Despite 60 years of journalistic lunches, including a Big Mac from a Soviet GRU operative in

Canberra, I’ve only enjoyed one really posh feed. That was in 1990 and my host was Tim
Marcus Clark, CEO of the Bank of South Australia.
The intimate dining room was under an atrium as if the whole tower had been designed
around it. Marcus Clark was feuding with his board and Premier John Bannon about his
wayward lending, so he wanted a puff piece from me in Business Review Weekly.1 I kept
getting distracted by the long scar under his chin –some assailant had cut his throat from ear
to ear a few years earlier. A few months after my lunch the bank collapsed with $3 billion of
dud loans, taking down Premier Bannon and much of SA.
I’m trying to imagine a scenario involving an equally posh lunch for top people at Melbourne
University but I don’t know how these lunches really go. I’ll just do my clunky best. It’s all
fiction except where indicated. The menu is leftover wombat road-kill. To find out why,
you’ll have to read on.
I’m imagining a Vice-Chancellor Dr Masculine hosting Tesla guy Elon Musk and offering
him a prestigious Enterprise Professorship.
Elon: Hi Dr Masculine !

Dr Masculine: Hi Elon! Make yourself at home on the sofa. The sofa is on

stolen Wurundjeri land of the Kulin Nation, and we pay our respects to Elders past, present
and emerging. Sovereignty was never ceded.

Elon: Hey I thought you owned the campus. The rent to these Kulins must cost a bomb.

Dr Masculine: It’s complicated but our Law Society Students Society is leading the way with
its “Pay the Rent” campaign. It wants me to pay rent to the Kulin nation too.2

Elon: Say, why don’t I lend you some lawyers and merchant bankers? I bet they can tailor
something win-win tax-positive with the Kulin embassy.

Dr Masculine: Thanks, our chancellor’s a barrister, he can follow that up. But to change the
subject, congrats on being so rich.

Elon: Oh, I’m comfortable. I get by.

Dr Masculine (coyly): Keep this under your hat, but as for me, I’m Australia’s best paid
vice-chancellor -- $1.5m last time around!

Elon: Wow, I’m impressed. The President of Princeton only gets a million US and the
president of Yale only gets $US1.16m.

Dr Masculine: They don’t have the prestige we enjoy here in Dan Andrew’s Victoria. But
let’s cut to the chase. We offer you a coveted Honorary Enterprise Professorship for building
the trillion-dollar Tesla company and launching space rockets and other business stuff.

Elon: But isn’t Melbourne University famously anti-capitalist? [Pulls out iphone and
googles]. The university says here that capitalism’s “death agonies will likely generate many
wild quests for salvation through vulgar resource exploitation”. And:  “We should
reconceive and replot our exit from capitalist modernity, not as retrenchment to misery, but
as quest for a new human plentitude. Freed from the diktak of capitalist growth, and its
straitened materialism, our species could discover fresh forms of realisation in things
without ‘value’, at least as presently conceived. A post-accumulative political economy is the
premise for a new urban modernity…”

Dr Masculine (blushing): “It should be diktat, not diktak, and we Cambridge people say
“plenitude” not “plentitude”. But anyway pay no attention. That’s just Professor Brendon
Gleeson, director of our Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute. He’s such a lovable rascal!
His colleague Sam Alexander even co-authored a book with Rupert Read from Extinction
Rebellion who advocated eco-fascism.3 Actually Brendan bugged out of the Institute last
September, and on December 6 I got my pro-vice chancellor Mark to sack everyone else
there.

Elon: So the Sustainable Institute wasn’t sustainable?

Dr Masculine Yeah no. (quoting his press release): The closure of MSSI does not diminish
the University’s deep commitment  to a sustainable society and to addressing the challenges
of climate change. 

Now Elon, about our Enterprise Professorship offer…

Elon: Sounds good. Who got the previous one?

Dr Masculine: Oh, that was famous Aboriginal business man Bruce Pascoe in September last
year.4 5 You’ll have heard about him and his Dark Emu story in Palo Alto I’m sure. Bruce’s
pre-contact forebears were agriculturalists living in stone villages of 1000 and they began
baking bread in 118,000BC.

Elon: Sounds good. What tribe’s Bruce from?

Dr Masculine: Well mainly Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian. But he’s also said he’s
Wiradjuri, Punniler panner, Koori,  a descendant of the Ballarat and Geelong Aboriginal
communities , and from a tribe bordering the Wathaurong of Geelong and Colac Victoria,
along with a South Australian Aboriginal connection . He discovered he was Aboriginal at
the age of 30 -- no, make that 18, -- no, make that 9, when he was speaking the Wathaurong
language with his family.
Elon: You’ve convinced me. And now tell me about his business successes.
Dr Masculine: Well there’s been three main companies. You can google it on that excellent
Quadrant blog. He and his charity Black Duck Foods have been producing flour from native
grass seeds for the past decade.
Elon: How many million tonnes so far?
Dr Masculine: Actually none is being offered on the Black Duck website yet.6 There also his
Gurundgi Munjie company
which ASIC is striking off, and he’s a director of Twofold Aboriginal Corporation, Eden.
Elon: How’s that one going?
Dr Masculine (googling): Well the auditor last March said:
Material Uncertainty Related to Going Concern
We draw attention to Note 1 in the financial report, which indicates that the
Corporation  incurred a net loss of $466,107 during the year ended June 30, 2020, and, as of
that date, the Corporation’s current liabilities exceeded its current assets by $542,937. These
events or conditions, along with other matters set forth in Note 1, indicate that a material
uncertainty exists that may cast significant doubt on the Corporation’s ability to continue as
a going concern. Our opinion is not modified in respect of this matter.
But if you ask me, some government agency or pal under some pretext is bound to throw
Twofold a million or two to get it viable again.
Elon: So all A-OK at Twofold Bay. Man, I could learn a lot from this Pascoe fellow about
running a successful enterprise.
Dr Masculine (chortling): Well Elon, as a special surprise he’s right here and he’s cooking
our lunch today!
Elon (amazed): So what’s he cooking for us?
Dr Masculine: It’s his culinary specialty – road-kill!
And here he is to tell you all about it.
Enter Bruce Pascoe wearing a toque, and holding his new book Country: Future Fire, Future
Farming.7 He opens it to his Chapter 4, “Future Farming – kangaroos and emus”, and reads to
Elon:
There is another avenue of protein collection we might consider. Every morning in East
Gippsland the road toll becomes apparent, with carcasses of wallabies, kangaroos, possums
and wombats every kilometre or so. In this district it is not uncommon to find kangaroos and
wallabies with broken legs as the result of being hit by a car.
I will never forget finding one huge injured male by following his moans of agony. And I will
certainly never forget the look he turned on me when I arrived with my gun. He knew exactly
what was about to happen, and was ready. [Who knew Bruce was a kangaroo-whisperer?]
We harvest these animals with our cars, so why not use their bounty instead of allowing their
carcasses to bloat? If we are going to be meat eaters, and there are good arguments for some
meat in our diet, then let us be economical about our harvest… Animals killed like this
almost always die suddenly, without the meat-toughening release of adrenaline into their
system.
Why don’t we have patrol vans with people licensed to inspect roadkill and harvest anything
left that is fit for human consumption or could be made into dog food? A simple temperature
probe is almost all that is required. Older carcasses could be moved further off the highway
so that eagles and crows were not tempted to feed too close to the road. Stringent health and
refrigeration rules could be set in place so that we don’t waste any resources. Harvesting
that meat and the kangaroo and emu stock in our paddocks would mean we could afford to
graze fewer hard-hoofed animals. (Kindle, p75 of 235).
Dr Masculine: The book shows great wisdom. No wonder National Museum Australia was
proud to be its co-publisher.
Elon, to Bruce (eagerly): So what’s for lunch?
Bruce: Wombat back legs! A truck hit it near my farm at Gipsy Point. I scraped it off the
Mallacoota-Genoa Road. The head got squashed, but the hindquarters were pristine and the
wombat didn’t have time to release any meat-toughening adrenaline. I stuck a simple
temperature probe up its arse and it had hardly begun to bloat. I separated the legs with an
axe and they’ve been in my fridge truck, involving stringent health rules, all the way down
here to Melbourne University. You’re in for a fine dining experience and what’s more,
wombat road-kill cuisine involves much fewer planet-killing CO2 emissions than steak and
lamb chops. I intend to sell any of today’s leftovers to chefs in Lygon St and the Paris end of
Collins St.
Enter waiters, exposing the wombat legs under silver salvers. Dr Masculine, Elon Musk and
Bruce Pascoe tuck in, using saucers to spit out bits of gravel.
Elon, to Dr Masculine: I really don’t feel worthy to stand alongside your Enterprise Professor
in Indigenous Agriculture, but I’m deeply grateful to accept your Honorary Enterprise
Professorship.
Pascoe: Koongadgee gobatarda – that’s goodbye and thanks in my native Wathaurong
tongue.
Dr Masculine: Allow me to phone you up an Uber to Tulla. We’ve got a tight budget here,
you’ll understand.

Tony Thomas’s just-published “Foot Soldier in the Culture Wars” ($29.95) is available
from author at tthomas061@gmail.com or publisher Connor Court
1
The State Bank lost $700 million just on one deal, the Remm Myer Centre development in Rundle
Mall.

2
The MULSS is contributing to the 'Pay the Rent' campaign. A portion of the Society's revenue is paid
to various Indigenous organisations in recognition of our existence on stolen land. We encourage
others to consider Paying the Rent with us.

3
Rupert Read and Sam Alexander, This Civilisation is Finished. Simplicity Institute, Melbourne 2019:

#  “It is just-about conceivable that this civilisation might survive by adopting an extremely disciplined
eco-fascism.”

# “… Cuba or Costa Rica, two of the very few countries in the world today that it might possibly be
argued are managing to achieve both ecological sustainability and some measure of economic
justice.”

#  “Whereas Marx foresaw a time when the proletariat would rise up and replace capitalism by way of
revolution, what looks to be the more likely course of events is that capitalism is replaced not by way of
revolution but by way of collapse. And even if the Marxist revolution comes first, then collapse lies
ahead all the same unless socialists adopt a post-growth position too.”  

4
Enterprise appointments are highly selective to ensure appointees bring distinctive knowledge and
skills that would be otherwise unavailable to the institution. Professorial-level Enterprise
appointments are highly distinguished positions.

5
In order to be appointed to the position of ‘Melbourne Enterprise Professor’ or ‘Honorary
Melbourne Enterprise Professor’, individuals must:

 Have an eminent and sustained record of peak level leadership, entrepreneurship and
influence;

 Be widely recognised for their outstanding achievements in industry, business,

professions and/or government; and
  Demonstrate specialist expertise and a highly developed industry/business knowledge
base that matches in breadth and depth what is expected of all professors of the
University.

6
The site has a page “Shop – coming soon”.
7
Thames & Hudson and National Museum Australia. Co-author is ANU historian Bill Gammage. The
publisher describes Pascoe as “an Aboriginal Australian writer”.