DANGERS OF CALLING PASCOE OUT

WHAT a scandal. Indigenous Australians Minister Ken Wyatt now threatens to sack a whistleblower who called out “Aboriginal historian” Bruce Pascoe as a white.

The whistleblower in Wyatt’s sights is Josephine Cashman, an Aboriginal businesswoman on his advisory council.

That’s because Cashman claims Pascoe, author of the bestseller Dark Emu and star of an upcoming ABC series, is a fake Aborigine, and she says she has plenty of evidence.

Genealogical records on darkemu-exposed.org suggest all of Pascoe’s ancestors are of English descent, and Pascoe refuses to say which is actually Aboriginal.

Indeed, his story keeps changing.

Once he identified as white, until a reviewer of his first novel said it would have been better had Pascoe been black.

Once he claimed that one of his mother’s grandmothers was Aboriginal, before admitting she was English.

Now he claims he’s descended from several tribes, including the Boonwurrong of Victoria, Tasmanian Aborigines and the Yuin of NSW.

But his claims have been rejected by the Boonwurrung Land & Sea Council, the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania and members of the Yuin, and now even the Yolngu of Arnhem Land.

Elder Terry Yumbulul says his fellow Yolngu want Wyatt to investigate Pascoe’s “claim to Aboriginal ancestry” and what he’s gained from an identity “he has been unable to verify”.

Yumbulul, like the Boonwurrung and the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania, also rejects Pascoe’s claims — based on false citations and exaggerations — that Aborigines weren’t huntergathers but farmers in “towns” of “1000 people”.

“There is no evidence of it in our art, languages or songlines,” says Yumbulul, who accuses Pascoe of causing “concerns about our ancient cultures, our ancient traditions, our precious stories”.

So what’s Wyatt’s reaction? It’s to defend white Pascoe and seemingly threaten Aboriginal Cashman with the sack.

Wyatt told The Guardian Australia that Pascoe’s Aboriginality was “being played out publicly” when “we should deal with (it) within communities”.

He said he could ask one of his advisers to quit: “I have to think of the greater good of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.”

Really? Is truth to be sacrificed for the “greater good”?

And where’s this “greater good” when Aborigines are being stripped of their past and even their right to say who is of their tribe?

No Liberal MP should tolerate what Wyatt seems to have in mind. If Cashman goes, so should he.