Another apology, page-82

I think Bruce Pascoe is a tasmanian aboriginal...but that could be fake...


The Bunurong

It’s unclear when Pascoe began to claim ancestry with the Bunurong (also written as Boonwurrung) people of Victoria. However in early 2020, when questions swirled around his identity, the Boonwurrung Land and Sea Council publicly shunned Pascoe and his claimed ancestry. (Pascoe has claimed the link may have been through his great-grandmother.)
The council’s chairman Jason Briggs issued a statement to The Age saying the organisation had “a sophisticated ancestral database of all peoples and families who can rightfully claim to be of [Bunurong] descent”, and that Pascoe wasn’t on it.
Briggs reaffirmed the council’s rejection of Pascoe when contacted by Crikey.
“We’re running a native title claim and I’ve got more reports on my desk than I care to mention,” Briggs said. “In a community like ours we all know who each other is. We don’t accept Bruce Pascoe as part of our community.
“We’ve had enough.”
Tasmania

After the Bunurong community rejected Pascoe in 2020, next came the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania. Chairman Michael Mansell has reaffirmed Tasmania’s rejection of Pascoe in a detailed statement to Crikey, pointing to gaps in Pascoe’s story when it comes to claimed family links to Tasmania.
Mansell referred to “the pattern of Pascoe’s elusiveness on challenges to his identity claims”. There were “no names, no direct statement about from whom he gets Aboriginal heritage, all general and vague — but powerfully suggestive, leaving the reader to conclude there must be something there”, Mansell said.
Crikey has confirmed that Pascoe attempted to gain proof of Tasmanian Aboriginal ancestry at the end of 2013 in the months before Dark Emu was first published in March 2014.
The Wiradjuri connection

Crikey is aware that in an application made to the Elders Council of the Tasmania Aboriginal Corporation, Pascoe claimed he was told by an uncle that the family was Aboriginal when he was 16 years old.
Pascoe also claimed his family had recently learned of a connection to the Wiradjuri people of central NSW — a claim not previously reported.
Claims of Tasmanian Aboriginality have been notoriously difficult to establish. A major factor is the sheer scale and brutality of the assault on Tasmanian Aborigines by white settlers, colonial authorities and subsequent governments. Another is the destruction of records.
Notwithstanding that, Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre Heather CEO Heather Sculthorpe told Crikey that Pascoe had not provided the information to persuade them that he had Tasmanian Aboriginal ancestry.
Sculthorpe also took aim at “the high profile people” who, she said, associated any questioning of Pascoe’s claims to Aboriginality with being “a fascist or a Bolt supporter”.
“The intellectual laziness of the commentators astounds me,” Sculthorpe told Crikey.