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Professor of Indigenous Agriculture
content/entries/indigenous-agriculture-professor.md
From Can’t Explain On GitHub
title: "Professor of Indigenous Agriculture" claim: "Bruce Pascoe has joined the University of Melbourne as Melbourne Enterprise Professor in Indigenous Agriculture." caption: "A chair in a subject the same university’s press was about to say did not happen." status: published example: false published: 2026-08-16T13:02:00+10:00 person: University of Melbourne claimType: speech year: 2020 loudness: 7 tags: [dark-emu, pascoe, unimelb, agriculture, government, education, "2020"] source: url: https://science.unimelb.edu.au/about/news/bruce-pascoe-appointed-enterprise-professor-in-indigenous-agriculture date: "2020-09-02" publisher: University of Melbourne title: "Bruce Pascoe appointed Enterprise Professor in Indigenous Agriculture" quote: "Bruce Pascoe has joined the University of Melbourne as Melbourne Enterprise Professor in Indigenous Agriculture" evidence: path: 2020/indigenous-agriculture-professor/source.md kind: html captured: "2026-08-16"
September 2020. The University of Melbourne, a public university, appoints Bruce Pascoe Enterprise Professor in Indigenous Agriculture. The job, the faculty said, was “designed to build knowledge and understanding of Indigenous agriculture.” Country News: he was hired on the back of Dark Emu, “documenting and arguing for the restoration of forgotten food production.” The live staff page still lists him Honorary (Enterprise Professor), School of Agriculture.
This card files that chair. It does not file “no native plant should be studied.”
What did have a receipt:
- Nine months later the same university’s press published Sutton and Walshe, Farmers or Hunter-gatherers?. Their finding: not agriculturalists. Pascoe’s village-and-crop reading of the explorers does not survive the diaries. The chair had already been named.
- Pascoe is a writer. The appointment did not require an archaeology or anthropology doctorate. The title does the work the book did: agriculture as the settled fact, hunter-gatherer as the tag to drop.
- ABC Education, NSW Premier’s prizes, a Melbourne chair. That is the support. The second meter is the same campus’s own press.
Grammar: Indigenous Agriculture. Logic: a chair is an endorsement. Rhetoric: professor.