Readers, the blush you see on my cheek is put there by how Bruce Pascoe's fabulously popular book Dark Emu (it has sold 260,000 copies and has attracted prizes and influencers' influential gushings galore) is now revealed to be a very, very bad book.
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I am one of those who, alerted by the public gushings (a lot of it from Pascoe-besotted ABC radio luminaries) bought and read it and imagined it to be a very, very importantly good book, a book that righted wrongs.
Now, as finely tuned, thinking readers will know, two passionately truth-loving and scholarly academics, social anthropologist and linguist Peter Sutton and archaeologist Keryn Walshe, have written their own book, Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate. In their book they forensically take Pascoe's book apart for its falsifications and wrong-headedness. In recent days I have read and listened to everything Sutton and Walshe have publicly had to say about Dark Emu and am persuaded they are right.
There is no room here to do the controversy justice. It is very well covered elsewhere, especially in Stuart Rintoul's recent, long-form Debunking Dark Emu: did the publishing phenomenon get it wrong?
Basically, Pascoe argues that the First Australians were never the "mere" primitive hunter-gatherers they've been dismissed as but were sophisticated farmers. The scholars, horrified, say that the First Australians were never farmers, that they were always hunter-gatherers, but that there has never been anything "mere'' or primitive about hunter-gatherers, their way of life requiring sophistications and spiritual attunements to their world of which Pascoe is totally ignorant. The scholars' case is evidence-based. Pascoe's is largely made up.
With no room to do the debunking justice I find myself thinking instead about the phenomenon of delusion and self-delusion, of those occasions in one's life when one develops major crushes (on particular people, cults, works, ideas and crazes) only to discover, later, that one has been naive and muddle-headed.
It is a harrowing self-discovery to make, especially when one has had thick wads of tickets on oneself as the possessor of an especially alert and sceptical mind. It shivers the timbers, leaving one to doubt one's judgment about everything.
What if I fell for Dark Emu because I am old (75) and have lost my intellectual agility? Would Young Ian have seen through the book's disguises by about page 66?
Now there is extra food for self-honest oldie thought in a new piece for the online admirable Unherd magazine in which Dominic Sandbrook asks, Is Joe Biden Too Old To Be President? Sandbrook goes on to argue persuasively that, yes, Joe, 78, is far too old.
Sandbrook reports that "The American media ... had a field day with Biden's gaffes during his summer travels" and then lists those gaffes which included calling Vladimir Putin 'President Trump'.
I freely admit that my own mind is not the sure-footed mountain goat, the bounding gazelle, it once was. Did my old mind shuffle unsteadily, on creaking knees, through Dark Emu as I read it? Australian judges must retire at 70 and perhaps there is a case for requiring influencers of all kinds (including and especially newspaper columnists) to stop their influencing at 70.
Then, I wonder if Dark Emu is a kind of unbook?
I'm indebted to unflinching UK columnist Julie Burchill for the notion of the unbook. She has just written scathingly about a self-help book, The Comfort Book, calling it in passing "this quivering blancmange of a book".
"It's very much what I think of as an UnBook," she scoffs.
"If it were a garment, it would be a onesie. If it were food, it would be mashed potato. If it could speak, it would say 'I'm here for you'."
The Comfort Book that Burchill is calling an unbook is quite unlike Dark Emu. And yet, in a sense Dark Emu is a kind of comfort book, a literary onesie, perhaps helping to explain its stupendous sales. In one recent interview Peter Sutton (co-author of the book refuting Dark Emu) says he believes that reading and accepting Dark Emu has become a search for "moral recovery" for some white Australians of goodwill.
Yes, many of us may be buying it, praising it, recommending it (state governments have even prescribed it for reading in schools and one university has made its author a professor) because we feel it is a book that urges a new respect for a shamefully downtrodden and disrespected people. Buying, admiring and gushing about the book has given us a kind of illusory moral comfort. Yes, we've been muddle-headed, but we meant well and showed naive goodwill.
