consciousness by Pauline Hanson who seized the moment and took the name for her political party ‘One Nation’.

Despite One Nation tainting the concept of ‘one nation,’ both meanings have persisted in Australia without much national discourse or reflection on which one we should have, but it’s been pretty clear from a Liberal Party standpoint since the days of John Howard that they aren’t huge fans of the multiculturalism actually meaning multiple cultures.

They are generally more on the side of white/western supremacy, which many liberals have hinted at, and which Tony Abbott flat out stated on multiple occasions when he was PM.

Their views on Indigenous assimilation are much the same.

This can be seen by their political insistence that reconciliation can only be achieved by ‘closing the gap’ rather than by recognising Indigenous Rights as defined by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Having an ambiguous working definition of multiculturalism began as a contest between the two, which the nation should have chosen between by now. Instead, both definitions have been left unchallenged to ensure that politicians can conveniently dog whistle to both sides whenever they talk about us being the ‘most successful multicultural country on Earth’.

This change plays right into that blurring of the lines between the two definitions.

We are one. And we are free. And from all the lands on earth we come.

You’d have thought they would have just straight up changed the anthem to ‘I am Australian’ by the Seekers, but I guess it has too much brand association with QANTAS these days, and because you don’t want to be seen as caving in to the politically correct demands of the slightly left of centrists who were presumably campaigning for this change.

Yesterday, on the last day of 2020, IndigenousX published a powerful piece from Gregory Phillips called ‘Can We Breathe?’ talking staunchly about truth telling, and about Indigenous empowerment.

Today, on the first day of 2021, we are talking about the anthem, or at least we are meant to be.

Instead of continuing to explain why the new anthem is just as shit as the old one though, I’m going to remind people of what some of our Indigenous Rights are:

Article 3: Indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.

Article 4: Indigenous peoples, in exercising their right to self-determination, have the right to autonomy or self-government in matters relating to their internal and local affairs, as well as ways and means for financing their autonomous functions.

Article 5: Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain and strengthen their distinct political, legal, economic, social and cultural institutions, while retaining their right to participate fully, if they so choose, in the political, economic, social and cultural life of the State.

Article 8.1: Indigenous peoples and individuals have the right not to be subjected to forced assimilation or destruction of their culture.

That’s only four of them, there are 46.  Read them. There will be a test.

This is the test, and Australia is failing at it.

These are what needs to be informing our discussions around change.

Australia has worked hard for decades now to poison the well of Indigenous Rights discourse by reframing any such discussion as ‘Indigenous people want special treatment and free handouts’.

We need to move beyond the fear of being shown in this light and embrace the reality that being the Indigenous peoples of these lands and waters is special, and it brings with it special rights and responsibilities.

This is not us wanting something for nothing. This is us demanding our rights, and we have already paid far more than we should ever have had to for them.

You can sing that anthem backwards for all I care, it’ll still be shit.

— 2020 Hater (@pauldutton1968) January 1, 2021

Adjunct associate professor at the School of Psychology, University of Queensland, and proud Wiradjuri man, Joe Williams, writing in The Guardian on 1 January 2021:

I was made aware on Thursday by a friend of the incoming changes to the national anthem. My reply was an “eye roll” emoji with the words: “But we aren’t all one, we certainly aren’t treated as one; and many, sure as hell, aren’t free”.

I put out a tweet on Friday with my thoughts:

For we are one and free, is like a present from yr nerd uncle, who tries to be cool, but fails hard. I mean, is that line trying to convince us, or you? Cos’ we definitely aren’t treated as one, & many sure as hell aren’t free”

Prime minister Scott Morrison was quoted as saying the change “takes away nothing … but adds much”.

'We are one and free': Australia's national anthem to change in attempt to recognise Indigenous history

Is it supposed to hit the “warm and fuzzies”, taking away the notion of “us and them” by pretending that all people who live on this continent are one big happy family?

Let’s be brutally honest, we aren’t.

You all know the rates of incarceration when it comes to First Nations v non-Indigenous Australians, deaths in custody, the drastic health disparity and the difference in life expectancy between First Nations and non-Indigenous Australians. You know of the negative profiling when it comes to mainstream media between the two (if you don’t, it’s not hard to Google). Why on earth would anyone think that the changing of just one word would encourage First Nations people to feel as “ONE” with any Australian?

To me, changing just one word with the view of inclusion does very little for actual inclusion, and does next to nothing for the hope of uniting a nation......

The song I believe is a beautiful representation of a united, multicultural Australia is the one written by Judith Durham, Uncle Kutcha Edwards, Lou Bennett, Camilla Chance and Bill Hauritz. It’s time for a fresh start and to get a new song. And if we are genuine about this word “reconciliation”, we need to start a relationship before we try to heal one that never existed. 

Me in ⁦@canberratimes⁩

“Please excuse us if we don't view the anthem change as a "good start". Aus is further down the road to substantive change than that. We are in the middle of a very serious, complex reform agenda, entering its second decade”. https://t.co/L9GU7qWniH

— Prof Dr M Davis (@mdavisqlder) January 1, 2021

Well said, #JessicaSavage keeps her eye on the dodgy colonial ball ...

I like her page. Thanks for sharing this 👏🏽https://t.co/DkZ4LFrvY3

— Girrali 😎 (@Girrali) January 2, 2021

NOTE:

* Advance Australia Fair became the national anthem on 19 April 1984.

NAIDOC Week 2020

 

"Shape of Land" artwork was designed by Tyrown Waigana, a Noongar and Saibai Islander man.

Shape of Land description: The Rainbow Serpent came out of the Dreamtime to create this land. It is represented by the snake and it forms the shape of Australia, which symbolises how it created our lands. The colour from the Rainbow Serpent is reflected on to the figure to display our connection to the Rainbow Serpent, thus our connection to country. The overlapping colours on the outside is the Dreamtime. The figure inside the shape of Australia is a representation of Indigenous Australians showing that this country - since the dawn of time - Always Was, Always Will Be Aboriginal Land.

NAIDOC originally stood for ‘National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee’. This committee was once responsible for organising national activities during NAIDOC Week and its acronym has since become the name of the week itself. Find out more about the origins and history of NAIDOC Week.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison denies slavery ever existed in Australia *WARNING this post contains the names of people who are no longer living*

This was Scott Morrison boldly asserting yesterday that “there was no slavery in Australia”.

The Sydney Morning Herald, 11 June 2020:

"Australia when it was founded as a settlement, as New South Wales, was on the basis that there'd be no slavery," the Prime Minister told Ben Fordham on 2GB. "And while slave ships continued to travel around the world, when Australia was established yes, sure, it was a pretty brutal settlement."

"My forefathers and foremothers were on the First and Second Fleets. It was a pretty brutal place, but there was no slavery in Australia," he said.

Why did Morrison chose to brazenly lie like this? Probably because he knew his statement would go to print without being immediately challenged by either News Corp, Nine, or Canberra Press Gallery journalists - and once in print with online amplification more than a few people would accept his lie as truth.

Thankfully Justice Garry Downes (President), Deputy President Stephen Estcourt and QC Deputy President Don Muller in an Administrative Appeals Tribunal of Australia decision on 18 October 2002 entered this into the record:

“Nelly Wanda is said to be a Queensland Aboriginal who was born in 1883 and died in 1903…. It is said that Nelly Wanda was brought to Tasmania from Queensland when she was 9 years old by a ship's captain named Lucas who, it is said, dealt in 'human trade'. Nelly was sold as a house servant and died at the age of 19 in childbirth.”

Newspaper reports found at Trove also mention slavery.

"Aboriginal Slave. Recaptured and Flogged. 
Ill-treatment of an Alleged Slave. 

 Under yesterday's date a telegram was received by the Colonial Secretaryfrom Mr. P. Keiley, lightkeeper at Karomba, at the mouth of the Norman River. Mr. Keiley states that a fugitive female slave (presumably an an aboriginal) who had run away from her master or masters had been recaptured and flogged at that place yesterday. In Mr. Keiley's opinion the case is one which warrants the interference of the Colonial Secretary. A similar telegram has been received from the same source by the Aborigines Protection Society of Queensland. Immediately upon receipt of the telegram the Colonial Secretary wired instructions to the police-magistrate at Normanton to make a thorough and searching inquiry into the matter, and to report to him as soon as possible."

The Telegraph, 18 October 1890

"The Government at least cannot plead ignorance of the iniquities which are openly perpertrated, for an official of its own, Dr. W. E. Both, Northern Protector of Aborigines; testifies to certain abuses which exist in the the treatment of the unfortunate Northern black helots. He tells in his official report of absolute kidnapping, of evasion of the labour regulations, and of the selling of young aborigine to traders. He says he has reported absolute proof that such has been the case, and as no departmental action has resulted the secretary of the Protection Society has good grounds for appealing to a higher power."

The Worker, 8 December 1900

"As regards the capturing of natives on the Descal, this has frequently been done by the notorious Hodgson, who chained men, women and children together and marched them under a broiling sun to the station, where they were detained as shepherds. It seems incredible that the people in the neighborhood of Pilbarra that this man was allowed to leave the country without any investigation being held as to his systematic cruelties. He was universally abhorred, both by blacks and white people. Hicks' black financial statement will have attention yet."

West Australian Sunday Times, 1 September 1901

"Astounding revelations have been made regarding the kidnapping of an aboriginal boy from Port Hedland four years ago The District Magistrate at Karachi, India, has forwarded statements from several people alleging that Jourack, a brother of Dust Mahomet, who was killed at Port Hedland I8 months ago, had taken a black boy named Pidgy, then six years old, to his (Jourack's) 'home near Karachi, where this lad is now held as a working slave."

The Register, 30 January 1911

"MINISTER ADMITS SLAVE TRADING 
 AN ABORIGINE SOLD 

 PART OF A STATION 
The sale of an aborigine as a servant at a station property in northern Australia was admitted by the Minister for Home and Territories, Mr. Marr, yesterday."

The Labor Daily, 18 October 1927

National Reconciliation Week begins in Australia today, Wednesday 27 May 2020

2020 also marks the twentieth anniversary of the reconciliation walks of 2000, when people came together to walk on bridges and roads across the nation and show their support for a more reconciled Australia.

Sadly, Australia has not moved as close to reconciliation with traditional owners/custodians of the land as people had hoped for twenty years ago. Let's do better in these next twenty years.

Handing down culture.....

Gumbaynggirr man Benelong Carroll and grandson Zarakai dance on Dunghutti Country for #NationDanceWorld pic.twitter.com/ItVRkDstkC

— @NITV (@NITV) May 4, 2020

When going straight to source documents when doing research applies to critics as well as authors

This article below demonstrates the advisability of going straight to source documents when doing research on a particular subject.

Not what an author 'quoted' or 'attributed' but to the actual extant documents.

Then go to other reliable contemporary accounts from the era in question, before deciding if the modern historian, amatuer historian, journalist, commentator or blogger has accurately conveyed facts.

Something Andrew Bolt appears not to have done.

When it comes to ancestry a good many people do not know the real whens and wheres of their family history, some know part of their family story and a very lucky few can count their line back by name across many generations.

In Australia finding out about your ancestry is as complicated by missing documents, unexplained name changes, unregistered births, unrecorded burials, adoption or removal by the state, divorce and family silences, as anywhere else in the world.

It is not uncommon to only find out some facts about your family once you are an adult.

If Bruce Pascoe says that on doing family research he discovered he has a forebear or forebears who were traditional owners/custodians of land in Australia why would I not take him at his word?

The Saturday Paper, 30 November 2019:

There is one particular question Andrew Bolt does not wish to answer.

In correspondence with The Saturday Paper, the News Corp columnist was asked three times whether he has read Bruce Pascoe’s best-selling history of Aboriginal Australia, Dark Emu. Each time, he evaded the question.

It is useful, then, to start an examination of his attacks on the author with this in mind.

A more inconvenient truth is that Bolt’s dislike of Pascoe began at least two years before the publication of the book, which has now become the focus of a minor culture war led by Bolt and others.

Bolt’s efforts to “fact-check” Pascoe’s book are based largely around a website called Dark Emu Exposed.

The site’s contributors cast doubt on Pascoe’s account of an Indigenous history different from the one allowed by colonial interpretation. They also doubt his Aboriginal heritage.

As one prominent Indigenous leader tells The Saturday Paper, on the condition of anonymity, the argument against Pascoe’s work is an extension of “19th-century race theory”, which once espoused the view that race is the major indicator of a person’s character and behaviour.

“Any suggestion that Aborigines are anything other than furtive rock apes has to be destroyed by these people,” the leader says.

“WHEN THEY INSIST ON THIS INQUIRY, DO THEY WONDER IF THIS PERSON HAD FAMILY MEMBERS STOLEN FROM THE MISSIONS? DO THEY WONDER IF THEY WERE HIDING TRUTHS BECAUSE OF A CONCERTED EFFORT TO SHAME OR HUMILIATE ABORIGINAL ANCESTRY?”

Pascoe’s book is based on close reading of the original journals of Australia’s explorers. In these journals, he has found new evidence of Indigenous agriculture and development. As the Indigenous leader notes: “He’s gone to the records and said, ‘Hang on, what does this really mean?’ While some historians with their PhDs have gone to the same original documents and came to the conclusion that we were all backward.”

In Dark Emu, which has sold more than 100,000 copies, Pascoe mounts a convincing argument that Aboriginal people actively managed and cultivated the landscape, harvested seeds for milling into cakes at an astonishing scale, took part in complex aquaculture and built “towns” of up to 1000 people.

That word, by the way – “town” – is not Pascoe’s. That is how one such settlement was referred to by a man in the exploration party of Thomas Mitchell in the mid-1800s.

What some have found so astonishing about Pascoe’s claimed developments is not that they happened – they are right there in Charles Sturt’s and Mitchell’s journals, among many others – but that we, as a nation, could have been so ignorant to their existence.

As Pascoe wrote last year in Meanjin: “Almost no Australians know anything about the Aboriginal civilisation because our educators, emboldened by historians, politicians and the clergy, have refused to mention it for 230 years.

“Think for a moment about the extent of that fraud. Imagine the excellence of the advocacy required to get our most intelligent people today to believe it.”

It is Pascoe’s attempt to shout down this conspiracy of silence that has primed the culture war machine. But why should a successful race of First Nations peoples be such a threat to modern Australians?

The most compelling answer to this question is that it removes a psychological shunt in the mind of European settlers and their descendants that this occupation, this invasion of land unceded, was to save Indigenous people from themselves, to bring civilisation to them.

Of course, it is uncomfortable to later ask: What if this race of First Australians were civilised all along? Maybe we were the barbarians?

Pascoe achieves this questioning with a somewhat controversial manoeuvre. He takes the European ideal of farming and architecture, and thoroughly white notions of success, and applies them, through the primary evidence, to Indigenous Australians.

Asked why he is offended by Pascoe’s assertion of complex farming and settlements built by First Nations peoples, Bolt said he is not.

“So, to answer your insult: I am not ‘offended’ by the thought of Aborigines being ‘well-adapted’ or ‘sophisticated’. How on earth would that be offensive to me? I in fact am determined to change policies and thinking that hold back so many Aboriginal communities that are now in poverty,” he said in a lengthy correspondence with The Saturday Paper.

“I am simply interested in the truth, and opposed to falsehoods … If I’m ‘offended’ by anything it is frauds......

The agitation surrounding Dark Emu, renewed by the announcement of an ABC documentary, has quickly driven a stake through the recently formed advisory group on the co-design for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. The group is chaired by Indigenous academic Marcia Langton, a defender of Pascoe’s, and counts Chris Kenny as a member.

Last week, Ken Wyatt, who established the group as minister for Indigenous Australians, backed Pascoe against the conservative onslaught and noted that Australians tend to “question if you are Indigenous”.

“If Bruce tells me he’s Indigenous, then I know that he’s Indigenous,” Wyatt told Kenny on Sky News.

This week, Wyatt told ABC’s Radio National that his office has been receiving calls where staff have been threatened and called “cunts” because he dared defend Pascoe.

“I’ve had one of my staff resign because she can’t cope with being abused over the issue,” he said.

Another of the co-design group’s members, Indigenous lawyer Josephine Cashman, has publicly questioned Pascoe’s ancestry. On Twitter, she stated that her former partner is a Yuin man who says he has never heard of Pascoe. Other Yuin people responded on Twitter, cautioning Cashman for relying on a single man’s testimony.

A week ago, Kenny wrote in The Australian: “Many claims in Dark Emu have been debunked by forensic reference to primary sources.”

But this week The Saturday Paper spent two days at the National Library of Australia reviewing the original documents and explorer accounts in question. They are – at every instance – quoted verbatim and cited accordingly in an extensive bibliography at the end of Pascoe’s book.

Bolt alleges: “They even overlooked the fact that his big hit – Dark Emu – included incredible misquotations of its sources.

“How else could Pascoe have argued that the historians had been wrong. Aborigines had not been hunter-gatherers but sophisticated farmers, living in ‘towns’ of up to 1000 people, in ‘houses’ with ‘pens’ for animals. (Koalas, perhaps?)”

It would take many thousands of words to address all of Bolt’s claims, but it is useful to highlight a few of them. The Saturday Paper put these claims to Bolt.

For example, he says that Pascoe tells the story of Sturt stumbling onto a town of 1000 people on the edge of the Cooper Creek. Dark Emu does not claim this; it instead quotes Sturt correctly on this front, when his party is taken in by “3 or 400 natives” in the area. Bolt says he was referring to a speech Pascoe made where he said there were 1000 people in the town.

Thomas Mitchell also noted a town of 1000 people in his journals, and the quote is attributed to Mitchell in Dark Emu at the bottom of page 15.

Bolt, when he does reference Mitchell, gets the date of that quotation wrong, too. He says it is from Mitchell’s 1848 journal when, in fact, the quote is from his 1839 journal. This, too, is recorded faithfully in Dark Emu.

Bolt has twice scoffed at the idea of animal yards being found by these explorers.

But Dark Emu records the firsthand account of David Lindsay on his 1883 survey of Arnhem Land, where he says he “came on the site of a large native encampment, quite a quarter of a mile across. Framework of several large humpies, one having been 12ft high: small enclosures as if some small game had been yarded and kept alive … This camp must have contained quite 500 natives.”

In reply, Bolt says: “Maybe they were animal pens, who knows?

“Arnhem Land has, after all, more game than Cooper Creek that might at a stretch be kept in a pen, although it is difficult to imagine what animals might have been kept. Wallabies?”

Again, Bolt says he is not so much quoting from Pascoe’s book as from his lectures, of which the author has done hundreds since Dark Emu’s 2014 release.

However, Bolt frequently conflates the two.

While Bolt mocks Pascoe for speaking at a lecture about a well that was made by Indigenous people and was “70 feet deep”, there are, in fact, a litany of accounts of incredibly sophisticated wells in the journals. Of one, Sturt writes: “… we arrived at a native well of unusual dimensions. It was about eight feet wide at the top and 22ft deep, and it was a work that must have taken the joint strength of a powerful tribe to perform.”

In his rebuttal, the Herald Sun columnist has been forced to accept there were incredibly sophisticated settlements and seed-milling operations, and that Aboriginal people really did give cake and honey and roast ducks to Sturt and his party. The debate has now been reduced to minutiae – questioning how many mills were going and the different depth of various wells.

Bolt responds: “Trust you to attempt to make this about me and not his incredible claims.”

But Pascoe is not alone in his assessments.

Writing in Inside Story this week, Australian National University professor of history Tom Griffiths lauded the book and its addition to a long trajectory of scholarly work.

“My point is that the blindnesses and complacencies that Pascoe rails against are the same silences and lies that Australian historians have been collaboratively challenging for decades now,” he says.

“It’s a job that will never finish. Pascoe is primarily bridling at an older form of history, the history he learnt at school and university 50 years ago.”

Edie Wright, the chair of Magabala Books, which published Dark Emu, told The Saturday Paper: “We unequivocally support our outstanding author Bruce Pascoe, and celebrate the contribution that Dark Emu has made to bringing a fuller understanding of our history to so many Australians of all ages.”

On Wednesday, Marcia Langton replied to Josephine Cashman on Twitter. The two were previously close.

“The critique of Dark Emu is a job for actual historians not Andrew Bolt & others who benefit financially from tearing apart the lives of people looking for family,” she said.

Looking for family has taken on a mournful quality this week, as Pascoe’s kin went to libraries around the country to find the name of their Aboriginal ancestor. But how to proceed, one must ask, when so much of their story and the story of a people has been destroyed to protect the last excuse for colonisation?

Read the full article here.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on Nov 30, 2019 as "Bolt, Pascoe and the culture wars". Subscribe to The Saturday Paper here.

Note: 

The website Dark Emu Exposed appears to be hosted by tucows.com, was created on 2019-06-01 and registered to Contact Privacy Inc. Customer 0154877432 as the creator/owner/administrator of the website apparently wishes to remain anonymous. However Roger Karge is reportedly the person who initiallly floated the idea for the site.

One has to wonder if the website is also the work of aquaintances of Keith Windshuttle, Chris Kenny, Peter O'Brien or even Andrew Bolt himself.