If Marcus Stewart was fair dinkum about honouring his heritage, he’d be wearing a kilt and playing the bagpipes.

By TONY MOBILIFONITIS
IT seems poor old Bruce Pascoe isn’t the only Aussie getting caught out in the scam by some prominent people to “identify” as indigenous, based on some hunch about a distant auntie having a connection to some distant alleged great, great, Black Fella grandad/auntie during our colonial past.

This business of white fellas and sheilas naming themselves something like Jingagoop man/woman from Werej Wallopim country is becoming a bit of a sick joke these days. Yes, we made up those names, but would you believe that some Australian university professors are doing much the same thing about their alleged indigenous heritage?

We call fakes, fakes and even if they really do have an Aboriginal gene somewhere way down the genealogical chain. In the big picture, what does it matter? Is it any different uncle Joe Blogs having a distant German fraulein somewhere back in his ancestry?

Where it does matter in Australia is that someone with Aboriginal descent qualifies for Aboriginality under the Commonwealth’s three-part rule. The other two parts are “self identification” (easy) and acceptance by others as such (fairly easy). For fake indigenous identifiers like Bruce Pascoe and others, it was a very lucrative claim to make.

But give us a break you 100% or 98% Irish-Pommie-Scots calling yourself indigenous names from some tribal area someone dug up from who knows where. With some of our Cairns News readers from up north there’s no mistaking the real indigenous, the real Black Fellas, and they would see right through this scam. And by the way, they don’t mind being called Black Fellas because they can call us White Fellas – so we’re equal in the wash up.

Melbourne man Roger Karge runs Dark Emu Exposed.org, a genealogical and historical research association, which first exposed the false claims of Bruce Pascoe. More recently Karge’s team of volunteers has shone a light on a whole bunch of Aussies with questionable or false claims to indigenous genes. Their main tool is publicly-available genealogical records, which are quite extensive.

Karge was recently on Sky News with Andrew Bolt, who has had his fair share of run-ins with the Australian Indigenous Industrial Complex. Those carefully researched by the group and shown to be making false claims about their heritage include Professor Kerry Doyle of WA, South Australian Attorney General Kyam Maher, Adjunct Professor Margot Neale, leading Voice activist Thomas Mayo and Labor MP Gordon Reid.

Then there are others like Marcus Stewart, a member of Albanese’s Voice team, whose great, great grandfather was Aboriginal. Stewart is as white as they come but calls himself a “Nira illim bulluk man of the Taungurung Nation”. He also has a long noble line of Scottish ancestors, according to the records, but apparently they don’t matter as much as that little bit of indigenous.

Stewart, when the occasion demands, jumps on the indigenous bandwagon by painting himself up to the hilt and donning his indigenous cloak. All this obviously pays better than just having great, great grand daddys and grandmas from bonnie Scotland.

Cairns News wonders what percentage Aboriginal genes Stewart actually has? And how does the “Treaty” he’s pushing work with people like him? Does he only get a few reparation dollars for his few dispossessed Aboriginal genes? And how much “country” is he entitled to? One square metre per hectare perhaps? But no, it only takes a distant link and you too can be part of a mob.

This is the case also with our old mate Thomas Mayo, who we credit with at least having the honesty to pay public tribute to the role of the Australian Communist Party in the Aboriginal movement.

Roger Karge has written a very long and reasonable open letter to Mayo. “Now, I am not denying that the records do seem to suggest that a small number of your 3X great-grandparents on your father’s side may be Indigenous Torres Strait Islanders, but our genealogist could not locate any definitive proof that this is the case,” Karge writes.

He then makes the case that Mayo, with his mixed genetic heritage of European, Filipino and Torres Strait Island. “Why should your claimed ‘indigeneity’ provide you with greater citizenship rights than myself? Shouldn’t we both be equal citizens under the law and equal voters under our democracy?” asks Karge.

“Why should you get ‘special’ democratic and political rights as a citizen, based solely on a condition – your DNA and ancestry – over which you have no control and which I cannot change in myself should I wish to obtain those same rights?” It’s a very reasonable and logical case.

And then there’s the academics claiming indigenous heritage, such as Professor Jakelin Troy, the Director of Aboriginal Research at Sydney University, who claims to have distant links to the indigenous people of “Ngarigu country” ie the Monaro-Snowy Mountains region she calls “my country”.

Now on appearances Prof. Troy and her mother might pass for part Aboriginal but Dark Emu researchers discovered otherwise in a five-part series of genealogical digging. The indigenous connections to “country” are simply not there. The connections she does have are because her family, like others from Sydney, moved out to the area to get away from the Japanese naval threats in the 1940s.

Prof. Jakelin in this video implies her great grandmother is indigenous but the researchers found nothing to back that claim. One might be inclined to tell Jakelin to in a non-academic way “cut the crap professor”.

And another academic who should cut the crap is Adjunct Professor Margo Neale (sorry, “Margo Ngawa Gurrawa Neale” as she calls herself) the senior Indigenous curator and adviser at the National Museum of Australia and head of the Centre for Indigenous Knowledges (sic).

The problem for Prof. Margo is that some Aboriginal people who did some digging found there was no reference to “Ngawa Gurrawa” in the Aboriginal dictionaries. Prof. Margo claims descent from several tribes and clans – the Kurnai/Gunai, the Kulin, the Gumbayngirr, the Northern Rivers tribes and even the Wuradjuri. But again the researchers helping Dark Emu were not able to locate any registered Aboriginal group that has formally recognised Margo Ngawa Neale as a member of their clan, family or tribe.

As well, other Dark Emu researchers used the public genealogical records and other evidence, constructed a family tree of Prof Neale which showed that none of her ancestors were Aboriginal, and came from England, Ireland or Wales. However, Karge does give her, and others, the benefit of the doubt that the family tree might not account for Aboriginal ancestry entering into the family line such as via a private or unrecorded adoption of an Aboriginal child or some undisclosed relationship.

As for Professor Kerrie Doyle, an Associate Dean for Indigenous Health at Western Sydney University, her claim to be a “mission-born Winnininni woman” is a huge embarrassment because no such tribe existed and in fact she was born in Papua New Guinea, which, well, might make her sort of indigenous.

Next on the Dark Emu list is Prof. Dennis Foley, Professor of Indigenous Entrepreneurship, Adjunct Professor, Canberra Business School, University of Canberra, Fullbright Scholar and Griffith University’s Outstanding First Peoples Alumnus, which is very impressive except for what researcher found: “Extensive genealogical investigations into his ‘matrilineal’ and ‘patrilineal’ connections has failed to find even one Aboriginal ancestor,” Dark Emu reports. That’s a real worry, given his academic titles and allegedly being among a “First Peoples Alumnus”.

Last on the list is the outstanding achiever Prof. Lisa Jackson Pulver AO who claims to be “the first known Aboriginal person to receive a PhD in medicine at the University of Sydney”, is known as a respected educator in Indigenous health services, a Member of the Order of Australia, and the University of Sydney Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Indigenous Strategy and Services).

Added to that is her claim to be possibly the highest ranking Aboriginal person in the Royal Australian Air Force, where she is a Group Captain and Indigenous Advisor to the Chief of Air Force. This is all very impressive, but according to Dark Emu research, her publicly available family trees “show no Aboriginal ancestry”.

Prof. Jackson Pulver however, had no problem telling, with a straight face, a gathering at Western Sydney University about her “two Aboriginal grandmothers”, which to say the very least, is a stark contrast to what the researchers found.

It seems as if there is a pattern here, even one that extends overseas. Take for instance Prof. Carrie Bourassa, a community health and epidemiology professor at the University of Saskatchewan [Canada] another “expert on indigenous issues”, who has been exposed as a fraud. “A family tree prepared by a group of academics who were suspicious of her ancestral claims shows that Bourassa is of Swiss, Hungarian, Polish and Czechoslovakian origins and has not one ounce of indigenous blood,” Canadian researchers reported.

The federal Labor politician Dr Gordon Reid, the Member for Robertson on the central NSW coast, has also jumped on the bandwagon, calling himself “a proud Wiradjuri man” based on the claims that his grandmother Aunty Robyn Reid was a Wiradjuri woman because she had been accepted as a Wiradjuri director of the Mingaletta Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander Corporation.

But was “Aunty Robyn” actually a Wiradjuri woman by descent. Nope. Dark Emu’s Wiradjuri contacts certainly didn’t know her as one of their mob. A letter from Karge to Dr Reid about this has so far not been answered, except for an automatic acknowledgement.