Keith Windschuttle
Encyclopedia
Keith Windschuttle is an Australia
n writer, historian
, and ABC
board member, who has authored several books from the 1970s onwards. These include Unemployment, (1979), which analysed the economic causes and social consequences of unemployment in Australia and advocated a socialist response; The Media: a New Analysis of the Press, Television, Radio and Advertising in Australia, (1984), on the political economy and content of the news and entertainment media
; The Killing of History, (1994), a critique of postmodernism
in history
; The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847, (2002), which accuses a number of Australian historians of falsifying and inventing the degree of violence
in the past; The White Australia Policy, (2004), a history of that policy which argues that academic historians have exaggerated the degree of racism
in Australian history; and The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume Three: The Stolen Generations 1881-2008, which argues the story of the "stolen generations" of Aboriginal children is a myth. He has been editor of Quadrant
magazine since 2008. He has been the publisher of Macleay Press
since 1994.
(where he was a contemporary of former Liberal
Australian prime minister
John Howard
), Windschuttle was a journalist on newspapers and magazines in Sydney. He completed a BA (first class honours in history) at the University of Sydney
in 1969, and an MA (honours in politics) at Macquarie University
in 1978. He enrolled in a PhD but did not submit it; instead he published it under the title The Media with Penguin Books. In 1973, he became a tutor
in Australian history at the University of New South Wales
(UNSW). Between 1977 and 1981, Windschuttle was lecturer
in Australian history and in journalism
at the New South Wales Institute of Technology, now University of Technology, Sydney
before returning to UNSW in 1983 as lecturer/senior lecturer in social policy. He resigned from UNSW in 1993 and since then he has been publisher of Macleay Press and a regular visiting and guest lecturer on history and historiography
at American universities. In June 2006 he was appointed to the Board of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
(ABC), Australia's non-commercial public broadcaster.
in the 1960s and 1970s, Windschuttle later moved to the right. This process is first evident in his 1984 book The Media, which took inspiration the empirical perspective of the Marxist historian
E. P. Thompson
, especially his The Poverty of Theory, to make a highly critical review of the Marxist theories of Louis Althusser
and Stuart Hall
. While the first edition attacked "the political program of the New Right
" and set out a case for both favouring "government restrictions and regulation" and condemning "private enterprise and free markets", the third edition four years later (1988) took a different view:
In The Killing of History, Windschuttle defended the practices and methods of traditional empirical history against postmodernism
, and praised historians such as Henry Reynolds
, but he now argues that some of those he praised for their empirically-grounded work fail to adhere to the principle. In the same book, Windschuttle maintains that historians on both sides of the political spectrum have misrepresented and distorted history to further their respective political causes or ideological positions.
In The Fabrication of Aboriginal History and other recent writings on Australian Aboriginal
history, Windschuttle criticises historians who, he claims, have extensively misrepresented and fabricated historical evidence to support a political agenda. He argues that Aboriginal rights, including land rights and the need for reparations for past abuses of Aboriginal people, have been adopted as a left-wing 'cause' and that those he perceives as left-wing historians distort the historical record to support that cause For Windschuttle, the task of the historian is to provide readers with an empirical history as close to the objective truth
as possible, based on an analysis of documentary, or preferably eye-witness, evidence. He questions the value of oral history. His "view is that Aboriginal oral history, when uncorroborated by original documents, is completely unreliable, just like the oral history of white people." A historian has no responsibility for the political implications of an objective, empirical history. One's political beliefs should not influence one's evaluation of archival evidence.
For some of his critics, 'historians don't just interpret the evidence: they compose stories about these meanings, or in the words of Hayden White
, they 'emplot' the past. This is itself a cultural process.'
Windschuttle's recent research disputes the idea that the colonial
settlers of Australia committed genocide
against the Indigenous Australians
. He also disputes the widespread view that there was a campaign of guerrilla warfare
against British settlement. Extensive debate on his work has come to be called the History Wars
. He dismisses assertions, which he imputes to the current generation of academic historians, that there was any resemblance between racial attitudes in Australia and those of South Africa under apartheid and Germany under the Nazis
. He is a frequent contributor to the conservative magazines Quadrant
and The New Criterion
.
against the Aborigines of Tasmania. He refers to historians he defines as making up this 'orthodox school' as being 'vain' and 'self-indulgent' for imposing their politics onto their scholarship, and ‘arrogant, patronizing and lazy’ for portraying the Tasmanian Aborigines' behavior and motivations in terms of European cultural concepts rather than taking the time to understand the cultural concepts of a hunter-gatherer society. Windschuttle's 'orthodox school' comprises a large number of historians and archaeologists, deceased or living, such as Henry Reynolds
, Lyndall Ryan
, Lloyd Robson, John Mulvaney
, Rhys Jones, Brian Plomley
, and Sharon Morgan, whom he regards as responsible for a politicized reading of the past, and for inflating the number of Aboriginal deaths. Reviewing their work, he highlights multiple examples of misrepresented sources, inaccurate reportage or the citation of sources that do not exist. His work on sources constitutes, according one critic, his most damaging contribution to the subject, though Stuart Macintyre
argues that Windschuttle 'misreads those whom he castigates'.
Windschuttle challenges the idea that mass killings were commonplace, arguing that the colonial settlers of Australia did not commit widespread massacres against Indigenous Australians
; he drastically reduces the figures for the Tasmanian Aboriginal death toll, and writes that Aborigines referred to by both Reynolds and Ryan as resistance figures, included ‘black bushranger
s’ and others engaged in acts normally regarded as 'criminality'; arguing that the evidence clearly shows that attacks by Aborigines on settlers were almost invariably directed at acquiring goods, such as flour, sugar, tea and tobacco, and that claims by orthodox historians that this was a form of guerrilla warfare
against British settlement aren't supported by credible evidence. Vicki Grieves argues that Windschuttle regards Aboriginal men who traded their women's services as pimp
s, although Windschuttle does not use the term. Adducing the work of a source who Stuart Macintyre claims is 'a particularly tendentious American anthropologist', he argues that the Tasmanian Aboriginal society was primitive, dysfunctional and on the verge of collapse, because their putative maltreatment of women impaired their ability to reproduce in a number of critical ways. Windschuttle agrees with earlier historical analysis, such as that of Geoffrey Blainey
, that introduced disease was the primary cause of the demise of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. He is highly critical of recent historical scholarship arguing that much of it ignores the scholar's basic duties to be objective and true to the evidence, and he advances a sympathetic analysis of settler opinion, arguing that historians such as Henry Reynolds
had misrepresented the contents of records of settler opinion to conceal the fact that the majority of settlers were consistently in favor of the protection of the Aborigines. He also criticises Aboriginal land right politics, arguing that it has resulted in many Aboriginal people being effectively confined to remote settlements far from viable employment opportunities and from the benefits of a modern society. His own examination of archives, contemporary newspapers, diaries and official accounts yields a provisory figure of approximately 120 deaths of Tasmanian Aborigines 'for which there is a plausible record of some kind' as having been killed by settlers, as opposed to earlier figures ranging as high as 700, and thus far less than the number of whites (187) reported as killed during the Black War of 1824 to 1828 by Aborigines. Windschuttle argues that the principles of the Enlightenment
, fused with the 19th century evangelical
revival within the Church of England
and Britain
s rule of law
had a profound effect on colonial policy and behaviour, which was humane and just, that together made the claimed genocide culturally impossible. Gregory D.B. Smithers argues that Windschuttle interpreted settler violence as self-defence.
Windschuttle argues that encroaching pastoralism
did not cause starvation through the loss of native hunting grounds as some historians have proposed, as their numbers were being drastically reduced by introduced disease, and large parts of Tasmania were not then, or now, occupied by white settlers. Windschuttle's estimate of the size of the Tasmanian Aboriginal population at the time of settlement is that it may have been as low as 2,000. Estimates made of the combined population of the Aboriginal people of Tasmania, before European arrival in Tasmania, are generally in the range of 3,000 to 8,000 people. Genetic studies have suggested much higher figures which is supported by oral traditions that Aborigines were "more numerous than the white people were aware of" but that their population had been decimated by a sudden outbreak of disease prior to 1803. It has been speculated that early contacts with passing ships, exploratory expeditions or sealers before colonization may have caused outbreaks of epidemic disease. The low rate of genetic drift
found in a recent genetic study argues that the highest previous estimate of pre-colonial Aboriginal population (8, 000) is likely too low and that a significantly higher population cannot be ruled out. He argues that the evidence shows that what the orthodox historians construed as 'resistance' by Tasmanian Aboriginal people, were acts of theft and violence motivated by their desire for 'exotic' consumer goods like flour, tea, sugar and blankets. The indigenous culture, in his view, 'had no sanctions against the murder of anyone outside their immediate clan', therefore they had no cultural sanctions preventing the killing of settler outsiders to obtain desired goods or in revenge. The forced removal of Tasmania's Aborigines from the Tasmanian mainland to Flinders Island
was the Colonial Administration's measure to ensuring peace for hard-pressed settlers while attempting, unsuccessfully, to prevent the extinction of the full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigines. The rapid decline in the Aboriginal population after the British colonisation was the product of the interaction of a number of factors including introduced diseases causing death and infertility, continued internecine warfare, deaths through conflict with settlers and the loss of a significant number of women of childbearing age from the full-blooded aboriginal gene pool to white sealers and settlers through abduction, ‘trade’ and by voluntary association.
(who is credited with the first use of the term anthropology
), by George Augustus Robinson
in his journals, and by the early Australian writer James Bonwick
, of the violence and cruelty with which many Tasmanian Aboriginal men were observed to treat women. He notes that the 'murder of women because of insult, jealousy and infidelity, was common' and that a woman who refused a particular suitor would often be abducted and raped. He argues that this contributed to the willingness of some Aboriginal women to associate themselves with sealers and settlers rather than their own people, so reducing the full-blooded Aboriginal population's ability to reproduce itself. He cites a number of accounts including one published in 1820 by a British officer who had spoken with Aboriginal women living with Bass Strait sealers. The officer reported that Aboriginal women made it known that their (Aboriginal) husbands treat them with 'considerable harshness and tyranny' and that they sometimes run away and 'attach themselves to the English sailors', finding 'their situation greatly improved by attaching themselves to the sealing gangs'. Windschuttle holds that the willingness of some Tasmanian Aboriginal women to engage in prostitution with convicts, sealers and settlers and the Tasmanian Aboriginal men who ‘actively colluded’ in the trade in their women aided in the transmission of venereal and other introduced diseases to the indigenous population. Windschuttle argues that introduced disease was the primary cause of the destruction of the full-blooded Tasmanian Aboriginal people, not merely by directly causing deaths but also through widespread infertility resulting from introduced venereal disease.
James Boyce, a Tasmanian historian, dismisses Windschuttle’s argument as "uninformed slander" based on a failure to read the only documentary sources that matter, the journals of French and British explorers recording the first contacts with Tasmanian aborigines before the colonial period. Examining Windschuttle's use of sources for the view women were treated like slaves and drudges, he says Windschuttle relies on a selective reading of just two of many sources in an early work by Ling Roth
, 'written at the height of Social Darwinist
orthodoxy' (1899). However, Ling Roth did not "write" these sources; he simply translated the diaries of the first contacts by the French explorers. One is from Péron, who noted scars on women, and interpreted them as signs of domestic violence, which however he had never witnessed. Other early observers took this scarring as an indigenous cultural practice
. James Cook
had noticed Aboriginal men and women’s bodies were both incised with scars in the same manner. Péron was less sympathetic than other first observers on the Baudin expedition to Australia. Boyce argues that their observations, including those of the captain Nicolas Baudin
, do not support Windschuttle’s claims. Even Péron records an encounter at Port Cygnet
with an Aboriginal group of men and women, who shared a meal of abalone
with the French explorers and, according to Péron, provided 'the most striking example we had ever had of attention and reasoning among savage people.' Péron would have disagreed, Boyce believes, with Windschuttle’s claim that ‘(t)raditional Aboriginal society placed no constraints on the women’s sexual behaviour with men, ’ for he was repeatedly rebuffed when he tried to make physical contact with Aboriginal women. Baudin believed that no one on his ship had managed to have sexual relations with the women on Bruny Island. The behaviour adduced by Windschuttle from the other, late report by J.E. Calder (in 1829) is, for Boyce, ‘self evidently a product of the extensive disruption of traditional life
that had occurred by then.' He concludes: ’Only someone who is totally blind to the impact of changing power relations, of declining choices, of the profound impact of cultural disintegration and recurring violence and abuse, let alone the simple imperatives of survival, could cite the unfolding tragedy at Bruny Island in this period as evidence for the sexual mores and domestic relations of pre-invasion Aboriginal society.’
Shayne Breen argues that Windschuttle's claim is a calculated guess. The picture is however complex. Evidence exists for some use of women as trading commodities. Some women were abducted by sealers, while others were traded by Aboriginal men in attempts to establish reciprocal relations with the sealers. Shayne concludes that: "There is some evidence that Aboriginal men, especially along the northern and south eastern coastlines, used women as trading commodities. Some of this trading was culturally sanctioned, some of it was not. Sometimes women willingly participated, sometimes they did not. But no credible documentary evidence is available for widespread selling of women into prostitution. There is, however, strong evidence that the abduction of women by colonists was practised across the island for much of the period to 1820. Indeed, the 1830 Aborigines Committee found that the abduction of women was a major cause of attacks against colonists by Aborigines."
In reply to Boyce, Windschuttle argues that Boyce could not have read the whole book, or even properly checked the index, which cited 'this very evidence', i.e. the journals of early French and British explorers. With respect to Boyce's claims that Windschuttle was 'unaware' of or 'ignored' various sources, Windschuttle responded that Boyce's claims, based on what was, and was not, in 'Fabrication's' bibliography, misinterpret the purpose of a bibliography. It listed only the sources referred to in the text and in his footnotes, and was not intended as an exhaustive list of every book or document that he had read regarding colonial Tasmania. Windschuttle argues that 'were Boyce more familiar with the ethnographic literature', he would know the most telling evidence about the treatment of women comes not from explorers but the Aborigines themselves; from the recorded words of male Aborigines, such as Woorrady, Montpeliatter, Mannalargenna and Nappelarteyer, and those of female Aborigines such as Tencotemainner, Truganini
and Walyer. Windschuttle did not claim that women had been sold 'into prostitution' but that they were, as Breen admits, traded as commodities. Breen, Windschuttle replies, admits such trading and regards this as an admission of the 'cruelty of pre-contact indigenous culture'. For Windschuttle, Breen and others can say things that sicken no one, because they contextualise it within a model of British invasion and Aboriginal resistance, whereas he is taken to task for being 'pitiless' for making what he argues is the same point, 'within a historical model of aboriginal accommodation to a comparatively nonviolent British settlement.'
Windschuttle argues that no word list records an Aboriginal term corresponding to the English word "land" in the sense that Europeans use it, "as a two-dimensional space marked out with definite boundaries, which can be owned by individuals or groups, which can be inherited, which is preserved for the exclusive use of its owner, and which carries sanctions against trespassers", but states that "they certainly did identify themselves with and regularly hunted and foraged on particular territories, known as their 'country', which I openly acknowledge. They had obvious attachments to these territories. But they did not confine themselves to these regions nor did they deter other Aborigines from entering their own territory." "Members of the Big River tribe, for instance, annually visited Cape Grim in the north-west, Port Sorell on the north coast, Oyster Bay on the east coast, and Pittwater and Storm Bay in the south-east; that is, they regularly traversed most of the island." "The strongest evidence for this thesis is actually the history of white colonization and the timing of the conflict that did occur between blacks and whites. Most observers at the time agreed there was very little violence in Tasmania for the first twenty years after the British arrived. And the historians, except Lyndall Ryan, agree there were minimal hostilities before 1824. If the Aborigines had really felt the land was exclusively theirs, they would not have waited more than twenty years after the colonists arrived to do something about it."
He contrasts this to the fiercely territorial Polynesian tribes of New Zealand
, Tahiti
and Tonga
who fought off the British immediately. “The fact that the Tasmanian Aborigines did not respond in the same way is not to say they didn't love their country or were thereby deficient as human beings. They simply had a different culture.”
The University of New England
's Russell McDougall, in turn, has recently argued that Windschuttle's use of Henry Ling Roth
's word-lists to deny a indigenous Tasmanian concept of 'land' constitutes 'a wrong-headed attempt to undermine the legitimacy of Aboriginal land claims,’ especially since Roth's lists made no claim to capture a linguistic totality, and Roth himself cited earlier testimonials to the fact that, though nomadic, the 'Tasmanians confined themselves within the boundaries of specific territories.' It was, McDougall argues, the pressing presence of colonisers that forced them to trespass and make war upon each other’
, with its 'agenda-setting capacity'. It was positively reviewed by Geoffrey Blainey
, who called it ‘one of the most important and devastating (books) written on Australian history in recent decades’, although Blainey notes that not every side-argument in the book convinced him and that his 'view is that the original Tasmanians were not as backward, mentally and culturally, as Windschuttle sometimes depicts them'. On Windschuttle's analysis of the 'fabrications', Blainey wrote: 'While reading the long recital of these failings, I felt an initial sympathy towards the Australian and overseas historians who were under such intense scrutiny. But many of their errors, made on crucial matters, beggared belief. Moreover their exaggeration, gullibility, and what this book calls "fabrication" went on and on. Admittedly, if sometimes the historians' errors had chanced to favor the Aborigines, and sometimes they had happened to favor British settlers, a reader might sympathetically conclude that there was no bias amongst the historians but simply an infectious dose of inaccuracy. Most of the inaccuracies, however, are used to bolster the case for the deliberate destruction of the Aborigines.' Claudio Veliz
greeted it as ‘one of the most important books of our time.’ Peter Coleman
, while speaking of its painstaking and devastating scholarship, regretted the absence from Windschuttle's work of any 'sense of tragedy.'.
Within a year Windschuttle's claims and research produced a volume of rebuttal
, namely Whitewash. On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History, an anthology edited and introduced by Robert Manne
, professor of politics at La Trobe University
, with contributions by Australian academics from a range of disciplines. Manne, who called the book ‘one of the most implausible, ignorant and pitiless books about Australian history written for many years’, himself summed up the case against Windschuttle, noting that Windschuttle's evidence for Aboriginal deaths is derived from a scholar, Plomley, who denied that any estimate for them could be made from the documentary record; that a scrupulous conservative scholar, H.A. Willis, using exactly the same sources as Windschuttle, came up with a figure of 188 violent deaths, and another 145 rumoured deaths; that Windschuttle's method excludes deaths of aborigines who were wounded, and later died; that all surviving Aborigines transported by Robinson to Flinders' Island bore marks of violence and gunshot wounds 'perpetrated on them by depraved whites'; that Windschuttle cannot deny that between 1803 and 1834 almost all Tasmanian Aborigines died, and the only evidence for disease as a factor before 1829 rests on a single conversation recorded by James Bonwick, and that Aboriginal women who lived with sealers did not, however, die off from contact with bearers of foreign disease; that Windschuttle likened Aboriginal attacks on British settlers to ‘modern-day junkie
s raiding service station
s for money’, whereas both colonial records and modern historians speak of them as highly 'patriotic', attached to their lands, and engaged in a veritable war
to defend it from settlement; that by Windschuttle's own figures, the violent death rate of Aborigines in Tasmania in the 1820s must have been 360 times the murder rate in contemporary New York; that Windschuttle shows scarce familiarity with period books, citing only 3 of the 30 books published on Van Diemen's land for the period 1803-1834, and with one of them confuses the date of the first visit
by the French with the publication date of the volume that recounted their expedition; that it is nonsensical to argue that a people who had wandered over an island and survived for 34,000 years had no attachment to their land; that Windschuttle finds no native words in 19th century wordlists for 'land' to attest to such an attachment, when modern wordlists show 23 entries under 'country'.
This in turn provoked Melbourne
writer and Objectivist
John Dawson, to undertake a counter-rebuttal, Washout: On the academic response to The Fabrication of Aboriginal History in which he argues that Whitewash leaves Windschuttle's claims and research unrefuted.
In their reviews, Australian specialists in both aboriginal and indigenous peoples' history were generally far less impressed than those who praised the book, which included Geoffrey Blainey, Claudio Veliz and Peter Coleman.
Windschuttle wrote: “Robert Manne's anthology Whitewash does not address the empirical evidence for genocide. In her essay in this collection, Lyndall Ryan does not attempt to uphold her original claim. Nor does Henry Reynolds defend his version of the topic.”…”Yet this is supposed to be the place in which he and Ryan answer my major charges against them. This is very telling. I take their complete silence on this issue as an admission that their earlier claims are unsustainable.”
He goes on to say: “Contrary to Manne's assertions, this death toll is not "almost entirely reliant" on Brian Plomley's earlier survey of a similar kind. As Fabrication states clearly, I "started with" Plomley's survey by checking his sources, but then did my own research, which included a complete reading of all the relevant files in the Tasmanian archives plus all the local newspapers up to 1832, as well as all the contemporary diaries and journals I could find.”
In addressing some of his critics' claims, he wrote: "Vicki Greaves had read at least some of the book but apparently not very much of it. She claims my account of the killings at Risdon Cove in May 1804 'ignored' the testimony of the convict Edward White. Had she bothered to read the chapter on Risdon Cove, she would have found that White's testimony is discussed in more length and detail (pp. 22–4) than that of any other witness. Most of her other comments either misinterpret my case or attribute to me views I have never expressed, such as support for Social Darwinism."
Elsewhere he notes: "The big problem in this debate for orthodox left-wing historians who rely on traditional empirical methods is the lack of evidence to give them a winning hand. Despite my opponents' claims to the contrary, the first volume of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History was an exhaustive study of all the relevant evidence on the frontier of Van Diemen's Land.
That evidence does not support claims of either genocide or frontier warfare in the colony. None of my critics have been able to come up with anything credible to show I am wrong. They are reduced to pinning their faith on speculation: the assumption of a frontier full of “unrecorded killings”.
....James Boyce, on whom editor Manne pinned so much hope, claimed I had overlooked a number of crucial private diaries and unofficial documents which told a story different to mine.
Yet, as John Dawson pointed out in Washout, no previous writer about the Aborigines in Van Diemen's Land had found the sources listed by Boyce contained anything worth reporting, not even Boyce himself in his own history of the Tasmanian Aborigines and the Anglican Church....
This is why the debate became so acrimonious. Without the historical evidence in their favour, my opponents have been largely reduced to two tactics: character assassination and language games."
In the wake of the 2011 Norway attacks
, Windschuttle did not deny that perpetrator Anders Behring Breivik
had read and praised statements he had made at a symposium in New Zealand in 2006, but stressed that he was "still at a complete loss to find any connection between them and the disgusting and cowardly actions of Breivik." Windschuttle went on to add that "it would be a 'disturbing accusation' if people thought that he had ever used deliberately provocative language that might have caused Breivik to take up a rifle and shoot unarmed teenagers in cold blood."
Key elements of the story of the ‘Stolen Generations’ are that children of Aboriginal descent were allegedly forcibly removed from their families and their culture. It is alleged that the children were removed as young as possible so that they could be raised to be ignorant of their culture and people and that the ultimate intent was to end the existence of the Aborigines as a distinct people. It was also alleged that, as a part of this policy, parents were deliberately prevented from maintaining contact with their children. Windschuttle cites the words of the principal historian of the ‘Stolen Generations’, Peter Read: "Welfare officers, removing children solely because they were Aboriginal, intended and arranged that they should lose their Aboriginality, and that they never return home."
Windschuttle's argues that his analysis of the records shows that Aboriginal children "were never removed from their families in order to put an end to Aboriginality or, indeed, to serve any improper government policy or program". He found a similar level of misrepresentation and fabrication in the history of the alleged ‘Stolen Generations’ as he had in his previous study on Van Diemen's Land. He argues that "until the term ‘stolen generations’ first appeared in 1981, there had been no popular tradition among Aboriginal people that employed either the term or the concept." Indeed, one of the organisations now accused of participation in the removals had Aboriginal rights activists working as members of the board and yet apparently they didn't notice that they were 'stealing' children. In 1981, a "then unknown white postgraduate history student, Peter Read" wrote, "in the course of just one day", a twenty-page pamphlet to make the case. "He alone was granted the vision denied to all who came before him."
Two years later, Coral Edwards, a colleague of Peter Read at the Link-Up social work organization, made a speech to a meeting of the National Aboriginal Consultative Council to seek funds for Link-Up and referred to the claims made in Read's pamphlet. " Edwards’s speech came as a bombshell. Mothers had not voluntarily given their children away, she said. Rather, ‘the governments never intended that the children should ever return’."
Windschuttle argues that Read's "version of events was deeply comforting". " Mothers had not given their children away, fathers had not left their children destitute or deserted their families or been so consumed by alcohol they left them vulnerable to sexual predators." ...."Aborigines could suddenly identify as morally innocent victims of a terrible injustice. Their problems could all be blamed on faceless white bureaucrats driven by racism. Since Read created this interpretation, it has come to be believed by most Aboriginal people in Australia."
With regard to the Human Rights Commission 'investigation' into the ‘Stolen Generations’ and their 1997 report entitled Bringing Them Home, he writes: "The empirical underpinnings of Bringing Them Home derived largely from the work of white academic historians. The Human Rights Commission did no serious research of its own into the primary historical sources. Co-authors Ronald Wilson and Mick Dodson also declined to hear any evidence that might have contradicted their preferred interpretation. They did not call witnesses from many of the still-living public officials responsible for child removal to hear or test their reasons for their policies and practices. The commission’s only original contribution was to solicit the testimony of 535 Aboriginal people who had been removed from their parents and who spoke about their own experiences. While many of these stories were completely believable in what they said about what happened and how they felt, it is nonetheless true that when these witnesses were children they were not in a position to comprehend the question at the centre of the accusation of genocide, the motives of government policy makers."
He argues that only a small number of children were actually removed (approximately 8250 in the period 1880 to 1971), far less than the tens of thousands claimed, and that most of the 'removed' children had been orphaned or were abandoned, destitute, neglected or subjected to various forms of exploitation and abuse. These removals were based on traditional grounds of child welfare. He argues that his analysis of welfare policy shows that that none of the policies that allowed the removal of Aboriginal children were unique to Aborigines and that the evidence shows they were removed for the same child welfare reasons as white children who were in similar circumstances. "A significant number of other children were voluntarily placed in institutions by Aboriginal parents to give them an education and a better chance in life."
In Western Australia, the majority of the children who are claimed to have been 'removed' and placed in state Aboriginal settlements, in fact went to those settlements with their destitute parents.
In New South Wales, Aboriginal children were placed in apprenticeships to enable them to acquire the skills to earn a living and be independent of welfare in a program that "was a replica of measures that had already been applied to white children in welfare institutions in New South Wales for several decades, and to poor English children for several centuries before that".
Windschuttle's argues that the evidence shows that the claims that parents were deliberately prevented from maintaining contact with their children and that the children were prevented from returning home are falsehoods. In New South Wales, for example, the relevant government board not only allowed parents to visit their children in the Aborigines Protection Board Children's Homes, it provided them with train fare and a daily living allowance to enable them to do so. When children of Aboriginal descent were apprenticed to employers, they often returned home for the holidays and when necessary, were accompanied by officers of the responsible government board to ensure they reached home safely. When they finished their apprenticeships, in common with apprentices of other races, they were free to go wherever they pleased including back to their original homes, permanently or for social visits.
With respect to the testing of the claims in court, Windschuttle writes: ".... when they tested specific policies before the Federal Court, and when they argued the general intentions of the parliaments and legislators before the High Court, the historians and political activists who invented the notion of the Stolen Generations proved incapable of substantiating their case. As far as Australia’s highest courts are concerned, the central hypothesis of the Stolen Generations is legally extinct."... "The only legal cases with any potential credibility would be those made by individuals such as Bruce Trevorrow, who was unlawfully removed from his family and suffered badly as a result." However in the Trevorrow case, Windschuttle argues that the decision shows "that the actions of the Aborigines Protection Board in placing Bruce in foster care without his parents’ agreement was actually illegal at the time" and not the result of a policy of removal but rather the illegal actions of welfare officials who believed, rightly or wrongly, that Bruce Trevorrow was neglected and that his health and life would be in danger if they returned him to his mother. The fact that Bruce Trevorrow's siblings were never removed is an indicator that there was no such policy and that welfare officials were not empowered to remove Aboriginal children on racial grounds.
had planned to produce food crops engineered with human genes. However, "Gould" revealed that she had regarded the article as an Alan Sokal
style hoax. Based on the reporter's intimate knowledge of the hoax and what he described as her "triumphant" tone when disclosing the hoax to him, Windschuttle accused the online publication Crikey
of being involved in the hoax, a claim Crikey denied. Two days later, Crikey revealed that "Gould" was in fact the writer, editor and activist Katherine Wilson. Wilson agreed to being named by Crikey, as her name had already appeared in online speculation and it seemed likely that her identity was about to be revealed by other journalists.
Reporters Kelly Burke and Julie Robotham note that "… the projects cited by ‘Gould’ as having been dumped by the organisation [CSIRO] are not in themselves implausible, and similar technologies are in active development. Human vaccines against diseases including hepatitis B, respiratory syncytial virus and Norwalk virus have been genetically engineered into crops as diverse as lettuce, potato and corn, and shown to provoke an immune response in humans.
Gould also suggests the CSIRO abandoned research into the creation of dairy cattle capable of producing non-allergenic milk for lactose-intolerant infants and a genetically engineered mosquito that could stimulate antibodies against malaria in humans who were bitten, mitigating against the spread of the disease. Both ideas are under serious scientific study by research groups around the world."
The hoax elements of the article published in Quadrant were that the CSIRO had planned such research, abandoned it because of perceived public moral or ethical objections and that evidence of this was "buried" in footnotes to an article in a scientific journal and in two annual reports of the CSIRO, the relevant report years being unspecified. The Alan Sokal
hoax that the Quadrant hoax is allegedly styled after consisted of writings described as obvious scientific nonsense submitted to an academic journal.
Windschuttle states: "A real hoax, like that of Alan Sokal and Ern Malley
, is designed to expose editors who are pretentious, ignorant or at least over-enthusiastic about certain subjects. The technique is to submit obvious nonsense for publication in order to expose the editor’s ignorance of the topic. A real hoax defeats its purpose if it largely relies upon real issues, real people and real publications for its content. All of the latter is true of what ‘Sharon Gould’ wrote. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of the content of her article is both factually true and well-based on the sources she cites."
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
n writer, historian
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
, and ABC
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, commonly referred to as "the ABC" , is Australia's national public broadcaster...
board member, who has authored several books from the 1970s onwards. These include Unemployment, (1979), which analysed the economic causes and social consequences of unemployment in Australia and advocated a socialist response; The Media: a New Analysis of the Press, Television, Radio and Advertising in Australia, (1984), on the political economy and content of the news and entertainment media
Mass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
; The Killing of History, (1994), a critique of postmodernism
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
in history
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
; The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847, (2002), which accuses a number of Australian historians of falsifying and inventing the degree of violence
Violence
Violence is the use of physical force to apply a state to others contrary to their wishes. violence, while often a stand-alone issue, is often the culmination of other kinds of conflict, e.g...
in the past; The White Australia Policy, (2004), a history of that policy which argues that academic historians have exaggerated the degree of racism
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
in Australian history; and The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume Three: The Stolen Generations 1881-2008, which argues the story of the "stolen generations" of Aboriginal children is a myth. He has been editor of Quadrant
Quadrant (magazine)
Quadrant is an Australian literary and cultural journal. The magazine takes a conservative position on political and social issues, describing itself as sceptical of 'unthinking Leftism, or political correctness, and its "smelly little orthodoxies"'. Quadrant reviews literature, as well as...
magazine since 2008. He has been the publisher of Macleay Press
Macleay Press
Macleay Press is a small press Australian publishing company founded in 1993 by Keith Windschuttle.Authors published include Leonie Kramer, Michael Connor and Windschuttle.-Publications:Publications include:...
since 1994.
Biography
After education at Canterbury Boys' High SchoolCanterbury Boys' High School
Canterbury Boys' High School is a public, secondary, day school for boys, located in Canterbury, a south-western suburb of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It is located near the Canterbury Park Racecourse and next to Canterbury Girl's High School.Established in January 1918 as the Canterbury...
(where he was a contemporary of former Liberal
Liberal Party of Australia
The Liberal Party of Australia is an Australian political party.Founded a year after the 1943 federal election to replace the United Australia Party, the centre-right Liberal Party typically competes with the centre-left Australian Labor Party for political office...
Australian prime minister
Prime Minister of Australia
The Prime Minister of the Commonwealth of Australia is the highest minister of the Crown, leader of the Cabinet and Head of Her Majesty's Australian Government, holding office on commission from the Governor-General of Australia. The office of Prime Minister is, in practice, the most powerful...
John Howard
John Howard
John Winston Howard AC, SSI, was the 25th Prime Minister of Australia, from 11 March 1996 to 3 December 2007. He was the second-longest serving Australian Prime Minister after Sir Robert Menzies....
), Windschuttle was a journalist on newspapers and magazines in Sydney. He completed a BA (first class honours in history) at the University of Sydney
University of Sydney
The University of Sydney is a public university located in Sydney, New South Wales. The main campus spreads across the suburbs of Camperdown and Darlington on the southwestern outskirts of the Sydney CBD. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and Oceania...
in 1969, and an MA (honours in politics) at Macquarie University
Macquarie University
Macquarie University is an Australian public teaching and research university located in Sydney, with its main campus situated in Macquarie Park. Founded in 1964 by the New South Wales Government, it was the third university to be established in the metropolitan area of Sydney...
in 1978. He enrolled in a PhD but did not submit it; instead he published it under the title The Media with Penguin Books. In 1973, he became a tutor
Tutor
A tutor is a person employed in the education of others, either individually or in groups. To tutor is to perform the functions of a tutor.-Teaching assistance:...
in Australian history at the University of New South Wales
University of New South Wales
The University of New South Wales , is a research-focused university based in Kensington, a suburb in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia...
(UNSW). Between 1977 and 1981, Windschuttle was lecturer
Lecturer
Lecturer is an academic rank. In the United Kingdom, lecturer is a position at a university or similar institution, often held by academics in their early career stages, who lead research groups and supervise research students, as well as teach...
in Australian history and in journalism
Journalism
Journalism is the practice of investigation and reporting of events, issues and trends to a broad audience in a timely fashion. Though there are many variations of journalism, the ideal is to inform the intended audience. Along with covering organizations and institutions such as government and...
at the New South Wales Institute of Technology, now University of Technology, Sydney
University of Technology, Sydney
The University of Technology Sydney is a university in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. The university was founded in its current form in 1981, although its origins trace back to the 1870s. UTS is notable for its central location as the only university with its main campuses within the Sydney CBD...
before returning to UNSW in 1983 as lecturer/senior lecturer in social policy. He resigned from UNSW in 1993 and since then he has been publisher of Macleay Press and a regular visiting and guest lecturer on history and historiography
Historiography
Historiography refers either to the study of the history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic...
at American universities. In June 2006 he was appointed to the Board of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, commonly referred to as "the ABC" , is Australia's national public broadcaster...
(ABC), Australia's non-commercial public broadcaster.
Political evolution
An adherent of the New LeftNew Left
The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...
in the 1960s and 1970s, Windschuttle later moved to the right. This process is first evident in his 1984 book The Media, which took inspiration the empirical perspective of the Marxist historian
Marxist historiography
Marxist or historical materialist historiography is a school of historiography influenced by Marxism. The chief tenets of Marxist historiography are the centrality of social class and economic constraints in determining historical outcomes....
E. P. Thompson
E. P. Thompson
Edward Palmer Thompson was a British historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is probably best known today for his historical work on the British radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular The Making of the English Working Class...
, especially his The Poverty of Theory, to make a highly critical review of the Marxist theories of Louis Althusser
Louis Althusser
Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy....
and Stuart Hall
Stuart Hall (cultural theorist)
Stuart Hall is a cultural theorist and sociologist who has lived and worked in the United Kingdom since 1951. Hall, along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, was one of the founding figures of the school of thought that is now known as British Cultural Studies or The Birmingham School of...
. While the first edition attacked "the political program of the New Right
New Right
New Right is used in several countries as a descriptive term for various policies or groups that are right-wing. It has also been used to describe the emergence of Eastern European parties after the collapse of communism.-Australia:...
" and set out a case for both favouring "government restrictions and regulation" and condemning "private enterprise and free markets", the third edition four years later (1988) took a different view:
"Overall, the major economic reforms of the last five years, the deregulation of the finance sector, and the imposition of wage restraint through the social contract of The Accord, have worked to expand employment and internationalize the Australian economy in more positive ways than I thought possible at the time."
In The Killing of History, Windschuttle defended the practices and methods of traditional empirical history against postmodernism
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
, and praised historians such as Henry Reynolds
Henry Reynolds (historian)
Henry Reynolds is an eminent Australian historian whose primary work has focused on the frontier conflict between European settlement of Australia and indigenous Australians.-Education and career:...
, but he now argues that some of those he praised for their empirically-grounded work fail to adhere to the principle. In the same book, Windschuttle maintains that historians on both sides of the political spectrum have misrepresented and distorted history to further their respective political causes or ideological positions.
In The Fabrication of Aboriginal History and other recent writings on Australian Aboriginal
Indigenous Australians
Indigenous Australians are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands. The Aboriginal Indigenous Australians migrated from the Indian continent around 75,000 to 100,000 years ago....
history, Windschuttle criticises historians who, he claims, have extensively misrepresented and fabricated historical evidence to support a political agenda. He argues that Aboriginal rights, including land rights and the need for reparations for past abuses of Aboriginal people, have been adopted as a left-wing 'cause' and that those he perceives as left-wing historians distort the historical record to support that cause For Windschuttle, the task of the historian is to provide readers with an empirical history as close to the objective truth
Objectivity (philosophy)
Objectivity is a central philosophical concept which has been variously defined by sources. A proposition is generally considered to be objectively true when its truth conditions are met and are "mind-independent"—that is, not met by the judgment of a conscious entity or subject.- Objectivism...
as possible, based on an analysis of documentary, or preferably eye-witness, evidence. He questions the value of oral history. His "view is that Aboriginal oral history, when uncorroborated by original documents, is completely unreliable, just like the oral history of white people." A historian has no responsibility for the political implications of an objective, empirical history. One's political beliefs should not influence one's evaluation of archival evidence.
For some of his critics, 'historians don't just interpret the evidence: they compose stories about these meanings, or in the words of Hayden White
Hayden White
Hayden White is a historian in the tradition of literary criticism, perhaps most famous for his work Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe...
, they 'emplot' the past. This is itself a cultural process.'
Windschuttle's recent research disputes the idea that the colonial
Colonialism
Colonialism is the establishment, maintenance, acquisition and expansion of colonies in one territory by people from another territory. It is a process whereby the metropole claims sovereignty over the colony and the social structure, government, and economics of the colony are changed by...
settlers of Australia committed genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
against the Indigenous Australians
Indigenous Australians
Indigenous Australians are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands. The Aboriginal Indigenous Australians migrated from the Indian continent around 75,000 to 100,000 years ago....
. He also disputes the widespread view that there was a campaign of guerrilla warfare
Guerrilla warfare
Guerrilla warfare is a form of irregular warfare and refers to conflicts in which a small group of combatants including, but not limited to, armed civilians use military tactics, such as ambushes, sabotage, raids, the element of surprise, and extraordinary mobility to harass a larger and...
against British settlement. Extensive debate on his work has come to be called the History Wars
History wars
The history wars in Australia are an ongoing public debate over the interpretation of the history of the British colonisation of Australia and development of contemporary Australian society...
. He dismisses assertions, which he imputes to the current generation of academic historians, that there was any resemblance between racial attitudes in Australia and those of South Africa under apartheid and Germany under the Nazis
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
. He is a frequent contributor to the conservative magazines Quadrant
Quadrant (magazine)
Quadrant is an Australian literary and cultural journal. The magazine takes a conservative position on political and social issues, describing itself as sceptical of 'unthinking Leftism, or political correctness, and its "smelly little orthodoxies"'. Quadrant reviews literature, as well as...
and The New Criterion
The New Criterion
The New Criterion is a New York-based monthly literary magazine and journal of artistic and cultural criticism, edited by Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball. It has sections for criticism of poetry, theater, art, music, the media, and books...
.
The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, Van Diemen's Land 1803 - 1847
In his The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, the first book of a projected multi-volume examination of frontier encounters between white colonizers and Aborigines, Windschuttle criticizes the last 3 decades of historical scholarship which had challenged the traditional view of Aboriginal passivity in the face of European colonisation. His critique specifically challenges the prevailing consensus created by what he called the 'orthodox school' of Australian frontier history concerning the violence between indigenous Australians and settlers, by examining the evidence for reported massacres in what is known as the Black WarBlack War
The Black War is a term used to describe a period of conflict between British colonists and Tasmanian Aborigines in the early nineteenth century...
against the Aborigines of Tasmania. He refers to historians he defines as making up this 'orthodox school' as being 'vain' and 'self-indulgent' for imposing their politics onto their scholarship, and ‘arrogant, patronizing and lazy’ for portraying the Tasmanian Aborigines' behavior and motivations in terms of European cultural concepts rather than taking the time to understand the cultural concepts of a hunter-gatherer society. Windschuttle's 'orthodox school' comprises a large number of historians and archaeologists, deceased or living, such as Henry Reynolds
Henry Reynolds (historian)
Henry Reynolds is an eminent Australian historian whose primary work has focused on the frontier conflict between European settlement of Australia and indigenous Australians.-Education and career:...
, Lyndall Ryan
Lyndall Ryan
Lyndall Ryan is an Australian academic. She has held positions in Australian Studies and Women's Studies at Griffith University and Flinders University and is currently Foundation Professor of Australian Studies and Head of School of Humanities at the University of Newcastle...
, Lloyd Robson, John Mulvaney
John Mulvaney
John Mulvaney AO CMG is an Australian archaeologist and known as the "father of Australian Archaeology".Derek John Mulvaney was born in Yarram, Victoria...
, Rhys Jones, Brian Plomley
Brian Plomley
Norman James Brian Plomley, also known as Brian Plomley, was one of the most respected and scholarly of Australian historians and, until his death, in Launceston, the doyen of Tasmanian Aboriginal scholarship.- Professional background :He graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from Sydney...
, and Sharon Morgan, whom he regards as responsible for a politicized reading of the past, and for inflating the number of Aboriginal deaths. Reviewing their work, he highlights multiple examples of misrepresented sources, inaccurate reportage or the citation of sources that do not exist. His work on sources constitutes, according one critic, his most damaging contribution to the subject, though Stuart Macintyre
Stuart Macintyre
Stuart Forbes Macintyre , Australian historian, academic and public intellectual, is a former Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. He has been voted one of Australia's most influential public intellectuals...
argues that Windschuttle 'misreads those whom he castigates'.
Windschuttle challenges the idea that mass killings were commonplace, arguing that the colonial settlers of Australia did not commit widespread massacres against Indigenous Australians
Indigenous Australians
Indigenous Australians are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands. The Aboriginal Indigenous Australians migrated from the Indian continent around 75,000 to 100,000 years ago....
; he drastically reduces the figures for the Tasmanian Aboriginal death toll, and writes that Aborigines referred to by both Reynolds and Ryan as resistance figures, included ‘black bushranger
Bushranger
Bushrangers, or bush rangers, originally referred to runaway convicts in the early years of the British settlement of Australia who had the survival skills necessary to use the Australian bush as a refuge to hide from the authorities...
s’ and others engaged in acts normally regarded as 'criminality'; arguing that the evidence clearly shows that attacks by Aborigines on settlers were almost invariably directed at acquiring goods, such as flour, sugar, tea and tobacco, and that claims by orthodox historians that this was a form of guerrilla warfare
Guerrilla warfare
Guerrilla warfare is a form of irregular warfare and refers to conflicts in which a small group of combatants including, but not limited to, armed civilians use military tactics, such as ambushes, sabotage, raids, the element of surprise, and extraordinary mobility to harass a larger and...
against British settlement aren't supported by credible evidence. Vicki Grieves argues that Windschuttle regards Aboriginal men who traded their women's services as pimp
Pimp
A pimp is an agent for prostitutes who collects part of their earnings. The pimp may receive this money in return for advertising services, physical protection, or for providing a location where she may engage clients...
s, although Windschuttle does not use the term. Adducing the work of a source who Stuart Macintyre claims is 'a particularly tendentious American anthropologist', he argues that the Tasmanian Aboriginal society was primitive, dysfunctional and on the verge of collapse, because their putative maltreatment of women impaired their ability to reproduce in a number of critical ways. Windschuttle agrees with earlier historical analysis, such as that of Geoffrey Blainey
Geoffrey Blainey
Geoffrey Norman Blainey AC , is a prominent Australian historian.Blainey was born in Melbourne and raised in a series of Victorian country towns before attending Wesley College and the University of Melbourne. While at university he was editor of Farrago, the newspaper of the University of...
, that introduced disease was the primary cause of the demise of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. He is highly critical of recent historical scholarship arguing that much of it ignores the scholar's basic duties to be objective and true to the evidence, and he advances a sympathetic analysis of settler opinion, arguing that historians such as Henry Reynolds
Henry Reynolds
Henry Reynolds may refer to:* Henry Reynolds , Australian historian* Henry Reynolds , English poet and critic of the seventeenth century* Henry Reynolds , English World War I recipient of the Victoria Cross...
had misrepresented the contents of records of settler opinion to conceal the fact that the majority of settlers were consistently in favor of the protection of the Aborigines. He also criticises Aboriginal land right politics, arguing that it has resulted in many Aboriginal people being effectively confined to remote settlements far from viable employment opportunities and from the benefits of a modern society. His own examination of archives, contemporary newspapers, diaries and official accounts yields a provisory figure of approximately 120 deaths of Tasmanian Aborigines 'for which there is a plausible record of some kind' as having been killed by settlers, as opposed to earlier figures ranging as high as 700, and thus far less than the number of whites (187) reported as killed during the Black War of 1824 to 1828 by Aborigines. Windschuttle argues that the principles of the Enlightenment
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...
, fused with the 19th century evangelical
Evangelicalism
Evangelicalism is a Protestant Christian movement which began in Great Britain in the 1730s and gained popularity in the United States during the series of Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th century.Its key commitments are:...
revival within the Church of England
Church of England
The Church of England is the officially established Christian church in England and the Mother Church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The church considers itself within the tradition of Western Christianity and dates its formal establishment principally to the mission to England by St...
and Britain
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
s rule of law
Rule of law
The rule of law, sometimes called supremacy of law, is a legal maxim that says that governmental decisions should be made by applying known principles or laws with minimal discretion in their application...
had a profound effect on colonial policy and behaviour, which was humane and just, that together made the claimed genocide culturally impossible. Gregory D.B. Smithers argues that Windschuttle interpreted settler violence as self-defence.
Windschuttle argues that encroaching pastoralism
Pastoralism
Pastoralism or pastoral farming is the branch of agriculture concerned with the raising of livestock. It is animal husbandry: the care, tending and use of animals such as camels, goats, cattle, yaks, llamas, and sheep. It may have a mobile aspect, moving the herds in search of fresh pasture and...
did not cause starvation through the loss of native hunting grounds as some historians have proposed, as their numbers were being drastically reduced by introduced disease, and large parts of Tasmania were not then, or now, occupied by white settlers. Windschuttle's estimate of the size of the Tasmanian Aboriginal population at the time of settlement is that it may have been as low as 2,000. Estimates made of the combined population of the Aboriginal people of Tasmania, before European arrival in Tasmania, are generally in the range of 3,000 to 8,000 people. Genetic studies have suggested much higher figures which is supported by oral traditions that Aborigines were "more numerous than the white people were aware of" but that their population had been decimated by a sudden outbreak of disease prior to 1803. It has been speculated that early contacts with passing ships, exploratory expeditions or sealers before colonization may have caused outbreaks of epidemic disease. The low rate of genetic drift
Genetic drift
Genetic drift or allelic drift is the change in the frequency of a gene variant in a population due to random sampling.The alleles in the offspring are a sample of those in the parents, and chance has a role in determining whether a given individual survives and reproduces...
found in a recent genetic study argues that the highest previous estimate of pre-colonial Aboriginal population (8, 000) is likely too low and that a significantly higher population cannot be ruled out. He argues that the evidence shows that what the orthodox historians construed as 'resistance' by Tasmanian Aboriginal people, were acts of theft and violence motivated by their desire for 'exotic' consumer goods like flour, tea, sugar and blankets. The indigenous culture, in his view, 'had no sanctions against the murder of anyone outside their immediate clan', therefore they had no cultural sanctions preventing the killing of settler outsiders to obtain desired goods or in revenge. The forced removal of Tasmania's Aborigines from the Tasmanian mainland to Flinders Island
Flinders Island
Flinders Island may refer to:In Australia:* Flinders Island , in the Furneaux Group, is the largest and best known* Flinders Island * Flinders Island , in the Investigator Group* Flinders Island...
was the Colonial Administration's measure to ensuring peace for hard-pressed settlers while attempting, unsuccessfully, to prevent the extinction of the full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigines. The rapid decline in the Aboriginal population after the British colonisation was the product of the interaction of a number of factors including introduced diseases causing death and infertility, continued internecine warfare, deaths through conflict with settlers and the loss of a significant number of women of childbearing age from the full-blooded aboriginal gene pool to white sealers and settlers through abduction, ‘trade’ and by voluntary association.
Specific Issues: Treatment of women
Windschuttle refers to accounts by the French zoologist François PéronFrançois Péron
François Auguste Péron was a French naturalist and explorer. He is credited with the first use of the term anthropology.-Explorations:...
(who is credited with the first use of the term anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
), by George Augustus Robinson
George Augustus Robinson
George Augustus Robinson was a builder and untrained preacher. He was the Chief Protector of Aborigines in Port Phillip District from 1839 to 1849...
in his journals, and by the early Australian writer James Bonwick
James Bonwick
James Bonwick was an English-born Australian historical and educational writer.-Early life:Bonwick was born Lingfield, Surrey, England, the eldest son of James Bonwick, carpenter, and his second wife Mary Ann née Preston...
, of the violence and cruelty with which many Tasmanian Aboriginal men were observed to treat women. He notes that the 'murder of women because of insult, jealousy and infidelity, was common' and that a woman who refused a particular suitor would often be abducted and raped. He argues that this contributed to the willingness of some Aboriginal women to associate themselves with sealers and settlers rather than their own people, so reducing the full-blooded Aboriginal population's ability to reproduce itself. He cites a number of accounts including one published in 1820 by a British officer who had spoken with Aboriginal women living with Bass Strait sealers. The officer reported that Aboriginal women made it known that their (Aboriginal) husbands treat them with 'considerable harshness and tyranny' and that they sometimes run away and 'attach themselves to the English sailors', finding 'their situation greatly improved by attaching themselves to the sealing gangs'. Windschuttle holds that the willingness of some Tasmanian Aboriginal women to engage in prostitution with convicts, sealers and settlers and the Tasmanian Aboriginal men who ‘actively colluded’ in the trade in their women aided in the transmission of venereal and other introduced diseases to the indigenous population. Windschuttle argues that introduced disease was the primary cause of the destruction of the full-blooded Tasmanian Aboriginal people, not merely by directly causing deaths but also through widespread infertility resulting from introduced venereal disease.
James Boyce, a Tasmanian historian, dismisses Windschuttle’s argument as "uninformed slander" based on a failure to read the only documentary sources that matter, the journals of French and British explorers recording the first contacts with Tasmanian aborigines before the colonial period. Examining Windschuttle's use of sources for the view women were treated like slaves and drudges, he says Windschuttle relies on a selective reading of just two of many sources in an early work by Ling Roth
Henry Ling Roth
Henry Ling Roth was an English-born anthropologist and museum curator, active in Australia.-Early life:Roth was born in London, the son of Dr Mathias Roth, an Austrian-born surgeon, and his English wife Anna Maria, née Collins. Henry was educated at University College School, London, and studied...
, 'written at the height of Social Darwinist
Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism is a term commonly used for theories of society that emerged in England and the United States in the 1870s, seeking to apply the principles of Darwinian evolution to sociology and politics...
orthodoxy' (1899). However, Ling Roth did not "write" these sources; he simply translated the diaries of the first contacts by the French explorers. One is from Péron, who noted scars on women, and interpreted them as signs of domestic violence, which however he had never witnessed. Other early observers took this scarring as an indigenous cultural practice
Scarification
Scarifying involves scratching, etching, burning, or superficially cutting designs, pictures, or words into the skin as a permanent body modification.In the process of body scarification, scars are formed by cutting or branding the skin...
. James Cook
James Cook
Captain James Cook, FRS, RN was a British explorer, navigator and cartographer who ultimately rose to the rank of captain in the Royal Navy...
had noticed Aboriginal men and women’s bodies were both incised with scars in the same manner. Péron was less sympathetic than other first observers on the Baudin expedition to Australia. Boyce argues that their observations, including those of the captain Nicolas Baudin
Nicolas Baudin
Nicolas-Thomas Baudin was a French explorer, cartographer, naturalist and hydrographer.Baudin was born a commoner in Saint-Martin-de-Ré on the Île de Ré. At the age of fifteen he joined the merchant navy, and at twenty joined the French East India Company...
, do not support Windschuttle’s claims. Even Péron records an encounter at Port Cygnet
Cygnet, Tasmania
Cygnet is a small town 55 kilometres south west of Hobart, in the Huon Valley in Tasmania. At the 2006 census, Cygnet had a population of 839.-History:...
with an Aboriginal group of men and women, who shared a meal of abalone
Abalone
Abalone , from aulón, are small to very large-sized edible sea snails, marine gastropod molluscs in the family Haliotidae and the genus Haliotis...
with the French explorers and, according to Péron, provided 'the most striking example we had ever had of attention and reasoning among savage people.' Péron would have disagreed, Boyce believes, with Windschuttle’s claim that ‘(t)raditional Aboriginal society placed no constraints on the women’s sexual behaviour with men, ’ for he was repeatedly rebuffed when he tried to make physical contact with Aboriginal women. Baudin believed that no one on his ship had managed to have sexual relations with the women on Bruny Island. The behaviour adduced by Windschuttle from the other, late report by J.E. Calder (in 1829) is, for Boyce, ‘self evidently a product of the extensive disruption of traditional life
Black War
The Black War is a term used to describe a period of conflict between British colonists and Tasmanian Aborigines in the early nineteenth century...
that had occurred by then.' He concludes: ’Only someone who is totally blind to the impact of changing power relations, of declining choices, of the profound impact of cultural disintegration and recurring violence and abuse, let alone the simple imperatives of survival, could cite the unfolding tragedy at Bruny Island in this period as evidence for the sexual mores and domestic relations of pre-invasion Aboriginal society.’
Shayne Breen argues that Windschuttle's claim is a calculated guess. The picture is however complex. Evidence exists for some use of women as trading commodities. Some women were abducted by sealers, while others were traded by Aboriginal men in attempts to establish reciprocal relations with the sealers. Shayne concludes that: "There is some evidence that Aboriginal men, especially along the northern and south eastern coastlines, used women as trading commodities. Some of this trading was culturally sanctioned, some of it was not. Sometimes women willingly participated, sometimes they did not. But no credible documentary evidence is available for widespread selling of women into prostitution. There is, however, strong evidence that the abduction of women by colonists was practised across the island for much of the period to 1820. Indeed, the 1830 Aborigines Committee found that the abduction of women was a major cause of attacks against colonists by Aborigines."
In reply to Boyce, Windschuttle argues that Boyce could not have read the whole book, or even properly checked the index, which cited 'this very evidence', i.e. the journals of early French and British explorers. With respect to Boyce's claims that Windschuttle was 'unaware' of or 'ignored' various sources, Windschuttle responded that Boyce's claims, based on what was, and was not, in 'Fabrication's' bibliography, misinterpret the purpose of a bibliography. It listed only the sources referred to in the text and in his footnotes, and was not intended as an exhaustive list of every book or document that he had read regarding colonial Tasmania. Windschuttle argues that 'were Boyce more familiar with the ethnographic literature', he would know the most telling evidence about the treatment of women comes not from explorers but the Aborigines themselves; from the recorded words of male Aborigines, such as Woorrady, Montpeliatter, Mannalargenna and Nappelarteyer, and those of female Aborigines such as Tencotemainner, Truganini
Truganini
Trugernanner , often referred to as Truganini, was a woman widely considered to be the last "full blood" Palawa ....
and Walyer. Windschuttle did not claim that women had been sold 'into prostitution' but that they were, as Breen admits, traded as commodities. Breen, Windschuttle replies, admits such trading and regards this as an admission of the 'cruelty of pre-contact indigenous culture'. For Windschuttle, Breen and others can say things that sicken no one, because they contextualise it within a model of British invasion and Aboriginal resistance, whereas he is taken to task for being 'pitiless' for making what he argues is the same point, 'within a historical model of aboriginal accommodation to a comparatively nonviolent British settlement.'
Specific Issues: Attachment to Land
In reply to his critics, Windschuttle argues that Henry Reynolds "willfully misinterprets" what he wrote, since his argument about Aboriginal concepts of land is based not on their words but on their deeds. 'It is not primarily an argument about Aboriginal language but about Aboriginal behaviour. I demonstrated the Tasmanian Aborigines did not act as if they demanded the exclusive usage of land. They had no concept of trespass.'Windschuttle argues that no word list records an Aboriginal term corresponding to the English word "land" in the sense that Europeans use it, "as a two-dimensional space marked out with definite boundaries, which can be owned by individuals or groups, which can be inherited, which is preserved for the exclusive use of its owner, and which carries sanctions against trespassers", but states that "they certainly did identify themselves with and regularly hunted and foraged on particular territories, known as their 'country', which I openly acknowledge. They had obvious attachments to these territories. But they did not confine themselves to these regions nor did they deter other Aborigines from entering their own territory." "Members of the Big River tribe, for instance, annually visited Cape Grim in the north-west, Port Sorell on the north coast, Oyster Bay on the east coast, and Pittwater and Storm Bay in the south-east; that is, they regularly traversed most of the island." "The strongest evidence for this thesis is actually the history of white colonization and the timing of the conflict that did occur between blacks and whites. Most observers at the time agreed there was very little violence in Tasmania for the first twenty years after the British arrived. And the historians, except Lyndall Ryan, agree there were minimal hostilities before 1824. If the Aborigines had really felt the land was exclusively theirs, they would not have waited more than twenty years after the colonists arrived to do something about it."
He contrasts this to the fiercely territorial Polynesian tribes of New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...
, Tahiti
Tahiti
Tahiti is the largest island in the Windward group of French Polynesia, located in the archipelago of the Society Islands in the southern Pacific Ocean. It is the economic, cultural and political centre of French Polynesia. The island was formed from volcanic activity and is high and mountainous...
and Tonga
Tonga
Tonga, officially the Kingdom of Tonga , is a state and an archipelago in the South Pacific Ocean, comprising 176 islands scattered over of ocean in the South Pacific...
who fought off the British immediately. “The fact that the Tasmanian Aborigines did not respond in the same way is not to say they didn't love their country or were thereby deficient as human beings. They simply had a different culture.”
The University of New England
University of New England (Australia)
The University of New England is an Australian public university with approximately 18,000 higher education students. Its original and main campus is located in the city of Armidale in northern New South Wales....
's Russell McDougall, in turn, has recently argued that Windschuttle's use of Henry Ling Roth
Henry Ling Roth
Henry Ling Roth was an English-born anthropologist and museum curator, active in Australia.-Early life:Roth was born in London, the son of Dr Mathias Roth, an Austrian-born surgeon, and his English wife Anna Maria, née Collins. Henry was educated at University College School, London, and studied...
's word-lists to deny a indigenous Tasmanian concept of 'land' constitutes 'a wrong-headed attempt to undermine the legitimacy of Aboriginal land claims,’ especially since Roth's lists made no claim to capture a linguistic totality, and Roth himself cited earlier testimonials to the fact that, though nomadic, the 'Tasmanians confined themselves within the boundaries of specific territories.' It was, McDougall argues, the pressing presence of colonisers that forced them to trespass and make war upon each other’
Critical reception
The appearance of the first volume provoked a lively polemical correspondence in the pages of The AustralianThe Australian
The Australian is a broadsheet newspaper published in Australia from Monday to Saturday each week since 14 July 1964. The editor in chief is Chris Mitchell, the editor is Clive Mathieson and the 'editor-at-large' is Paul Kelly....
, with its 'agenda-setting capacity'. It was positively reviewed by Geoffrey Blainey
Geoffrey Blainey
Geoffrey Norman Blainey AC , is a prominent Australian historian.Blainey was born in Melbourne and raised in a series of Victorian country towns before attending Wesley College and the University of Melbourne. While at university he was editor of Farrago, the newspaper of the University of...
, who called it ‘one of the most important and devastating (books) written on Australian history in recent decades’, although Blainey notes that not every side-argument in the book convinced him and that his 'view is that the original Tasmanians were not as backward, mentally and culturally, as Windschuttle sometimes depicts them'. On Windschuttle's analysis of the 'fabrications', Blainey wrote: 'While reading the long recital of these failings, I felt an initial sympathy towards the Australian and overseas historians who were under such intense scrutiny. But many of their errors, made on crucial matters, beggared belief. Moreover their exaggeration, gullibility, and what this book calls "fabrication" went on and on. Admittedly, if sometimes the historians' errors had chanced to favor the Aborigines, and sometimes they had happened to favor British settlers, a reader might sympathetically conclude that there was no bias amongst the historians but simply an infectious dose of inaccuracy. Most of the inaccuracies, however, are used to bolster the case for the deliberate destruction of the Aborigines.' Claudio Veliz
Claudio Véliz
Claudio Véliz is a prominent historian, sociologist and author from Chile, who has held numerous academic posts in various institutions of higher learning including La Trobe University , Harvard and Boston University....
greeted it as ‘one of the most important books of our time.’ Peter Coleman
Peter Coleman
William Peter Coleman is an Australian writer/journalist, former politician and Minister of the Crown in the cabinets of Tom Lewis and Sir Eric Willis. Following Willis' resignation as leader he was made Leader of the New South Wales Opposition...
, while speaking of its painstaking and devastating scholarship, regretted the absence from Windschuttle's work of any 'sense of tragedy.'.
Within a year Windschuttle's claims and research produced a volume of rebuttal
Rebuttal
In law, rebuttal is a form of evidence that is presented to contradict or nullify other evidence that has been presented by an adverse party. By analogy the same term is used in politics and public affairs to refer to the informal process by which statements, designed to refute or negate specific...
, namely Whitewash. On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History, an anthology edited and introduced by Robert Manne
Robert Manne
Robert Manne is a professor of politics at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.Born in Melbourne, Manne's earliest political consciousness was formed by the fact that his parents were Jewish refugees from Europe and his grandparents were victims of the Holocaust...
, professor of politics at La Trobe University
La Trobe University
La Trobe University is a multi-campus university in Victoria, Australia. It was established in 1964 by an Act of Parliament to become the third oldest university in the state of Victoria. The main campus of La Trobe is located in the Melbourne suburb of Bundoora; two other major campuses are...
, with contributions by Australian academics from a range of disciplines. Manne, who called the book ‘one of the most implausible, ignorant and pitiless books about Australian history written for many years’, himself summed up the case against Windschuttle, noting that Windschuttle's evidence for Aboriginal deaths is derived from a scholar, Plomley, who denied that any estimate for them could be made from the documentary record; that a scrupulous conservative scholar, H.A. Willis, using exactly the same sources as Windschuttle, came up with a figure of 188 violent deaths, and another 145 rumoured deaths; that Windschuttle's method excludes deaths of aborigines who were wounded, and later died; that all surviving Aborigines transported by Robinson to Flinders' Island bore marks of violence and gunshot wounds 'perpetrated on them by depraved whites'; that Windschuttle cannot deny that between 1803 and 1834 almost all Tasmanian Aborigines died, and the only evidence for disease as a factor before 1829 rests on a single conversation recorded by James Bonwick, and that Aboriginal women who lived with sealers did not, however, die off from contact with bearers of foreign disease; that Windschuttle likened Aboriginal attacks on British settlers to ‘modern-day junkie
Substance dependence
The section about substance dependence in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders does not use the word addiction at all. It explains:...
s raiding service station
Filling station
A filling station, also known as a fueling station, garage, gasbar , gas station , petrol bunk , petrol pump , petrol garage, petrol kiosk , petrol station "'servo"' in Australia or service station, is a facility which sells fuel and lubricants...
s for money’, whereas both colonial records and modern historians speak of them as highly 'patriotic', attached to their lands, and engaged in a veritable war
War
War is a state of organized, armed, and often prolonged conflict carried on between states, nations, or other parties typified by extreme aggression, social disruption, and usually high mortality. War should be understood as an actual, intentional and widespread armed conflict between political...
to defend it from settlement; that by Windschuttle's own figures, the violent death rate of Aborigines in Tasmania in the 1820s must have been 360 times the murder rate in contemporary New York; that Windschuttle shows scarce familiarity with period books, citing only 3 of the 30 books published on Van Diemen's land for the period 1803-1834, and with one of them confuses the date of the first visit
Bruni d'Entrecasteaux
Antoine Raymond Joseph de Bruni d'Entrecasteaux was a French navigator who explored the Australian coast in 1792 while seeking traces of the lost expedition of La Pérouse....
by the French with the publication date of the volume that recounted their expedition; that it is nonsensical to argue that a people who had wandered over an island and survived for 34,000 years had no attachment to their land; that Windschuttle finds no native words in 19th century wordlists for 'land' to attest to such an attachment, when modern wordlists show 23 entries under 'country'.
This in turn provoked Melbourne
Melbourne
Melbourne is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia. The Melbourne City Centre is the hub of the greater metropolitan area and the Census statistical division—of which "Melbourne" is the common name. As of June 2009, the greater...
writer and Objectivist
Objectivist movement
The Objectivist movement is a movement to study and advance the philosophy of Objectivism. It was founded by novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand. The movement began informally in the 1950s and consisted of students who were brought together by their mutual interest in Rand’s novel, The Fountainhead...
John Dawson, to undertake a counter-rebuttal, Washout: On the academic response to The Fabrication of Aboriginal History in which he argues that Whitewash leaves Windschuttle's claims and research unrefuted.
In their reviews, Australian specialists in both aboriginal and indigenous peoples' history were generally far less impressed than those who praised the book, which included Geoffrey Blainey, Claudio Veliz and Peter Coleman.
- Henry ReynoldsHenry Reynolds (historian)Henry Reynolds is an eminent Australian historian whose primary work has focused on the frontier conflict between European settlement of Australia and indigenous Australians.-Education and career:...
interprets his book as an attempt to revive the concept of terra nulliusTerra nulliusTerra nullius is a Latin expression deriving from Roman law meaning "land belonging to no one" , which is used in international law to describe territory which has never been subject to the sovereignty of any state, or over which any prior sovereign has expressly or implicitly relinquished...
, and regards it as 'without doubt, the most biased and cantankerous historical work to appear since the publication of G.W. RusdenGeorge William RusdenGeorge William Rusden was an English-born historian, active in Australia.-Early life:Rusden was born in Leith Hill Place , Surrey, England, son of the Rev. George Keylock Rusden, M.A. and his wife Anne, née Townsend. G.K...
's three-volume History of Australia in the 1880s.' *The historian of genocideGenocideGenocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
, Ben KiernanBen KiernanBenedict F. Kiernan is the Whitney Griswold Professor of History, Professor of International and Area Studies and Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University. He is a prolific writer on the Cambodian genocide...
, who classifies the fate of aborigines as an example of the practice, situates Windschuttle's polemical history within a new campaign, led by QuadrantQuadrant (magazine)Quadrant is an Australian literary and cultural journal. The magazine takes a conservative position on political and social issues, describing itself as sceptical of 'unthinking Leftism, or political correctness, and its "smelly little orthodoxies"'. Quadrant reviews literature, as well as...
, but taken up by a 'chorus of right-wing columnists' within the Australian mass media with a record of antagonism to both Aborigines and their 'leftist' supporters. - Stephen Garton, Professor of History, ProvostProvost (education)A provost is the senior academic administrator at many institutions of higher education in the United States, Canada and Australia, the equivalent of a pro-vice-chancellor at some institutions in the United Kingdom and Ireland....
& Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Sydney UniversityUniversity of SydneyThe University of Sydney is a public university located in Sydney, New South Wales. The main campus spreads across the suburbs of Camperdown and Darlington on the southwestern outskirts of the Sydney CBD. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and Oceania...
, argued that the ‘the flaw in Windschuttle’s argument is his belief that history can only be based on the evidence that survives. .Evidence is always partial and only takes on a meaning if placed in an appropriate context. In other words historians always construct larger worlds from the fragments that survive’. - University of AberdeenUniversity of AberdeenThe University of Aberdeen, an ancient university founded in 1495, in Aberdeen, Scotland, is a British university. It is the third oldest university in Scotland, and the fifth oldest in the United Kingdom and wider English-speaking world...
’s Gregory D.B. Smithers, an Australian comparativist working on native histories, argues that Windschuttle's political agenda shows a ‘discomfort with the way the “orthodox” school” by inflating Aboriginal deaths, impugns Australian identity and its virtuous Anglo-Saxon originsWhite Australia policyThe White Australia policy comprises various historical policies that intentionally restricted "non-white" immigration to Australia. From origins at Federation in 1901, the polices were progressively dismantled between 1949-1973....
.’ Windschuttle's book plays to 'the white wing populismPopulismPopulism can be defined as an ideology, political philosophy, or type of discourse. Generally, a common theme compares "the people" against "the elite", and urges social and political system changes. It can also be defined as a rhetorical style employed by members of various political or social...
of white Australians, who feel their racially privileged position is under attack.’ By reaction, Smithers argues, Windschuttle highlights 'the nation’s virtues’, privileging the opinions of settlers and colonial officials, ' while rejecting Aboriginal oral histories. Smithers argues that Windschuttle ignores documentary evidence that contradicts his own ideology, and fails to perceive that the island reserves created for indigenous Tasmanians were 'racialized spaces' for a people regarded as a form of 'social pollution'. He argues that the book is ‘a therapeutic history for white (Anglo-Saxon) Australians that distorts and distracts’ and that in denying the reliability of historical evidence of racialized groups, Windschuttle employs a tactic used by historians to discredit historical accounts that do not fit with their presentist morality.’ - For Stuart Macintyre, Windschuttle's book was not 'so much counter-history as an exercise in incomprehension'. He finds Windschuttle's method of calculating aboriginal losses flimsy, and the figures he allocates to each incident 'no more reliable than those, which he dismissed as guesswork, of mainstream frontier historians.' He concludes that the first volume is 'a shocking book, shocking in its allegation of fabrication and also in its refusal of the interpretive framework that earlier historians employed, ’ and that its author 'fails to register the tragedy of what was a fatal encounter'. When challenged on his lack of compassion, Windschuttle is reported as replying: 'You can’t really be serious about feeling sympathy for someone who died 200 years ago.' For Macintyre, '‘It is the absence of any sense of this tragedy, the complete lack of compassion for its victims, that is surely the most disturbing quality of Windschuttle’s rewriting of Aboriginal history.'
- For University of SydneyUniversity of SydneyThe University of Sydney is a public university located in Sydney, New South Wales. The main campus spreads across the suburbs of Camperdown and Darlington on the southwestern outskirts of the Sydney CBD. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and Oceania...
historian Vicki Grieves, Windschuttle's approach reads as though indigenous people 'were not the intentional targets of the colonisers but accidental targets, mostly through their inability to be realistic, objective, logical and moral, ' and thus the 'seeds of their own destruction' lay within their own 'psyche and culture'. Even were one to concede Windschuttle's guesstimate for the pre-white population of Tasmania, by his own figures, the death-rate for his plausible deaths still works out as higher in percentage terms than the mortality risk of the Australian population during WW1, when 60, 000 soldiers died. Windschuttle shows, she argues, a predilection for old colonial explanations, and DarwinistSurvival of the fittest"Survival of the fittest" is a phrase originating in evolutionary theory, as an alternative description of Natural selection. The phrase is today commonly used in contexts that are incompatible with the original meaning as intended by its first two proponents: British polymath philosopher Herbert...
values, as though nothing had happened in between. Regarding native treatment of women, who in his account were viciously brutalized, Windschuttle appeals to the reader's moral outrage at the way a 14 year old native girl was traded. In doing so, he ignores the fact that the age of consent in Britain at that time was 12, and whites themselves on the frontier exchanged wives or traded them for tobacco and rum. - James Boyce, in an extended review, notes that Windschuttle ignores native views for the period after 1832, precisely the date when almost all of what is known of Aboriginal perspectives began to be recorded. Examining Windschuttle's use of sources, he finds his selection of material narrow, and his reading of their contents selective.’
- Bain Attwood of the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies at Monash UniversityMonash UniversityMonash University is a public university based in Melbourne, Victoria. It was founded in 1958 and is the second oldest university in the state. Monash is a member of Australia's Group of Eight and the ASAIHL....
dismisses him as a 'tabloid historian' however Attwood concedes that 'Boyce is unable to demonstrate' that the documents he says Windschuttle ignored 'would have provided factual killings of Aborigines' and that ‘ 'revisionist' critics have demonstrated that the academic historians lacked documentation for most of the killings represented in their accounts’. - Shayne Breen, lecturer in Aboriginal history at the University of TasmaniaUniversity of TasmaniaThe University of Tasmania is a medium-sized public Australian university based in Tasmania, Australia. Officially founded on 1 January 1890, it was the fourth university to be established in nineteenth-century Australia...
, reads the book as 'systematic character assassination', replete with 'unsupportable generalizations', and nurtured by a 'delusion' that only Windschuttle can find the historical truth. For Breen, 'In making 'the most primitive ever' claim, Windschuttle is not practising forensic scholarship. He is renovating a colonial ideology that decreed that Tasmanian Aborigines were the missing linkMissing LinkMissing link is a nonscientific term for any transitional fossil, especially one connected with human evolution; see Transitional fossil - Missing links and List of transitonal fossils - Human evolution.Missing Link may refer to:...
between apes and man. This idea formed a central plank of what is known to scholars as scientific racism.'
Windschuttle's Responses, and critical replies
In response to his critics, Windschuttle comments that they are “selective” in their critique, “politicised” in their judgment and do not address the “major charges” against the historians whom he criticized in Fabrication.Windschuttle wrote: “Robert Manne's anthology Whitewash does not address the empirical evidence for genocide. In her essay in this collection, Lyndall Ryan does not attempt to uphold her original claim. Nor does Henry Reynolds defend his version of the topic.”…”Yet this is supposed to be the place in which he and Ryan answer my major charges against them. This is very telling. I take their complete silence on this issue as an admission that their earlier claims are unsustainable.”
He goes on to say: “Contrary to Manne's assertions, this death toll is not "almost entirely reliant" on Brian Plomley's earlier survey of a similar kind. As Fabrication states clearly, I "started with" Plomley's survey by checking his sources, but then did my own research, which included a complete reading of all the relevant files in the Tasmanian archives plus all the local newspapers up to 1832, as well as all the contemporary diaries and journals I could find.”
In addressing some of his critics' claims, he wrote: "Vicki Greaves had read at least some of the book but apparently not very much of it. She claims my account of the killings at Risdon Cove in May 1804 'ignored' the testimony of the convict Edward White. Had she bothered to read the chapter on Risdon Cove, she would have found that White's testimony is discussed in more length and detail (pp. 22–4) than that of any other witness. Most of her other comments either misinterpret my case or attribute to me views I have never expressed, such as support for Social Darwinism."
Elsewhere he notes: "The big problem in this debate for orthodox left-wing historians who rely on traditional empirical methods is the lack of evidence to give them a winning hand. Despite my opponents' claims to the contrary, the first volume of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History was an exhaustive study of all the relevant evidence on the frontier of Van Diemen's Land.
That evidence does not support claims of either genocide or frontier warfare in the colony. None of my critics have been able to come up with anything credible to show I am wrong. They are reduced to pinning their faith on speculation: the assumption of a frontier full of “unrecorded killings”.
....James Boyce, on whom editor Manne pinned so much hope, claimed I had overlooked a number of crucial private diaries and unofficial documents which told a story different to mine.
Yet, as John Dawson pointed out in Washout, no previous writer about the Aborigines in Van Diemen's Land had found the sources listed by Boyce contained anything worth reporting, not even Boyce himself in his own history of the Tasmanian Aborigines and the Anglican Church....
This is why the debate became so acrimonious. Without the historical evidence in their favour, my opponents have been largely reduced to two tactics: character assassination and language games."
In the wake of the 2011 Norway attacks
2011 Norway attacks
The 2011 Norway attacks were two sequential terrorist attacks against the government, the civilian population and a summer camp in Norway on 22 July 2011....
, Windschuttle did not deny that perpetrator Anders Behring Breivik
Anders Behring Breivik
Anders Behring Breivik is a Norwegian terrorist, paranoid schizophrenic and the confessed perpetrator of the Norway attacks on 22 July 2011: the bombing of government buildings in Oslo that resulted in eight deaths, and the mass shooting at a camp of the Workers' Youth League of the Labour Party...
had read and praised statements he had made at a symposium in New Zealand in 2006, but stressed that he was "still at a complete loss to find any connection between them and the disgusting and cowardly actions of Breivik." Windschuttle went on to add that "it would be a 'disturbing accusation' if people thought that he had ever used deliberately provocative language that might have caused Breivik to take up a rifle and shoot unarmed teenagers in cold blood."
The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume Three, The Stolen Generations 1881-2008
Published in 2009, the argument of this book is that the ‘Stolen Generations’ is a myth.Key elements of the story of the ‘Stolen Generations’ are that children of Aboriginal descent were allegedly forcibly removed from their families and their culture. It is alleged that the children were removed as young as possible so that they could be raised to be ignorant of their culture and people and that the ultimate intent was to end the existence of the Aborigines as a distinct people. It was also alleged that, as a part of this policy, parents were deliberately prevented from maintaining contact with their children. Windschuttle cites the words of the principal historian of the ‘Stolen Generations’, Peter Read: "Welfare officers, removing children solely because they were Aboriginal, intended and arranged that they should lose their Aboriginality, and that they never return home."
Windschuttle's argues that his analysis of the records shows that Aboriginal children "were never removed from their families in order to put an end to Aboriginality or, indeed, to serve any improper government policy or program". He found a similar level of misrepresentation and fabrication in the history of the alleged ‘Stolen Generations’ as he had in his previous study on Van Diemen's Land. He argues that "until the term ‘stolen generations’ first appeared in 1981, there had been no popular tradition among Aboriginal people that employed either the term or the concept." Indeed, one of the organisations now accused of participation in the removals had Aboriginal rights activists working as members of the board and yet apparently they didn't notice that they were 'stealing' children. In 1981, a "then unknown white postgraduate history student, Peter Read" wrote, "in the course of just one day", a twenty-page pamphlet to make the case. "He alone was granted the vision denied to all who came before him."
Two years later, Coral Edwards, a colleague of Peter Read at the Link-Up social work organization, made a speech to a meeting of the National Aboriginal Consultative Council to seek funds for Link-Up and referred to the claims made in Read's pamphlet. " Edwards’s speech came as a bombshell. Mothers had not voluntarily given their children away, she said. Rather, ‘the governments never intended that the children should ever return’."
Windschuttle argues that Read's "version of events was deeply comforting". " Mothers had not given their children away, fathers had not left their children destitute or deserted their families or been so consumed by alcohol they left them vulnerable to sexual predators." ...."Aborigines could suddenly identify as morally innocent victims of a terrible injustice. Their problems could all be blamed on faceless white bureaucrats driven by racism. Since Read created this interpretation, it has come to be believed by most Aboriginal people in Australia."
With regard to the Human Rights Commission 'investigation' into the ‘Stolen Generations’ and their 1997 report entitled Bringing Them Home, he writes: "The empirical underpinnings of Bringing Them Home derived largely from the work of white academic historians. The Human Rights Commission did no serious research of its own into the primary historical sources. Co-authors Ronald Wilson and Mick Dodson also declined to hear any evidence that might have contradicted their preferred interpretation. They did not call witnesses from many of the still-living public officials responsible for child removal to hear or test their reasons for their policies and practices. The commission’s only original contribution was to solicit the testimony of 535 Aboriginal people who had been removed from their parents and who spoke about their own experiences. While many of these stories were completely believable in what they said about what happened and how they felt, it is nonetheless true that when these witnesses were children they were not in a position to comprehend the question at the centre of the accusation of genocide, the motives of government policy makers."
He argues that only a small number of children were actually removed (approximately 8250 in the period 1880 to 1971), far less than the tens of thousands claimed, and that most of the 'removed' children had been orphaned or were abandoned, destitute, neglected or subjected to various forms of exploitation and abuse. These removals were based on traditional grounds of child welfare. He argues that his analysis of welfare policy shows that that none of the policies that allowed the removal of Aboriginal children were unique to Aborigines and that the evidence shows they were removed for the same child welfare reasons as white children who were in similar circumstances. "A significant number of other children were voluntarily placed in institutions by Aboriginal parents to give them an education and a better chance in life."
In Western Australia, the majority of the children who are claimed to have been 'removed' and placed in state Aboriginal settlements, in fact went to those settlements with their destitute parents.
In New South Wales, Aboriginal children were placed in apprenticeships to enable them to acquire the skills to earn a living and be independent of welfare in a program that "was a replica of measures that had already been applied to white children in welfare institutions in New South Wales for several decades, and to poor English children for several centuries before that".
Windschuttle's argues that the evidence shows that the claims that parents were deliberately prevented from maintaining contact with their children and that the children were prevented from returning home are falsehoods. In New South Wales, for example, the relevant government board not only allowed parents to visit their children in the Aborigines Protection Board Children's Homes, it provided them with train fare and a daily living allowance to enable them to do so. When children of Aboriginal descent were apprenticed to employers, they often returned home for the holidays and when necessary, were accompanied by officers of the responsible government board to ensure they reached home safely. When they finished their apprenticeships, in common with apprentices of other races, they were free to go wherever they pleased including back to their original homes, permanently or for social visits.
With respect to the testing of the claims in court, Windschuttle writes: ".... when they tested specific policies before the Federal Court, and when they argued the general intentions of the parliaments and legislators before the High Court, the historians and political activists who invented the notion of the Stolen Generations proved incapable of substantiating their case. As far as Australia’s highest courts are concerned, the central hypothesis of the Stolen Generations is legally extinct."... "The only legal cases with any potential credibility would be those made by individuals such as Bruce Trevorrow, who was unlawfully removed from his family and suffered badly as a result." However in the Trevorrow case, Windschuttle argues that the decision shows "that the actions of the Aborigines Protection Board in placing Bruce in foster care without his parents’ agreement was actually illegal at the time" and not the result of a policy of removal but rather the illegal actions of welfare officials who believed, rightly or wrongly, that Bruce Trevorrow was neglected and that his health and life would be in danger if they returned him to his mother. The fact that Bruce Trevorrow's siblings were never removed is an indicator that there was no such policy and that welfare officials were not empowered to remove Aboriginal children on racial grounds.
Future volumes
In April 2010, Keith Windschuttle announced that the two remaining books in the series, Volume Two on the Colonial Frontier from 1788 onwards, and Volume Four on the History Wars, originally projected for publication in 2003 and 2004, will be published at a date yet to be announced. As of October 2011, no further announcement has been made.Hoax
In January 2009, Windschuttle was hoaxed into publishing an article in Quadrant. The stated aim of the hoax was to expose Windschuttle's alleged right wing bias by proving he would publish an inaccurate article and not check its footnotes or authenticity if it met his preconceptions. An author using the pseudonym "biotechnologist Dr Sharon Gould" submitted an article claiming that CSIROCommonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation is the national government body for scientific research in Australia...
had planned to produce food crops engineered with human genes. However, "Gould" revealed that she had regarded the article as an Alan Sokal
Alan Sokal
Alan David Sokal is a professor of mathematics at University College London and professor of physics at New York University. He works in statistical mechanics and combinatorics. To the general public he is best known for his criticism of postmodernism, resulting in the Sokal affair in...
style hoax. Based on the reporter's intimate knowledge of the hoax and what he described as her "triumphant" tone when disclosing the hoax to him, Windschuttle accused the online publication Crikey
Crikey
Crikey is an independent Australian electronic magazine comprising an open access website and an email newsletter available to subscribers. Well known in Australian political, media and business circles, Crikey was described by former Federal Opposition Leader Mark Latham as the "most popular...
of being involved in the hoax, a claim Crikey denied. Two days later, Crikey revealed that "Gould" was in fact the writer, editor and activist Katherine Wilson. Wilson agreed to being named by Crikey, as her name had already appeared in online speculation and it seemed likely that her identity was about to be revealed by other journalists.
Reporters Kelly Burke and Julie Robotham note that "… the projects cited by ‘Gould’ as having been dumped by the organisation [CSIRO] are not in themselves implausible, and similar technologies are in active development. Human vaccines against diseases including hepatitis B, respiratory syncytial virus and Norwalk virus have been genetically engineered into crops as diverse as lettuce, potato and corn, and shown to provoke an immune response in humans.
Gould also suggests the CSIRO abandoned research into the creation of dairy cattle capable of producing non-allergenic milk for lactose-intolerant infants and a genetically engineered mosquito that could stimulate antibodies against malaria in humans who were bitten, mitigating against the spread of the disease. Both ideas are under serious scientific study by research groups around the world."
The hoax elements of the article published in Quadrant were that the CSIRO had planned such research, abandoned it because of perceived public moral or ethical objections and that evidence of this was "buried" in footnotes to an article in a scientific journal and in two annual reports of the CSIRO, the relevant report years being unspecified. The Alan Sokal
Alan Sokal
Alan David Sokal is a professor of mathematics at University College London and professor of physics at New York University. He works in statistical mechanics and combinatorics. To the general public he is best known for his criticism of postmodernism, resulting in the Sokal affair in...
hoax that the Quadrant hoax is allegedly styled after consisted of writings described as obvious scientific nonsense submitted to an academic journal.
Windschuttle states: "A real hoax, like that of Alan Sokal and Ern Malley
Ern Malley
Ernest Lalor "Ern" Malley was a fictitious poet and the central figure in Australia's most celebrated literary hoax. The poet, and his entire body of work, were created in one day in 1944 by writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart as a hoax on Max Harris, Angry Penguins, the modernist magazine he...
, is designed to expose editors who are pretentious, ignorant or at least over-enthusiastic about certain subjects. The technique is to submit obvious nonsense for publication in order to expose the editor’s ignorance of the topic. A real hoax defeats its purpose if it largely relies upon real issues, real people and real publications for its content. All of the latter is true of what ‘Sharon Gould’ wrote. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of the content of her article is both factually true and well-based on the sources she cites."
Major publications
- Unemployment: a Social and Political Analysis of the Economic Crisis in Australia, Penguin, (1979)
- Fixing the News, Cassell, (1981)
- The Media: a New Analysis of the Press, Television, Radio and Advertising in Australia, Penguin, (1984, 3rd edn. 1988)
- Working in the Arts, University of Queensland Press, (1986)
- Local Employment Initiatives: Integrating Social Labour Market and Economic Objectives for Innovative Job Creation, Australian Government Publishing Service, (1987)
- Writing, Researching Communicating, McGraw-Hill, (1988, 3rd edn. 1999)
- The Killing of History: How a Discipline is being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists, Macleay Press, Sydney (1994); Macleay Press, Michigan (1996); Free Press, New York (1997); Encounter Books, San Francisco (2000) online edition
- The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847, Macleay Press, (2002)
- The White Australia Policy, Macleay Press, (2004)
- The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume Three: The Stolen Generations 1881-2008, Macleay Press, (2009)
External links
- Bibliography of online sources at Questia
- SydneyLine website - recent articles and lectures by Sydney author and publisher, Keith Windschuttle, plus other works and links that pursue similar interests and are conceived within the same tradition
- ABC Board bio