Keith Windschuttle (born 1942) is an Australian
historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the stu ...
and former board member of the
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) is the national broadcaster of Australia. It is principally funded by direct grants from the Australian Government and is administered by a government-appointed board. The ABC is a publicly-own ...
.
He was editor of ''
Quadrant'' from 2007 to 2015 when he became chair of the board and editor-in-chief.
[Keith Windschuttle, (12 February 2015), Quadrant's New Editor, ''Quadrant''](_blank)
/ref> He was the publisher
Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software and other content available to the public for sale or for free. Traditionally, the term refers to the creation and distribution of printed works, such as books, newsp ...
of Macleay Press which operated from 1994 to 2010.
Windschuttle's right-wing political views have been characterised by other commentators as racist.
Major published items include ''Unemployment'' (1979), which analysed the economic causes and social consequences of unemployment in Australia and advocated a socialist
Socialism is a left-wing economic philosophy and movement encompassing a range of economic systems characterized by the dominance of social ownership of the means of production as opposed to private ownership. As a term, it describes the e ...
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
Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or Rhetorical modes, mode of discourseNuyen, A.T., 1992. The Role of Rhetorical Devices in Postmodernist Discourse. Philosophy & Rhetoric, pp.183–194. characterized by philosophical skepticism, skepticis ...
in the study of history
History (derived ) is the systematic study and the documentation of the human activity. The time period of event before the History of writing#Inventions of writing, invention of writing systems is considered prehistory. "History" is an umbr ...
; ''The Fabrication of Aboriginal
Aborigine, aborigine or aboriginal may refer to:
*Aborigines (mythology), in Roman mythology
* Indigenous peoples, general term for ethnic groups who are the earliest known inhabitants of an area
*One of several groups of indigenous peoples, see ...
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 is the use of physical force so as to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy. Other definitions are also used, such as the World Health Organization's definition of violence as "the intentional use of physical force or Power (social and p ...
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 is the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to inherited attributes and can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another. It may also mean prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism ...
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.
Biography
He attended at Canterbury Boys' High School
Canterbury Boys' High School (CBHS) 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 about 200 metres north of Ca ...
(where he was a contemporary of Liberal
Liberal or liberalism may refer to:
Politics
* a supporter of liberalism
** Liberalism by country
* an adherent of a Liberal Party
* Liberalism (international relations)
* Sexually liberal feminism
* Social liberalism
Arts, entertainment and m ...
Australian prime minister
The prime minister of Australia is the head of government of the Commonwealth of Australia. The prime minister heads the executive branch of the federal government of Australia and is also accountable to federal parliament under the principl ...
John Howard
John Winston Howard (born 26 July 1939) is an Australian former politician who served as the 25th prime minister of Australia from 1996 to 2007, holding office as leader of the Liberal Party. His eleven-year tenure as prime minister is the s ...
).
Windschuttle was a journalist on newspapers and magazines in Sydney. He completed a BA (first class honours in history) at the University of Sydney
The University of Sydney (USYD), also known as Sydney University, or informally Sydney Uni, is a public research university located in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and is one of the country's si ...
in 1969, and an MA (honours in politics) at Macquarie University
Macquarie University ( ) is a public research university based in Sydney, Australia, in the suburb of Macquarie Park. Founded in 1964 by the New South Wales Government, it was the third university to be established in the metropolitan area of S ...
in 1978. He enrolled as a PhD student but did not submit a thesis; instead he published it under the title ''The Media'' with Penguin Books. In 1973, he became a tutor
TUTOR, also known as PLATO Author Language, is a programming language developed for use on the PLATO system at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign beginning in roughly 1965. TUTOR was initially designed by Paul Tenczar for use in co ...
in Australian history at the University of New South Wales
The University of New South Wales (UNSW), also known as UNSW Sydney, is a public research university based in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It is one of the founding members of Group of Eight, a coalition of Australian research-intensive ...
(UNSW). Between 1977 and 1981, Windschuttle was lecturer
Lecturer is an List of academic ranks, academic rank within many universities, though the meaning of the term varies somewhat from country to country. It generally denotes an academic expert who is hired to teach on a full- or part-time basis. T ...
in Australian history and in journalism
Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on the interaction of events, facts, ideas, and people that are the "news of the day" and that informs society to at least some degree. The word, a noun, applies to the occupation (profes ...
at the New South Wales Institute of Technology (now the University of Technology, Sydney
The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) is a public research university located in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Although its origins are said to trace back to the 1830s, the university was founded in its current form in 1988. As of 2021 ...
) before returning to UNSW in 1983 as lecturer/senior lecturer in social policy. He resigned from UNSW in 1993 and founded Macleay Press, a small-press
A small press is a publisher with annual sales below a certain level or below a certain number of titles published. The terms "indie publisher" and "independent press" and others are sometimes used interchangeably.
Independent press is general ...
publishing company. Published authors besides Windschuttle include Leonie Kramer and Michael Connor. He has been a regular visiting and guest lecturer on history and historiography
Historiography is the study of the methods of historians in developing history as an academic discipline, and by extension is any body of historical work on a particular subject. The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians ha ...
at American universities.
In June 2006, he was appointed to the board of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) is the national broadcaster of Australia. It is principally funded by direct grants from the Australian Government and is administered by a government-appointed board. The ABC is a publicly-own ...
(ABC), Australia's non-commercial public broadcaster.
Political evolution
An adherent of the New Left
The New Left was a broad political movement mainly in the 1960s and 1970s consisting of activists in the Western world who campaigned for a broad range of social issues such as civil and political rights, environmentalism, feminism, gay rights, g ...
in the 1960s and 1970s, Windschuttle later moved to the political right. This process is first evident in his 1984 book ''The Media'', which took inspiration from the empirical perspective of the Marxist historian
Marxist historiography, or historical materialist historiography, is an influential school of historiography. The chief tenets of Marxist historiography include the centrality of social class, social relations of production in class-divided so ...
E. P. Thompson
Edward Palmer Thompson (3 February 1924 – 28 August 1993) was an English historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is best known today for his historical work on the radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in ...
, especially his ''The Poverty of Theory'', to make a highly critical review of the Marxist theories of Louis Althusser
Louis Pierre Althusser (, ; ; 16 October 1918 – 22 October 1990) 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.
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: "Overall, the major economic reforms of the last five years, the deregulation of the finance sector, and the imposition of wage restraint
Incomes policies in economics are economy-wide wage and price controls, most commonly instituted as a response to inflation, and usually seeking to establish wages and prices below free market level.
Incomes policies have often been resorted to ...
through the social contract of The Accord, have worked to expand employment and internationalise 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 is an intellectual stance or Rhetorical modes, mode of discourseNuyen, A.T., 1992. The Role of Rhetorical Devices in Postmodernist Discourse. Philosophy & Rhetoric, pp.183–194. characterized by philosophical skepticism, skepticis ...
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 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 eyewitness, 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 V. White (July 12, 1928 – March 5, 2018) was an American historian in the tradition of literary criticism, perhaps most famous for his work '' Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe'' (1973/2014).
Career
W ...
, they 'emplot' the past. This is itself a cultural process".
Windschuttle's research in the early 2000s disputed the idea that the colonial settlers of Australia committed genocide
Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part. Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944, combining the Greek word (, "race, people") with the Latin ...
against the Indigenous Australians
Indigenous Australians or Australian First Nations are people with familial heritage from, and membership in, the ethnic groups that lived in Australia before British colonisation. They consist of two distinct groups: the Aboriginal peoples ...
. He also disputed the widespread view that there was a campaign of guerrilla warfare
Guerrilla warfare is a form of irregular warfare in which small groups of combatants, such as paramilitary personnel, armed civilians, or Irregular military, irregulars, use military tactics including ambushes, sabotage, Raid (military), raids ...
against British settlement. Extensive debate on his work has come to be called the " history wars". He dismissed assertions, which he imputed to the current generation of academic historians, that there was any resemblance between racial attitudes in Australia and those of South Africa under apartheid
Apartheid (, especially South African English: , ; , "aparthood") was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia) from 1948 to the early 1990s. Apartheid was ...
and Germany under the Nazis
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Na ...
. He has been a frequent contributor to conservative magazines, such as '' Quadrant'' in Australia, of which he became editor in 2007, and '' The New Criterion'' in the United States.
In the wake of the 2011 Norway attacks
The 2011 Norway attacks, referred to in Norway as 22 July ( no, 22. juli) or as 22/7, were two domestic terrorist attacks by neo-Nazi Anders Behring Breivik against the government, the civilian population, and a Workers' Youth League (AUF) ...
, Windschuttle did not deny that the perpetrator, Anders Behring Breivik
Fjotolf Hansen (born 13 February 1979), better known by his birth name Anders Behring Breivik () and by his pseudonym Andrew Berwick, is a Norwegian far-right domestic terrorist, known for committing the 2011 Norway attacks on 22 July 2011. On ...
, had read and praised statements he had made at a symposium in New Zealand
New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island count ...
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 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 colonisers and Aboriginal people, Windschuttle criticises 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 War" against the Aboriginal people 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 Aboriginal people's 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
Norman James Brian Plomley (born 6 November 1912 – 8 April 1994) regarded by some as one of the most respected and scholarly of Australian historians and, until his death, in Launceston, the doyen of Tasmanian Aboriginal scholarship ...
, and Sharon Morgan, whom he regards as responsible for a politicised reading of the past, and for inflating the number of Aboriginal deaths. Reviewing their work, he highlights multiple examples of what he alleges are 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 Forbes Macintyre (21 April 1947 – 22 November 2021) was an Australian historian, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne from 1999 to 2008. He was voted one of Australia's most influential historians.
Early lif ...
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 or Australian First Nations are people with familial heritage from, and membership in, the ethnic groups that lived in Australia before British colonisation. They consist of two distinct groups: the Aboriginal peoples ...
; he drastically reduces the figures for the Tasmanian Aboriginal death toll, and writes that Aboriginal people referred to by both Reynolds and Ryan as resistance figures, included "black bushranger
Bushrangers were originally escaped convicts in the early years of the British settlement of Australia who used the bush as a refuge to hide from the authorities. By the 1820s, the term had evolved to refer to those who took up "robbery under ...
s" and others engaged in acts normally regarded as "criminality"; arguing that the evidence clearly shows that attacks by Aboriginal people 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 is a form of irregular warfare in which small groups of combatants, such as paramilitary personnel, armed civilians, or Irregular military, irregulars, use military tactics including ambushes, sabotage, Raid (military), raids ...
against British settlement aren't supported by credible evidence.[Gregory D. B. Smithers, "Reassuring 'White Australia'," p. 497.] Vicki Grieves argues that Windschuttle regards Aboriginal men who traded their women's services as pimp
Procuring or pandering is the facilitation or provision of a prostitute or other sex worker in the arrangement of a sex act with a customer. A procurer, colloquially called a pimp (if male) or a madam (if female, though the term pimp has still ...
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 favour of the protection of Aboriginal people. 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.][http://samuelgriffith.org.au/docs/vol15/v15chap11.pdf ] His own examination of archives, contemporary newspapers, diaries and official accounts yields a provisory figure of approximately 120 deaths of Tasmanian Aboriginal people "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 Aboriginal people.[Windschuttle, ''The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, '' pp. 387–397.] Windschuttle argues that the principles of the Enlightenment
Enlightenment or enlighten may refer to:
Age of Enlightenment
* Age of Enlightenment, period in Western intellectual history from the late 17th to late 18th century, centered in France but also encompassing (alphabetically by country or culture): ...
, fused with the 19th century evangelical
Evangelicalism (), also called evangelical Christianity or evangelical Protestantism, is a worldwide Interdenominationalism, interdenominational movement within Protestantism, Protestant Christianity that affirms the centrality of being "bor ...
revival within the Church of England
The Church of England (C of E) is the established Christian church in England and the mother church of the international Anglican Communion. It traces its history to the Christian church recorded as existing in the Roman province of Britain ...
and Britain's rule of law
The rule of law is the political philosophy that all citizens and institutions within a country, state, or community are accountable to the same laws, including lawmakers and leaders. The rule of law is defined in the ''Encyclopedia Britannica ...
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 is a form of animal husbandry where domesticated animals (known as "livestock") are released onto large vegetated outdoor lands (pastures) for grazing, historically by nomadic people who moved around with their herds. The animal ...
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 Aboriginal people 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, also known as allelic drift or the Wright effect, is the change in the frequency of an existing gene variant (allele) in a population due to random chance.
Genetic drift may cause gene variants to disappear completely and there ...
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 Aboriginal people from the Tasmanian mainland to Flinders Island was the Colonial Administration's measure to ensure peace for hard-pressed settlers while attempting, unsuccessfully to prevent the extinction of the full-blooded Tasmanian Aboriginal people. 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
Zoology ()The pronunciation of zoology as is usually regarded as nonstandard, though it is not uncommon. is the branch of biology that studies the Animal, animal kingdom, including the anatomy, structure, embryology, evolution, Biological clas ...
François Péron
François Auguste Péron (22 August 1775 – 14 December 1810) was a French naturalist and explorer.
Life
Péron was born in Cérilly, Allier, in 1775, the son of a tailor (not a harness maker as is frequently asserted). Although intended for ...
,[ Flannery, T. F. (1994) ''The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People,'' Chatswood: New South Wales ] by George Augustus Robinson in his journals, and by the early Australian writer James Bonwick
James Bonwick (8 July 1817 – 6 February 1906) 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 '' ...
, 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 Aboriginal people 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
Social Darwinism refers to various theories and societal practices that purport to apply biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology, economics and politics, and which were largely defined by scholars in W ...
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
James Cook (7 November 1728 Old Style date: 27 October – 14 February 1779) was a British explorer, navigator, cartographer, and captain in the British Royal Navy, famous for his three voyages between 1768 and 1779 in the Pacific Ocean an ...
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
The Baudin expedition of 1800 to 1803 was a French expedition to map the coast of New Holland (now Australia). Nicolas Baudin was selected as leader in October 1800. The expedition started with two ships, '' Géographe'', captained by Baudin, an ...
. Boyce argues that their observations, including those of the captain Nicolas Baudin
Nicolas Thomas Baudin (; 17 February 1754 – 16 September 1803) was a French explorer, cartographer, naturalist and hydrographer, most notable for his explorations in Australia and the southern Pacific.
Biography
Early career
Born a comm ...
, 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
Abalone ( or ; via Spanish , from Rumsen ''aulón'') is a common name for any of a group of small to very large marine gastropod molluscs in the family (biology), family Haliotidae. Other common name
In biology, a common name of a taxon o ...
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 Aboriginal people themselves; from the recorded words of Aboriginal men, such as Woorrady, Montpeliatter, Mannalargenna and Nappelarteyer, and those of Aboriginal women 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".
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 ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island count ...
, Tahiti
Tahiti (; Tahitian ; ; previously also known as Otaheite) is the largest island of the Windward group of the Society Islands in French Polynesia. It is located in the central part of the Pacific Ocean and the nearest major landmass is Austr ...
and Tonga
Tonga (, ; ), officially the Kingdom of Tonga ( to, Puleʻanga Fakatuʻi ʻo Tonga), is a Polynesian country and archipelago. The country has 171 islands – of which 45 are inhabited. Its total surface area is about , scattered over in ...
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
Henry Ling Roth (3 February 1855 – 12 May 1925) 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 Mar ...
's word-lists to deny an 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 Australian
''The Australian'', with its Saturday edition, ''The Weekend Australian'', is a broadsheet newspaper published by News Corp Australia since 14 July 1964.Bruns, Axel. "3.1. The active audience: Transforming journalism from gatekeeping to gatew ...
'', 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 favour the Aborigines, and sometimes they had happened to favour 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
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 w ...
, namely ''Whitewash. On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History'', an anthology edited and introduced by Robert Manne
Robert Michael Manne (born 31 October 1947) is an Emeritus Professor of politics and Vice-Chancellor's Fellow at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. He is a leading Australian public intellectual.
Background
Robert Manne was born in Melbo ...
, professor of politics at La Trobe University
La Trobe University is a public research university based in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Its main campus is located in the suburb of Bundoora. The university was established in 1964, becoming the third university in the state of Victoria an ...
, with contributions by Australian academics from a range of disciplines. Manne, who called Windschuttle's publication "one of the most implausible, ignorant and pitiless books about Australian history written for many years", summed up the case against Windschuttle's book, noting that its assessment of Aboriginal deaths is based on Plomley, despite the fact that Plomley denied that any estimate regarding such deaths could be made from the documentary record. Manne added further observations, to the effect: that "a scrupulous conservative scholar", H. A. Willis
H.A. Willis, (born Howard Alan Willis on 15 November 1948), is an Australian essayist, novelist, critic and editor.
Early life
The son of a Lands Department inspector in Victoria, Willis was born at Colac and grew up at Apollo Bay, Kyneton an ...
, using exactly the same sources as Windschuttle, instead 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
Junkie is a pejorative usually referring to a person with an addiction.
Entertainment and media
* ''Junkie'' (novel), a novel by William S. Burroughs
* "Junkie" (song), 2013 song by Medina featuring Svenstrup & Vendelboe
* ''The Junkies'', a ...
s raiding service stations 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". In turn, this provoked Melbourne
Melbourne ( ; Boonwurrung/Woiwurrung: ''Narrm'' or ''Naarm'') is the capital and most populous city of the Australian state of Victoria, and the second-most populous city in both Australia and Oceania. Its name generally refers to a met ...
writer and Objectivist
Objectivism is a philosophical system developed by Russian-American writer and philosopher Ayn Rand. She described it as "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement ...
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 Reynolds interprets his book as an attempt to revive the concept of terra nullius, and regards it as "without doubt, the most biased and cantankerous historical work to appear since the publication of G. W. Rusden's three-volume History of Australia in the 1880s".
*The historian of genocide
Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part. Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944, combining the Greek word (, "race, people") with the Latin ...
, Ben Kiernan
Benedict F. "Ben" Kiernan (born 1953) is an Australian-born American academic and historian who is the Whitney Griswold Professor Emeritus of History, Professor of International and Area Studies and Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yal ...
, who classifies the fate of Aborigines as an example of the practice, situates Windschuttle's polemical history within a new campaign, led by '' Quadrant'', 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
Stephen Garton AM, FAHA, FRAHS, FASSA FRSN (born 1955) is an Australian historian and Professor of History at the University of Sydney
The University of Sydney (USYD), also known as Sydney University, or informally Sydney Uni, is a publi ...
, Professor of History, Provost & Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Sydney University
The University of Sydney (USYD), also known as Sydney University, or informally Sydney Uni, is a public research university located in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and is one of the country's six ...
, argued that "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".
*The University of Aberdeen
The University of Aberdeen ( sco, University o' 'Aiberdeen; abbreviated as ''Aberd.'' in List of post-nominal letters (United Kingdom), post-nominals; gd, Oilthigh Obar Dheathain) is a public university, public research university in Aberdeen, Sc ...
'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 origins". Windschuttle's book plays to "the white wing populism
Populism refers to a range of political stances that emphasize the idea of "the people" and often juxtapose this group against " the elite". It is frequently associated with anti-establishment and anti-political sentiment. The term developed ...
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 "racialised 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 racialised 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 Sydney
The University of Sydney (USYD), also known as Sydney University, or informally Sydney Uni, is a public research university located in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and is one of the country's si ...
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 WWI, when 60,000 soldiers died. Windschuttle shows, she argues, a predilection for old colonial explanations, and Darwinist
Darwinism is a theory of biological evolution developed by the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and others, stating that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations tha ...
values, as though nothing had happened in between. Regarding native treatment of women, who in his account were viciously brutalised, 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 University
Monash University () is a public research university based in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Named for prominent World War I general Sir John Monash, it was founded in 1958 and is the second oldest university in the state. The university has a ...
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 Tasmania
The University of Tasmania (UTAS) is a public research university, primarily located in Tasmania, Australia. Founded in 1890, it is Australia's fourth oldest university. Christ College, one of the university's residential colleges, first pro ...
, 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 link between apes and man. This idea formed a central plank of what is known to scholars as scientific racism".
''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 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 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 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". 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".
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
Michael James Dodson (born 10 April 1950) is an Aboriginal Australian barrister, academic, and member of the Yawuru people in the Broome area of the southern Kimberley region of Western Australia.
His brother is Pat Dodson, also a noted Abor ...
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 8,250 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 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".
Windschuttle states that, in Western Australia, the records indicate that the majority of the children who are claimed to have been removed and placed in state Aboriginal settlements, went to those settlements with their destitute parents.
Windschuttle 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. Windschuttle states that the records show that a majority of children removed in New South Wales returned either to their families or to their Aboriginal communities.
Windschuttle states that 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". When Aboriginal children finished their apprenticeships 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, 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. In December 2013, Windschuttle advised that he hopes to have Volume Two published "in time to take its place in the discussions about our past during the Anzac Centenary in April 2015".
As of November 2022, neither Volume 2 nor Volume 4 has appeared, and no revised publication schedule has been announced.
Hoax
In January 2009, Windschuttle was hoaxed into publishing an article in ''Quadrant''. The stated aim of the hoax was to expose Windschuttle's purported 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 CSIRO
The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is an Australian Government
The Australian Government, also known as the Commonwealth Government, is the national government of Australia, a federal parliamentar ...
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, referring to an instance in which writings described as obvious scientific nonsense were submitted to and accepted by an academic journal. 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 SIROare 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 (sic) 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, that they had 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. 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."
Campaign on Cardinal Pell case
During the trial and imprisonment of Cardinal Pell
George Pell (born 8 June 1941) is an Australian cardinal of the Catholic Church. He served as the inaugural prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy between 2014 and 2019, and was a member of the Council of Cardinal Advisers between 2013 an ...
in 2019-20 on charges of sexual abuse of a minor, Windschuttle led a campaign in ''Quadrant'' defending Pell's innocence. After Pell's acquittal by the High Court of Australia
The High Court of Australia is Australia's apex court. It exercises Original jurisdiction, original and appellate jurisdiction on matters specified within Constitution of Australia, Australia's Constitution.
The High Court was established fol ...
, Windschuttle published a book, ''The Persecution of George Pell'', arguing that Pell had faced a concerted campaign by Victorian police, judiciary and victims' advocates to convict him on flimsy evidence.
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)
* ''The Breakup of Australia: The Real Agenda Behind Aboriginal Recognition'', Quadrant Books, (2016)
* ''The Persecution of George Pell'', Quadrant Books, (2020)
See also
* American Indian Wars
* Aboriginal Tasmanians and the Black War
* Australian frontier wars
* ''Historikerstreit
The ''Historikerstreit'' (, "historians' dispute") was a dispute in the late 1980s in West Germany between conservative and left-of-center academics and other intellectuals about how to incorporate Nazi Germany and the Holocaust into German hist ...
''
* History wars
* Indian removal
Indian removal was the United States government policy of forced displacement of self-governing tribes of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands in the eastern United States to lands west of the Mississippi Riverspecifically, to a de ...
(United States)
* New Historians (comparable Israeli phenomenon)
* Stolen Generations (Australia)
* Vergangenheitsbewältigung
''Vergangenheitsbewältigung'' (, "struggle of overcoming the past" or "work of coping with the past") is a German compound noun describing processes that since the later 20th century have become key in the study of post-1945 German literature, so ...
References
Further reading
* "Contra Windschuttle", S. G. Foster, ''Quadrant'', March 2003, 47:3.
''The Whole Truth...?''
P. Francis, ''The Journal of GEOS'', 2000.
* "Whitewash Confirms the Fabrication of Aboriginal History", Keith Windschuttle, ''Quadrant'', October 2003.
* "The Return of Postmodernism in Aboriginal History", Keith Windschuttle, ''Quadrant'', April 2006.
External links
Articles by Keith Windschuttle
at The New Criterion
Articles by Keith Windschuttle
in ''Quadrant''.
Articles by Keith Windschuttle
at The Spectator
''The Spectator'' is a weekly British magazine on politics, culture, and current affairs. It was first published in July 1828, making it the oldest surviving weekly magazine in the world.
It is owned by Frederick Barclay, who also owns ''The ...
Who Owns White Australia? Andrew Fraser Versus Keith Windschuttle
by R. J. Stove
Robert James Stove (born 1961 in Sydney) is an Australian writer, editor, composer and organist.
Biography
Born in 1961 in Sydney, but later resident in Melbourne, Stove graduated from University of Sydney, Sydney University in 1985. He is the a ...
Foster, S. G. ''Contra Windschuttle'', Quadrant, March 2003, 47:3
Retrieved from Internet Archive 13 December 2013.
(contains edited transcript of 2002 ABC radio interviews by Peter McCutcheon with historian and author Keith Windschuttle and historian and author Henry Reynolds)
"Native Fiction"
a sympathetic New Criterion
New is an adjective referring to something recently made, discovered, or created.
New or NEW may refer to:
Music
* New, singer of K-pop group The Boyz (South Korean band), The Boyz
Albums and EPs
* New (album), ''New'' (album), by Paul McCartn ...
review of Keith Windschuttle's book casting doubt on a supposed Tasmanian genocide. Retrieved from Internet Archive 13 December 2013.
Transcript of current affairs television program
''Sunday'' with Keith Windschuttle, Prof. Henry Reynolds, Prof. Cassandra Pybus, Prof. Lyndall Ryan, and others. Retrieved from Internet Archive 13 December 2013.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Windschuttle, Keith
1942 births
20th-century Australian historians
Australian anti-communists
Australian magazine editors
Australian publishers (people)
Conservatism in Australia
Critics of postmodernism
Historians of Australia
History of Indigenous Australians
Living people
People educated at Canterbury Boys' High School
People from Sydney
Quadrant (magazine) people
University of Sydney alumni
Date of birth missing (living people)