Bruce Pascoe | |
|---|---|
 Pascoec. 2022 | |
| Born | 1947 (age 78–79) Richmond, Victoria, Australia |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Alma mater | University of Melbourne (BEd) |
| Genre | Australian fiction, poetry |
| Subject | Australian Indigenous history |
| Notable works | Fog a Dox (2012) Dark Emu (2014) |
| Notable awards | List of awards
|
| Spouse | ? (?–1982) Lyn Harwood (1982– ) |
| Children | 2[1] |
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 thepen namesMurray Gray andLeopold Glass. Pascoe identifies as Aboriginal. Since August 2020, he has been Enterprise Professor in Indigenous Agriculture at theUniversity of Melbourne.
Pascoe is best known for his workDark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? (2014), in which he argues that traditional Aboriginal andTorres Strait Islander peoples engaged inagriculture,engineering andpermanent building construction, and that their practices provide possible models for future sustainable development in Australia.
Pascoe was born inRichmond, Victoria in 1947.[2] 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 the1980 Arnhem Paralympics.[3][4][5] Pascoe spent his early years onKing Island where his father worked at thetungsten mine. His family moved toMornington, Victoria, when he was 10 years old, and then two years later moved to the Melbourne suburb ofFawkner. He attended the local state school before completing his secondary education atUniversity High School, where his sister had won an academic scholarship. Pascoe went on to attend theUniversity of Melbourne, initially studying commerce but then transferring toMelbourne State College. After graduating with aBachelor of Education,[6] he was posted to a small township nearShepparton. He later taught atBairnsdale for nine years.[7]
While on leave from his teaching career, Pascoe bought a 300-hectare (740-acre)mixed farming property and occasionally worked as anabalone 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, raisingA$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, includingHelen Garner,Gillian Mears andTim 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 novelFox is a fugitive, searching for hisAboriginal identity and home. The book deals with issues such asAboriginal deaths in custody, discrimination andland 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 theConvincing 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'sblurb 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 onSBS 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 theWathaurong language, producing a dictionary of the language.[2]
Fog a Dox, a story for young adults, won thePrime Minister's Literary Awards in 2013 and was shortlisted for the 2013Western Australian Premier's Book Awards (Young Adult category) and the 2013Deadly 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: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?, first published in 2014, challenges the claim that pre-colonial Australian Aboriginal peoples were onlyhunter-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 theNSW 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 magazineThe Conversation touched off a debate there about Pascoe's use of his historical sources.[18] A second edition, entitledDark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture was published in mid-2018,[19] and a version of the book for younger readers, entitledYoung Dark Emu: A Truer History, was published in 2019.[20] The 2019 version was shortlisted for the 2020Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature in the Children's Literature Award section.[21]
The success ofDark Emu andYoung Dark Emu prompteda book-length critique byPeter 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 ofDark Emu would be made for television byBlackfella Films, co-written by Pascoe with Jacob Hickey, directed byErica Glynn and produced byDarren Dale and Belinda Mravicic.[23]
In September 2015, in a collaboration withPoets House inNew York, a recording of sixFirst Nations Australia Writers Network members reading their work was presented at a special event, which was recorded. Pascoe was one of the readers, along withJeanine Leane,Dub Leffler,Melissa Lucashenko,Jared Thomas andEllen van Neerven.[24]
Pascoe was appointed Enterprise Professor in Indigenous Agriculture at theUniversity 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 is aCountry Fire Authority volunteer. He battled the2019–20 bushfires nearMallacoota.[27] In January 2020, he went toNew South Wales to help out there, before returning to Mallacoota. He cancelled his scheduled appearances at aPerth Festival event in February and at theAdelaide Writers' Week in March, to remain inEast 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.[28]
Pascoe states that in his early thirties he found Aboriginal ancestors on both sides of his family, including from Tasmania (Palawa),[29] from theBunurong people of theKulin nation ofVictoria, and theYuin of southernNew South Wales.[30][8] Heidentified himself asKoori by the age of 40.[3] He acknowledges hisCornish andEuropean 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]
InConvincing 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 theProdigal 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 columnistAndrew Bolt's breach of theRacial 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 arefair 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 discreditDark 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 theAboriginal 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 includingMarcia Langton andKen 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] HistorianGeoffrey Blainey stated that "it is now known that [Pascoe's] four grandparents were of English descent".[40]
Pascoe was nominated as Person of the Year at theNational Dreamtime Awards 2018, and was also invited by Yuinelder Max Dulumunmum Harrison to a special cultural ceremony lasting several days.[3][49] In the same year he presented "Mother Earth" for theEric Rolls Memorial Lecture.[50]
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, nearMallacoota inEast 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 inDark Emu on a commercial scale.[54] His 2024 book is titledBlack Duck – A Year at Yumburra.[55]
The following list is a selection of the 182 items by Pascoe as listed onAustlit as of December 2019[update]:[56]
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]
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| People | |
| Other | |
