Bruce Pascoe (born 1947) is an 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 namesMurray Gray and Leopold Glass. Pascoe identifies as Aboriginal. Since August 2020, he has been Enterprise Professor in Indigenous Agriculture at the University of Melbourne.
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.[7]
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.[8][2]
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.[3][8][2] The first issue came close to selling out its initial print run of 20,000.[7]
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.[9]
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Learning to Fall in Love with Your Country (2007), whose title is drawn from the Convincing Ground massacre, examines historical documents and eyewitness accounts of incidents in Australian history and ties them in with the "ongoing debates about identity, dispossession, memory and community".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".[10][11]
Pascoe featured in the award-winning documentary series which aired on SBS Television in 2008, First Australians,[8] has been Director of Commonwealth Australian Studies project for the Commonwealth Schools Commission,[8] and has worked extensively on preserving the Wathaurong language, producing a dictionary of the language.[2]
Fog a Dox, a story for young adults, won the Prime Minister's Literary Awards in 2013 and was shortlisted for the 2013 Western Australian Premier's Book Awards (Young Adult category) and the 2013 Deadly Awards (Published Book of the Year category).[12] 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.[13]
Dark Emu (2014)
Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?, first published in 2014, challenges the claim that pre-colonial Australian Aboriginal peoples were only hunter-gatherers.[14] Pascoe argues that his examination of early settler accounts and other sources provides evidence of agriculture, aquaculture, engineering and villages of permanent housing in traditional Aboriginal societies.[15][16] The book won Book of the Year at the NSW Premier's Literary Awards, and was widely praised for popularising past research on the sophistication of Aboriginal economies. The book also attracted controversy.[17] A favourable review of its cultural implications in the academic online magazine The Conversation touched off a debate there about Pascoe's use of his historical sources.[18] A second edition, entitled Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture was published in mid-2018,[19] and a version of the book for younger readers, entitled Young Dark Emu: A Truer History, was published in 2019.[20] The 2019 version was shortlisted for the 2020 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature in the Children's Literature Award section.[21]
The success of Dark Emu and Young Dark Emu prompted a book-length critique by Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe who argue that Pascoe selectively quotes sources and misinterprets archaeological and anthropological evidence to draw conclusions which give a misleading view of Aboriginal societies.[22]
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.[23]
Pascoe was appointed Enterprise Professor in Indigenous Agriculture at the University of Melbourne in September 2020, in a role "within the School of Agriculture and Food,... designed to build knowledge and understanding of Indigenous agriculture within the Faculty and to grow engagement and research activities in this area".[25][26]
Pascoe states that in his early thirties he found Aboriginal ancestors on both sides of his family, including from Tasmania (Palawa),[29] from the Bunurong people of the Kulin nation of Victoria, and the Yuin of southern New South Wales.[30][8] He identified himself as Koori by the age of 40.[3] He acknowledges his Cornish and European colonial ancestry but says that he feels Aboriginal, writing, "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.[31]
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." He says that some branches of family trees and public records have often been "pruned of a few branches".[32][33] In this book and in interviews, Pascoe admits that his Aboriginal ancestry is distant, and that he is "more Cornish than Koori".[3]
Following columnist Andrew Bolt's breach of the Racial Discrimination Act in 2011 relating to comments about fair-skinned Aboriginal people, 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,[34] and that the full explanation would be very long and involved.[3]
In January 2020, Pascoe said he believed 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 his connection was through the Tasmanian family, not through Central Victorian Bunurong.[35] A few days later, the chairman of the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania, Michael Mansell, stated that he does not believe Pascoe has Indigenous ancestry, and he should stop claiming he does.[36] However, Mansell acknowledged that some Indigenous leaders including Marcia Langton and Ken Wyatt supported Pascoe’s Aboriginality based on his claim to community recognition.[37][38]
In 2021, Nyunggai Warren Mundine stated that genealogists "have produced research that all Pascoe’s ancestry can be traced to England. Pascoe has not addressed this and has been persistently vague about who his Aboriginal ancestors are and where they came from."[39] Historian Geoffrey Blainey stated that "it is now known that [Pascoe's] four grandparents were of English descent".[40]
In 1982, Pascoe separated from a woman whom he had married after graduating from college.[7] They have a daughter.[51] In the same year, he married Lyn Harwood. They have a son.[51] 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.[3]
Pascoe lives on a 60-hectare (150-acre) farm, Yumburra, near Mallacoota in East Gippsland, on the eastern coast of Victoria.[3] He is also working for his family-run company, Black Duck Foods,[3][52][53] which is aiming to produce the type of Indigenous produce mentioned in Dark Emu on a commercial scale.[54] His 2024 book is titled Black Duck – A Year at Yumburra.[55]
Works
The following list is a selection of the 182 items by Pascoe as listed on Austlit as of December 2019[update]:[56]
A Corner Full of Characters, Blackstone Press, 1981, ISBN0959387005
Black Duck – A Year at Yumburra, with Lyn Harwood, Thames & Hudson, 2024, ISBN978-1-76076-311-4
He has also written under the names Murray Gray (The Great Australian Novel: At Last it's Here, a 1984 satirical novel)[60] and Leopold Glass (Ribcage: All You Need Is $800,000 – Quickly, a 1999 detective novel).[8][61]
