I started school at a place called Batchelor near a uranium mine called Rum Jungle in the Northern Territory of Australia.   I went off to school each morning with an Aboriginal boy called Johnny who had feet that were so wide they didn’t fit into shoes.

And maybe he didn’t wear shoes because he wanted to feel the ground that he walked upon.

There is a book by Richard Trudgen ‘Why Warriors Lie Down and Die’ that explains a lot about the people of East Arnhem land, not far from where I grew-up.  It also explains, repeatedly through the book, that these Yolngu people have trouble understanding our world.  They feel there is something they don’t quite understand.  For them it is as though we [Balanda/white fellas] are keeping something from them – not telling them everything.

That is how I often feel about the world.  That when it comes to how our society is organised, and how decisions are made, a lot is opaque.  So much doesn’t make any sense.

I often write things out, to try and understand. I was never considered much good at English when I was at school, but I’ve persisted with the writing, and guess it is what I have become: a writer.    I really value the people who read my articles, and especially those who subscribe at my blog for my monthly e-news updates.

I had a good number ‘unsubscribe’ after my last e-newsletter.  The offending comment – from me – seems to have been:

I always think it good to keep an open mind about history.  To understand context and all the available evidence before making a judgement.   I am often dismayed by my countrymen.  The vitriol with which Conservatives lampooned Bruce Pascoe’s book ‘Dark Emu’: so disappointing.

Some just hit the unsubscribe button at the end of the email.  But others sent me comments.  The comments tended to be along the lines:

Stick to your science please.

Though there is a recent comment at an unrelated blog post:

I love that you’re spreading your scientific wings Jennifer to provide us with information that is critical to our understanding of the global unrest and change.

When I pressed the point in my reply-emails to those who where ‘Gobsmacked’ at my comment; when I asked their specific objection to ‘Dark Emu’, it seemed to always come back to the authority of Andrew Bolt and questions of Bruce Pascoe’s Aboriginality – which is arguably as much about history and culture as genetics, that is a science.

I’ve never done one of those ancestry DNA tests, but I’m guessing I have a Viking lineage.

Culturally though, I would arguably, be closer to the Australian Aboriginal. They say the first seven years of a person’s life are important in terms of their perspective and values.

The first seven years of my life were spent living in a mud-brick house in the hot and humid Northern Territory of Australia just up the hill from a billabong that is part of Coomalie Creek – just to the west of Kakadu National Park.  Aborigines lived in a camp on the property and us kids swam in that one billabong, together.  Me as white as a Norwegian and them as black as an Australian Aboriginal.   We were stuck in the same place.  That was the first seven years of my life.   That was my reality.  It was another thirty years before I saw snow.

I did not grow up with any of the experiences of people who lived in northern Europe, though that is probably my ancestry in terms of DNA.   I don’t believe I could write anything useful about life where my ancestor came from – the cold northern latitudes – but because of my childhood experience, and then my academic studies and my later research – I do know something about the tropics, especially northern Australia.

My father went north, leaving Melbourne in the 1950s.  He first had a job with CSIRO, in rice research in Western Australia.  Then he worked for the Northern Territory government, running an experimental farm again growing rice.   He employed an Aborigine as a tractor driver.  As the story goes, he told the man that he would be paid properly for his work.   But when the first pay day came around, he wasn’t.   When my father enquired, he was told by the administration: because the tractor driver was a blackfella – he wasn’t entitled to full pay.  He wasn’t entitled to be paid the same as the other tractor drivers.   It didn’t matter that the Blackfella worked harder or did a better job.

My late father fought the bureaucracy back then – for fairness for people who worked hard, irrespective of their colour.   Then he left the government and with my mother took out two leases on land that was to be developed by them as a farm.   He then had to fight the bureaucracy all over again.   The bureacrats insisted he clear the land of trees and sink bores – that he also develops the water resource.  He said, he didn’t have the money and it wasn’t necessary.  But there were rules back then: if you had a lease you had to improve the land according to a set of instructions – it didn’t matter whether the instructions made sense financially or environmentally.   Eventually, on my seventh birthday, my family left that property, we drove south away from the rules governing the development of land in the Northern Territory.   I’ve no idea where Johnny is now.

It is a fact that until very recently, having an Aboriginal ancestry was a major handicap.  Women got the right to vote in Australia in 1902, it was another sixty years, not until 1962 that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders had the opportunity to vote in federal elections.

Apparently, the year before Bruce Pascoe published his book ‘Dark Emu’ he tried to establish his Aboriginality.  But so far, he has been unsuccessful.  I understand that being accepted has less to do with your DNA or where you grew-up, but whether you are accepted by the group who currently control such things.

I have never meet Bruce Pascoe but I enjoyed reading his book ‘Dark Emu’. I thought it an easy to read, touching on important topics and from an alternative perspective.

According to an article in The Guardian from two years ago:

Pascoe identifies as of Tasmanian descent and Yuin by cultural law. Cashman, a member of the government’s senior advisory group on the co-design of an Indigenous voice to government, has previously questioned Pascoe’s Yuin ancestry on social media. She declined a request for an interview on Saturday but confirmed she had written to [Peter] Dutton.

The minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt, rejected her call for an investigation into Pascoe. Through a spokesman, Wyatt said a member of the advisory committee should not have made a formal complaint about the writer’s Aboriginality.

“The minister does not believe this is appropriate,” a spokesman said.

Wyatt has previously said he does not support a register to assess Aboriginality. Last year, he defended Pascoe in an interview on Sky News, saying: “If Bruce tells me he’s Indigenous, then I know that he’s Indigenous.”

Pascoe has been fighting bushfires in east Gippsland and could not be reached on Saturday. His son, Jack Pascoe, said the fires had been burning on his father’s property, that many of the writer’s friends had lost their homes and one had been killed.

“Given the stress of the situation, our family is surprised by the timing of these allegations coming around again,” Jack Pascoe said.

“We stand by the identity of our family. The insinuation that my father has fabricated his heritage is hard to take because for him it’s an issue that has been part of the public discourse for 40 years.”

Jack Pascoe, who is the conservation and research manager at the Conservation Ecology Centre in Cape Otway, said the complaint seemed to be driven by the push by Cashman and others for registry of Aboriginality.

“I’d prefer to be talking about how our traditional ecological knowledge could help mitigate damage from bushfires and reduce risk to communities rather than be talking about these distractions,” he said.

Indigenous academic Marcia Langton, the co-chair of the advisory group, last year said on Twitter that Pascoe was collateral damage in a fight against the facts of Aboriginal history.

What I’m most interested in is Australia’s natural history and how it has been shaped through Aboriginal land management.   But I’m also interested in which bits Bruce Pascoe got wrong in his book ‘Dark Emu’.  I’m also interested to know what specifically he has got wrong about his identify and how you think this should be defined.

Bruce Pascoe has a new book out entitled ‘Country – First Knowledges’, written with Bill Gammage.  I’m planning to review it in a future blog post, I haven’t finished reading it yet.

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The image at the very top of this blogpost is an emu looking at the town of Denham in Shark bay Western Australia.  I wonder what he/she sees.  Shutterstock Item ID: 1551229643