Bruce Pascoe

Bruce Pascoe (born 1947) is an Aboriginal Australian writer of literary fiction, non-fiction, poetry, essays and children's literature. As well as his own name, Pascoe has written under the pen names Murray Gray and Leopold Glass. He is a professor at the Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education & Research at the University of Technology Sydney.

Pascoe is best known for his work Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?, which reexamines colonial accounts of Aboriginal people in Australia and cites evidence of pre-colonial agriculture, engineering and building construction by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Pascoe was born in Richmond, Victoria in 1947.He grew up in a poor working-class family; his father, Alf, was a carpenter, and his mother, Gloria Pascoe, went on to win a gold medal in lawn bowls at the 1980 Arnhem Paralympics.Pascoe spent his early years on King Island where his father worked at the tungsten mine. His family moved to Mornington, Victoria, when he was 10 years old, and then two years later moved to the Melbourne suburb of Fawkner. He attended the local state school before completing his secondary education at University High School, where his sister had won an academic scholarship. Pascoe went on to attend the University of Melbourne, initially studying commerce but then transferring to Melbourne State College. After graduating with a Bachelor of Education, he was posted to a small township near Shepparton. He later taught at Bairnsdale for nine years.

While on leave from his teaching career, Pascoe bought a 300-hectare (740-acre) mixed farming property and occasionally worked as an abalone fisherman. In his spare time he began writing short stories, poetry and newspaper articles.

In 1982 he moved back to Melbourne and sought to publish a journal of short stories. He came into conflict with existing publishers and instead decided to form his own company, raising A$10,000 in capital with his friend Lorraine Phelan.He ran Pascoe Publishing and Seaglass Books with his wife, Lyn Harwood.

From 1982 to 1998 Pascoe edited and published a new quarterly magazine of short fiction, Australian Short Stories, which published all forms of short stories by both established and new writers, including Helen Garner, Gillian Mears and Tim Winton. The first issue came close to selling out its initial print run of 20,000.

The main character in his 1988 novel Fox is a fugitive, searching for his Aboriginal identity and home. The book deals with issues such as Aboriginal deaths in custody, discrimination and land rights, as well as blending Aboriginal traditions with contemporary life and education.

Convincing Ground: Learning to Fall in Love with Your Country (2007), whose title is drawn from the Convincing Ground massacre, examines historical documents and eyewitness accounts of incidents in Australian history and ties them in with the "ongoing debates about identity, dispossession, memory and community". It is described in the publisher's blurb as a book "for all Australians, as an antidote to the great Australian inability to deal respectfully with the nation's constructed Indigenous past".

Pascoe featured in the award-winning documentary series which aired on SBS Television in 2008, First Australians, has been Director of Commonwealth Australian Studies project for the Commonwealth Schools Commission, and has worked extensively on preserving the Wathaurong language, producing a dictionary of the language.

Fog a Dox, a story for young adults, won the Prime Minister's Literary Awards in 2013 and was shortlisted for the 2013 WA Premier’s Book Awards (Young Adult category) and the 2013 Deadly Awards (Published Book of the Year category). Judges for the PM's Award commented that "The author's Aboriginality shines through but he wears it lightly...", in a story which incorporates Indigenous cultural knowledge.

Dark Emu (2014)

Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?, first published in 2014, drew on scientific work which challenged the oft-cited claim that pre-colonial Australian Aboriginal peoples were only hunter-gatherers. Pascoe's research of early settler accounts found accounts of grain cultivation, wells, and sophisticated systems of aquaculture. The book was well-received. A favourable review of its cultural implications in the academic online magazineThe Conversation touched off a debate there about Pascoe's use of his historical sources. A second edition, entitled Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture was published in mid-2018, and a version of the book for younger readers, entitled Young Dark Emu: A Truer History, was published in 2019. The 2019 version was shortlisted for the 2020 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature in the Children's Literature Award section.

In October 2019 it was announced that a documentary film of Dark Emu would be made for television by Blackfella Films, co-written by Pascoe with Jacob Hickey, directed by Erica Glynn and produced by Darren Dale and Belinda Mravicic.

Current work

As of December 2019, Pascoe is a professor at the Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education & Research at the University of Technology Sydney.

At the end of January, he cancelled his scheduled appearances at a Perth Festival event in February and at the Adelaide Writers' Week in March, to return home to East Gippsland to assess the damage done to his Mallacoota property, and to assist his community in the recovery effort in the aftermath of the bushfires.

For the first part of his life, Pascoe assumed he only had British heritage. In his early thirties, Pascoe started investigating his ancestry, partly as he remembered an uncle having mentioned Aboriginal ancestry. He found Aboriginal ancestors on both sides of his family, including from Tasmania (Palawa), from the Bunurong people of the Kulin nation of Victoria, and the Yuin of southern New South Wales. He identified himself as Koori by the age of 40. He acknowledges his Cornish and European colonial ancestry as well as his love of "the broader Australian culture", but says that he feels Aboriginal. He has said "It doesn’t matter about the colour of your skin, it's about how deeply embedded you are in the culture. It's the pulse of my life". He said that his family denied their own Aboriginality for a long time, and it was only when he investigated the "glaring absences" in the family's story that he was drawn into Aboriginal society and culture.

In Convincing Ground (2007), Pascoe wrote about the dangers of "people of broken and distant heritage like me...barging into their rediscovered community expecting to be greeted like the Prodigal Son", saying that those who have grown up without awareness of their Aboriginality cannot have experienced racism, being removed from family or other disadvantages, and cannot "fully understand what it is to be Aboriginal. You've lost contact with your identity and in quite profound areas it can never be reclaimed... As a result of this limited experience you cannot assume authority or the position of a spokesperson". He says that some branches of family trees and public records have often been "pruned of a few branches". In this book and in interviews, Pascoe admits that his Aboriginal ancestry is distant, and that he is "more Cornish than Koori".

Columnist Andrew Bolt and the magazine Quadrant have questioned Pascoe's identification as Aboriginal. Following Bolt's breach of the Racial Discrimination Act in 2011 relating to comments about fair-skinned Aboriginal people (upheld in Eatock v Bolt), Pascoe wrote an article in 2012 titled "Andrew Bolt's Disappointment". It was originally published in the Griffith Review (republished in 2019 in Salt: Selected Stories and Essays). In it Pascoe suggested that he and Bolt could "have a yarn" together, without rancour, because "I think it's reasonable for Australia to know if people of pale skin identifying as Aborigines are fair dinkum". He described how and why his Aboriginal ancestry – and that of many others – had been buried, and that the full explanation would be very long and involved.

In December 2019 Indigenous lawyer Josephine Cashman wrote to the Minister for Home Affairs, Peter Dutton, alleging that Pascoe had benefited financially from falsely claiming to be Indigenous. Dutton referred the matter to the Australian Federal Police (AFP) on 24 December. Pascoe said that he found the referral "hurtful", and that he had never met Cashman. On 23 January 2020, the AFP wrote to Cashman saying that the investigation had been closed, as based on their inquiries, no Commonwealth offences had been identified.

In January 2020, Pascoe said that he believed that the allegations that he is not Aboriginal are motivated by wanting to discredit Dark Emu. He had already responded to the Boonwurrung Land and Sea Council's rejection of his connection to the Bunurong, saying that his connection was through the Tasmanian family, not through Central Victorian Bunurong. A few days later, the chairman of the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania, Michael Mansell, issued a three-page statement on the issue, saying that he does not believe that Pascoe has Indigenous ancestry, and he should stop claiming he does. However, Mansell acknowledged that some Indigenous leaders including Marcia Langton (Foundation Chair in Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne) and Aboriginal elder and Minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt supported Pascoe’s Aboriginality based on his claim to community recognition.

• 1999: Fellowship of Australian Writers - Australian Literature Award for Shark, joint winner (with David Foster).
• 2013: Prime Minister's Literary Award - Young Adult Fiction.
• 2013: The Deadlys - Published book of the year.
• 2016: NSW Premier's Literary Award for Dark Emu
• 2016: New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards - Indigenous Writers' Prize.
• 2018: Australia Council for the Arts - Lifetime Achievement Award.

Pascoe was nominated as Person of the Year at the National Dreamtime Awards 2018, and was also invited by Yuin elder Max Dulumunmum Harrison to a special cultural ceremony lasting several days.

In 1982, Pascoe separated from a woman whom he had married after graduating from college. They have a daughter. In the same year, he married Lyn Harwood. They have a son. In 2017, Pascoe and Harwood separated. According to Pascoe, the split was due to his many absences and his late-life mission to pursue farming.

Pascoe lives on a 60-hectare (150-acre) farm near Mallacoota in East Gippsland, on the eastern coast of Victoria. He is also working for his family-run company, Black Seed Food, that is aiming to produce the type of Indigenous produce mentioned in Dark Emu on a commercial scale.

Pascoe is a Country Fire Authority (CFA) volunteer and battled the 2019–20 bushfires near Mallacoota. In January he went to New South Wales to help out there, before returning to Mallacoota to assist the community in recovery efforts.

The following list is a selection of the 182 items by Pascoe as listed on Austlit as of December 2019:

• A Corner Full of Characters, Blackstone Press, 1981, ISBN 0959387005
• Night Animals, Penguin Books, 1986, ISBN 9780140087420
• Fox, McPhee Gribble/Penguin books, 1988, ISBN 9780140114089
• Ruby-eyed Coucal, Magabala Books, 1996, ISBN 9781875641291
• Wathaurong : Too bloody strong : Stories and life journeys of people from Wathaurong, Pascoe Publishing, 1997, ISBN 0947087311
• Cape Otway: Coast of secrets (1997)
• Shark, Magabala Books, 1999, ISBN 9781875641482
• Nightjar, Seaglass Books, 2000, ISBN 9780947087357
• Earth, Magabala Books, 2001, ISBN 1875641610
• Ocean, Bruce Sims Books, 2002, ISBN 9780957780064
• Foxies in a Firehose : A piece of doggerel from Warragul, Seaglass Books, 2006, ISBN 0947087362
• Bloke. Penguin Books Limited. 3 August 2009. ISBN 978-0-85796-558-5.
• Convincing Ground: Learning to Fall in Love with Your Country. Aboriginal Studies Press. 2007. ISBN 978-0-85575-549-2.
• The Little Red Yellow Black Book : An introduction to indigenous Australia, Aboriginal Studies Press, 2008, ISBN 9780855756154
• Fog a Dox, Magabala Books, 2012, ISBN 9781922142597
• Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture Or Accident?, Magabala Books, 2014, ISBN 9781922142436
• Seahorse, Magabala Books, 2015, ISBN 9781921248931
• Mrs Whitlam,Magabala Books, 2016, ISBN 9781925360240
• Young Dark Emu: A Truer History, Magabala Books, 2019, ISBN 9781925360844
• Salt: Selected Stories and Essays, Black Inc, 2019, ISBN 9781760641580

Pascoe has also produced a language learning CD-ROM, film, and teachers' book and a Wathaurong dictionary for the Wathaurong Aboriginal Co-op, Geelong, Victoria.

He has also written under the names Murray Gray (The Great Australian Novel: At Last it's Here, a 1984 satirical novel) and Leopold Glass (Ribcage: All You Need Is $800,000 - Quickly, a 1999 detective novel).