Before Bruce Pascoe was Aboriginal he was Jewish, but it didn’t take. In 1999, the year he was fifty-two, he came out as Leopold Glass. It was a pseudonym chosen for his self-published novel Ribcage—a book of crime, money and race. A mock bio of Leopold Glass described a man who had mislaid his family: “He is currently researching the life of his paternal grandmother who grew up in a New South Wales orphanage with no clear records.” Unlike Glass, the real author had two grandmothers with very clear records. Ribcage is short, 144 pages, and the hero, David Bourke,…