Michael Mansell (Image: Private Media)

Michael Mansell, chair of the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania, is a lawyer and a long-term activist for Aboriginal rights. Mansell has been vigilant when it comes the bona fides of those claiming Tasmanian Aboriginal ancestry and was one of 16 pale-skinned Aboriginal people named by News Corp columnist Andrew Bolt in articles found by the Federal Court to have breached section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. 

He supplied the following statement to Crikey.

One of the key demands from the 2017 Uluru gathering was the need for truth telling. Truth, of course, can often be as elusive as it is desirable, often judged by personal cultural experience — a bit like beauty being in the eye of the beholder. But many facts are verifiable, a point that has haunted Bruce Pascoe since he made his claims in Dark Emu that we Aborigines were farmers, not “mere” hunters and gatherers, and that he was Aboriginal.

When the history about my people was written by whites from the early 19th century up until the 1980s, invariably we were pitied as a people too savage to be acknowledged as real landowners. Dispossession was therefore justified.

When Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu hit the book stands in 2014, his sympathetic view of Aboriginal life struck a chord with many well-meaning people, especially in the media. Pascoe made two contentious claims: first, that Aborigines were not a primitive people but that our use of the land was something akin to agriculturalists, indicating we were a much more sophisticated people than historians previously acknowledged. 

Now, Peter Sutton and co-author Keryn Walsh in their book Farmers or Hunter Gatherers? have taken Pascoe’s claims to task; not about being Aboriginal, but about his argument that Aborigines farmed kangaroo and tilled the soil like Europeans. They rightly point out that Aborigines do not have to “act like white people” — remember Collingwood’s Allan McAlister, who said Aboriginal players were welcome  “as long as they conduct themselves like white people”? — in order to be seen as an equal people. 

Where does that leave Pascoe’s claim to be Aboriginal? He is more than just a good writer — he is a clever and shrewd tactician. What better way to promote an otherwise doubtful set of historical facts than to gain the sympathy of the literary world by claiming to be Aboriginal? And the more that people like me tried to tell ABC and The Guardian and others that his Aboriginality claim was baseless, devoid of any facts, the more sympathy he got — a poor blackfella unfairly being attacked. Implicitly, Pascoe’s supporters took the view that because his view on Aboriginal history was what they wanted to hear, any criticism of him was unfounded. 

As Nyungar human rights lawyer and academic Dr Hannah McGlade said, “It’s a nonsense to say that we support truth-telling and at the same time support Dark Emu, which clearly is not very truthful or accurate.”

I shudder to think that my telling the truth about Pacoe’s mistaken claims on being Aboriginal somehow puts me in line with the likes of Mark Latham, Fred Nile and One Nation who want to ban Pascoe’s books — a ridiculous idea.

But the truth is the truth, and it should not be hidden because of right-wing agendas. Unfortunately, instead of Pascoe’s supporters dealing with facts, they are no better than their opponents, wanting to stifle free speech. The media outlets that would normally, sometimes begrudgingly, print my statements on Tasmanian Aborigines, in this case refused point blank. They censored the truth. 

Pascoe’s defenders have rolled two separate and distinct issues — Aboriginality of the author, and what he writes — into one. The result is a smokescreen. Anyone who challenges Pascoe’s bona fides on identity — is he an Aboriginal or a white man? — is labelled a right-wing opponent of his books. Pascoe himself pushed the line in an interview with the Sunday Age in 2020, that questioning his identity was an attempt to discredit Dark Emu.

Michael Mansell

July 2021

Editor’s note

Guardian Australia editor Lenore Taylor provided the following response to Crikey: “Neither Guardian Australia‘s Indigenous affairs editor Lorena Allam nor I can recall Michael Mansell ever raising this issue with us. We have acknowledged the questions about Bruce Pascoe’s identity, for example in this podcast . We think this essay that we published by Mark McKenna was an excellent and informed contribution to the discussion prompted by the publication of Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe’s book.

A spokesperson for the ABC has declined to respond to Michael Mansell’s criticisms. It appears the ABC is quietly addressing criticism of its coverage of Dark Emu and Pascoe by adding footnotes to existing stories, pointing readers to an ABC interview with Sutton and Walshe for an “alternative perspective”. According to the ABC, this is being done to provide “context” for the audience, rather than as a correction.