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''''Keith Windschuttle''' is gay (born 1942) is an Australian writer, [[history|historian]], and [[Australian Broadcasting Corporation|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 [[mass media|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; and ''The White Australia Policy'', (2004), a history of that policy which argues that academic historians have exaggerated the degree of [[racism]] in Australian history. He was appointed editor of [[Quadrant (magazine)|Quadrant]] magazine from the end of 2007.<ref>[http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/windschuttle-to-edit-quadrant/2007/10/24/1192941074501.html Windschuttle to edit Quadrant, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 October 2007]</ref> He is the [[publisher]] of [[Macleay Press]]. ==Biography== After education at [[Canterbury Boys' High School]] (where he was a contemporary of former [[Liberal Party of Australia|Liberal]] [[Prime Minister of Australia|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 complete it. 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. ==Political evolution== An adherent of the [[New Left]] in the 1960s and 70s, 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 historiography|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 (cultural theorist)|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, ",<ref>{{Cite news| url=http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/12/23/1040511005690.html | location=Melbourne | work=The Age | title=The battle is not to be left behind}}</ref> the third edition four years later (1988) took a different view: <blockquote>"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 [[Prices and Incomes Accord|The Accord]], have worked to expand employment and internationalize the Australian economy in more positive ways than I thought possible at the time."</blockquote> The rightward march of his thinking was consolidated by the late 1990s. According to his fiercest critic, [[Robert Manne]], '(b)y the late 1990s, Windschuttle's journey from [[Pol Pot]] enthusiast to apologist for the British Empire was complete, '<ref>Robert Manne, ''Whitewash: on Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal history, ''Black Inc., 2003 p.6.</ref> though Windschuttle clarified in a riposte that, 'Never in my life have I written or spoken a word in favour of Pol Pot.'<ref>[http://www.sydneyline.com/Return%20of%20Postmodernism.htm K. Windschuttle, 'The Return of Postmodernism in Aboriginal History, '] [[Quadrant]], April 2006.</ref> In ''The Killing of History'', Windschuttle defended the practices and methods of traditional empirical history against [[postmodernism]], and praised historians such as [[Henry Reynolds (historian)|Henry Reynolds]], but he now argues that some of those he praised for their empirically-grounded work fail to adhere to the principle.{{Citation needed|date=September 2010}}. 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 [[Indigenous Australians|Australian Aboriginal]] history, Windschuttle takes aim at 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<ref>According to Vickie Grieves, in Windschuttle's usage 'the term 'left-wing' is synonymous with idealistic, subjective and over-theorised. Windschuttle positions himself as the opposite: a realistic, objective, logical empiricist, who rejects rhetoric. '[http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/lab/85/grieves.html Vicki Grieves, 'Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History: A View from the Other Side],' in ''[[Labor History (journal)|Labour History]],'' No. 85 (Nov., 2003), pp. 194-199 p.194.</ref> distort the historical record to support that cause.{{Citation needed|date=September 2010}} For Windschuttle, the task of the historian is to provide readers with an empirical history as close to the [[Objectivity (philosophy)|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."<ref>http://www.sydneyline.com/National%20Museum%20Frontier%20Conflict.htm</ref> An 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. His critics, historians, archaeologists, and sociologists, many of them he directly alleged 'fabricated' history, argue that Windschuttle fails to follow his own criteria in this regard, since, in their view, his work ignores primary sources that contradict his views and invariably produces findings consistent with his known political ideology. Controversy surrounds both his own use of documentary sources, and his 'empiricism'. 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.'<ref>Stephen Garton, ‘On the Defensive: Poststructuralism and Australian Cultural History’ in Hsu-Ming Teo, Richard White (eds.) ''Cultural history in Australia, '' UNSW Press, 2003 pp</ref> Windschuttle's recent research disputes the idea that the [[Colonialism|colonial]] settlers of Australia committed [[genocide]] against the [[Indigenous Australians]]. He denies the widespread view that there was a campaign of [[guerrilla warfare]] against British settlement. Extensive debate on his claims 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 [[Nazism|Nazis]]. He is a frequent contributor to the conservative magazines ''[[Quadrant (magazine)|Quadrant]]'' and ''[[The New Criterion]]''. ==''The Fabrication of Aboriginal History''== {{See also|History Wars}} In his ''The Fabrication of Aboriginal History'', the first book of a projected multi-volume examination of frontier encounters between white colonizers and Aborigines,<ref>Keith Windschuttle, ''The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847'' Macleay Press, 2002.</ref> Windschuttle rejects the last 3 decades of historical scholarship which had challenged the traditional view of Aboriginal passivity in the face of [[Colonization|European colonisation]].<ref>Gregory D.B. Smithers, ‘Reassuring "White Australia": A Review of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One, ' in ''Journal of Social History, '' Vol. 37, No. 2 (Winter, 2003), pp. 493-505, p.493.</ref> 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 [[Wiktionary:massacre|massacres]] in what is known as the [[Black War]] against the [[Tasmanian Aborigine|Aborigines of Tasmania]]. He refers to historians he defines as making up this 'orthodox school' as being 'vain', 'self-indulgent', ‘arrogant, patronizing and lazy’. Windschuttle's 'orthodox school' comprises a large number of noted historians and archaeologists, deceased or living, of widely varying sympathies, such as [[Henry Reynolds]], [[Lyndall Ryan]], Lloyd Robson, [[John Mulvaney]], [[Rhys Jones (archaeologist)|Rhys Jones]], [[Brian Plomley]], and Sharon Morgan, whom he regards as colluding in a politicized reading of the past,<ref>Stuart Macintyre 'Reviewing the History Wars, ' in ''Labour History, '' No. 85 (Nov., 2003), pp. 213-215, p.213.</ref> and conspiring to inflate the number of Aboriginal deaths.<ref>Gregory D.B. Smithers ‘Reassuring "White Australia": A Review of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, ' p.495</ref> Reviewing their work, he highlights examples of inaccurate reportage<ref>An Anglican diary reported as recording 100 Aboriginal and 20 white deaths, was found to record 4 for the former, and 2 for the latter. Checking a source for Brian Plomley's reference to 'more killed', Windschuttle found that the original actually had 'mare killed'. [http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/nativefiction-1774 G. Blainey, 'Native Fiction],' in [[New Criterion]], April 2003</ref> or the citation of sources that do not exist.<ref>The Hobart Town Courier for 1826 is twice cited by one historian as providing the evidence for killings, but was not printed that year. [http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/nativefiction-1774 G. Blainey, 'Native Fiction']</ref> 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'.<ref>'It works by a loose reading of the work of those historians and a close reading of their treatment of massacres. ’Stuart Macintyre 'Reviewing the History Wars, 'p.213</ref> Windschuttle challenges the idea that mass killings were commonplace, arguing that the colonial settlers of Australia did not commit widespread [[List of massacres of indigenous Australians|massacres]] against [[Indigenous Australians]], or that a campaign of [[guerrilla warfare]] was waged by the latter against British settlement; he drastically reduces the figures for the Tasmanian Aboriginal death toll, and argues that Aborigines referred to by both Reynolds and Ryan as resistance figures, were ‘black [[bushranger]]s’, 'outlaws' or 'violent' 'common criminals',<ref>Windschuttle, ''The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, '' pp.65-77</ref><ref>Gregory D.B. Smithers, Reassuring "White Australia", ' p.497</ref><ref>Stuart Macintyre, 'Reviewing the History Wars, ' in ''Labour History'', No. 85 (Nov., 2003), pp. 213-215, p.214)</ref> and, Vicki Grieves argues, [[pimp]]s.<ref>[http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/lab/85/grieves.html Vicki Grieves, 'Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History: A View from the Other Side, ’] in ''[[Labor History (journal)|Labour History]],'' No. 85 (Nov., 2003), pp. 194-199, p.197.</ref> Adducing the work of, in Stuart Macintyre's words, 'a particularly tendentious American anthropologist',<ref>His source is Robert B. Edgerton, ''Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony, '' Free Press, New York, 1992 pp.47ff.</ref> he claims that the Tasmanian Aboriginal society was primitive, dysfunctional and on the verge of collapse, because their putative maltreatment of women impaired their reproduction;<ref>Stuart Macintyre, 'Reviewing the History Wars, ' in ''Labour History'', No. 85 (Nov., 2003), pp. 213-215, pp.214-215)</ref> In Windschuttle’s analysis, introduced disease was the primary cause of the demise of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people.<ref>Windschuttle, ''The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, '' pp.372-375</ref> He is highly critical of recent historical scholarship, and advances a sympathetic analysis of settler opinion. He also criticises Aboriginal [[Land law|land right politics]].<ref>Gregory D.B. Smithers ‘Reassuring "White Australia", ' p.494, 497.</ref> His own examination of archives, contemporary newspapers, diaries and official accounts yields a provisory figure<ref>K. Windschuttle, 'This figure is not absolute or final'.</ref> 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,<ref>Gregory D.B. Smithers ‘Reassuring "White Australia", ' p.494.</ref> and thus far less than the number of whites (187) reported as killed during the Black War of 1824 to 1828 by Aborigines.<ref>http://www.sydneyline.com/Manne%20debate%20Quadrant.htm</ref><ref name="Windschuttle, pp387-397">Windschuttle, ''The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, '' pp387-397</ref> Windschuttle argues that the principles of the [[Age of Enlightenment|Enlightenment]], fused with the 19th century [[Evangelicalism|evangelical]] revival within the [[Church of England]] and [[United Kingdom|Britain]]s [[rule of law]] had a profound effect on colonial policy and behaviour, which was humane and just,<ref>Gregory D.B. Smithers ‘Reassuring "White Australia", ' p.496.</ref> that together made the claimed genocide culturally impossible. Gregory D.B. Smithers argues that Windschuttle interpreted settler violence as self-defence.<ref name="Windschuttle, pp387-397"/><ref>Gregory D.B. Smithers ‘Reassuring "White Australia", ' p.497.</ref> 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,<ref>[http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/nativefiction-1774 G. Blainey, 'Native Fiction, '] in [[New Criterion]], April 2003</ref> and large parts of Tasmania were not then, or now, occupied by white settlers.<ref>Windschuttle, ''The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, '' pp87-95</ref> Though the low rate of [[genetic drift]] found in recent genetic studies indicates that the highest previous estimate of pre-colonial Aboriginal population (8, 000) is likely the lower boundary and that a significantly higher population cannot be ruled out,<ref>Colin Pardoe, "Isolation and Evolution in Tasmania". [[Current Anthropology]], (1991) 32 (1), pp. 1-27.</ref> in Windschuttle's own estimate, without reference to any demographic historian, the size of the original Aboriginal inhabitants of Tasmania is revised downward to as few as 2, 000.<ref>Stuart Macintyre 'Reviewing the History Wars, ' p.214</ref> He interprets what is customarily construed as 'resistance' by Tasmanian Aboriginal people as 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 killing settler outsiders was part of that culture. 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. ===Specific Issues: Demographics and Death Toll=== ===Specific Issues: Treatment of women=== Windschuttle refers to accounts by the French [[zoologist]] [[François Péron]],<ref>Edward Duyker, ''François Péron: an impetuous life : naturalist and voyager, '' Miegunyah Press, 2006, describes him as the expedition's assistant zoologist</ref> 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'.<ref>Windschuttle, ''The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, '' pp.379-382</ref> 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.<ref>Windschuttle, ''The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, '' pp.372-375, 383-386</ref></blockquote> James Boyce, an authority on Tasmanian history, 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 [[Henry Ling Roth|Ling Roth]], 'written at the height of [[Social Darwinism|Social Darwinist]] orthodoxy' (1899). 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 [[Scarification|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 [[Cygnet, Tasmania|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 [[Black War|the extensive disruption of traditional life]] that had occurred by then.' He concludes:- :<blockquote>’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.’ <ref>Boyce, in Robert Manne (ed.) ''Whitewash, '' pp.65-66</ref></blockquote> 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.<ref>Shayne Breen, ‘Tasmanian Aborigines,’ in James Jupp (ed.) ''The Australian people: an encyclopedia of the nation, its people and their origins,'' Cambridge University Press, 2001 pp.110- p.113.</ref> Shayne concludes that:- :<blockquote>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.<ref>[http://evatt.labor.net.au/publications/papers/101.html Shayne Breen 'Criminals and pimps: Keith Windschuttle and Tasmanian Aborigines'], [[Evatt Foundation]], 27 August 2003.</ref></blockquote> In reply to Boyce, Windschuttle claims that Boyce hadn't read the whole book, or checked the index, which, he asserts, cited 'this very evidence.' He read more than what his bibliography listed, which refers to the sources used in his footnotes, and not what he read. Windschuttle insists the most telling evidence in his book about the native treatment of their women comes from Aborigines, such as Woorrady, Montpeliatter, Mannalargenna and Nappelarteyer, and the females Tencotemainner, [[Truganini]] and Walyer. Breen, Windschuttle replies, admits that women were traded, and takes this as an admission that the 'pre-contact indigenous culture' was marked by 'cruelty'. 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.'<ref>[http://www.sydneyline.com/Fabrication%20one%20year%20on.htm Keith Windschuttle, 'No Slander in Exposing Cultural Brutality,'] in [[The Australian]], December 29, 2003</ref> ===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, while insisting no word list records an Aboriginal term corresponding to the English word "land", acknowledges 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. 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.”<ref>http://www.sydneyline.com/Manne%20reply%20Australian.htm</ref><ref>http://www.sydneyline.com/Fabrication%20one%20year%20on.htm</ref> ::The [[University of New England (Australia)|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 [[Nomadism|nomadic]], the 'Tasmanians confined themselves within the boundaries of specific territories.' It was, he argues the pressing presence of colonisers that forced them to trespass and make war upon each other’ <ref>Russell McDougall, ‘Henry Ling Roth in Tasmania,' in Peter Hulme, Russell McDougall (eds.) ''Writing, travel, and empire: in the margins of anthropology,'' I.B. Tauris, 2007 pp.43-68 p.61.</ref> ==Critical reception== The appearance of the first volume provoked a lively polemical correspondence in the pages of [[The Australian]], with its 'agenda-setting capacity'.<ref>R. Manne (ed.)''Whitewash. On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History'', Introduction p.10.</ref> It was positively reviewed by [[Geoffrey Blainey]], who, while disagreeing with Windschuttle's portrayal of the original Tasmanians as backward 'mentally and culturally', called it ‘one of the most important and devastating (books) written on Australian history in recent decades’, also writing: '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.'<ref>[http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/nativefiction-1774 G. Blainey, 'Native Fiction, '] in [[New Criterion]], April 2003: 'his book will ultimately be recognized as one of the most important and devastating written on Australian history in recent decades.'</ref> [[Claudio Veliz]] greeted it as ‘one of the most important books of our time.’<ref>Manne ‘Windschuttle’s Whitewash, ’ in Peter Craven (ed.) ''The best Australian essays (2003), '' Black, Inc. 2003 pp.65-77 p.66.</ref> [[Peter Coleman]], while speaking of its painstaking and devastating scholarship, regretted the absence from Windschuttle's work of any 'sense of tragedy.'.<ref>Robert Manne, in R. Manne (ed.)''Whitewash. On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History'', Introduction pp.9-10</ref> Within a year Windschuttle's claims and research produced an immediate 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’,<ref>Manne, 'Windschuttle's Whitewash, ' in Craven p.66</ref> 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 [[Substance dependence|junkie]]s raiding [[Filling station|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 [[Bruni d'Entrecasteaux|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'.<ref>Robert Manne ‘Windschuttle’s Whitewash, ’in Peter Craven (ed.)The best Australian essays, 2003, '' Black, Inc. 2003 pp.65-77.</ref> This in turn provoked [[Melbourne]] businessman, freelance writer and [[Objectivist movement|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 Blainey, Vejez and 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 [[George William Rusden|G.W. Rusden]]'s three-volume History of Australia in the 1880s.'<ref>[http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/08/22/1061529333638.html Henry Reynolds, 'Killing off the case for terra nullius.'] The Age, 23 August 2003.</ref> *The historian of [[genocide]], [[Ben Kiernan]], who classifies the fate of aborigines as an example of the practice, situates Windschuttle's polemical history within a new campaign, led by [[Quadrant (magazine)|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.<ref>[[Ben Kiernan]], 'Cover-up and Denial of Genocide: Australia, the USA, East Timor, and the Aborigines, ' in ''Critical Asian Studies'', Routledge, 34:2 (2002), pp.163-192, p.182.</ref> *Stephen Garton, Professor of History, [[Provost (education)|Provost]] & [[Deputy Vice-Chancellor]] at [[University of Sydney|Sydney University]], 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’.<ref>Stephen Garton, ‘On the Defensive: Poststructuralism and Australian Cultural History’ in Hsu-Ming Teo, Richard White (eds.) ''Cultural history in Australia, '' UNSW Press, 2003 pp.52-67, p.61, p.62</ref> *Bain Atwood of the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies at [[Monash University]] dismisses him as a 'tabloid historian'<ref>Bain Attwood, 'Old news from a Tabloid Historian', [[The Australian]], 6 January 2003, p.13.</ref> *[[University of Aberdeen]]’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 [[White Australia Policy|virtuous Anglo-Saxon origins]].’ Windschuttle's book plays to 'the white wing [[populism]] 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.’<ref>[http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Reassuring+%22White+Australia%22%3A+a+Review+of+The+Fabrication+of...-a0111897843 Gregory D.B. Smithers ‘Reassuring "White Australia": A Review of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One], in [[Journal of Social History]], Vol. 37, No. 2 (Winter, 2003), pp.493-505, pp.495-6, 500, 503 n.33</ref> *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.'<ref>Stuart Macintyre 'Reviewing the History Wars', pp. 214, 215.</ref> *For [[University of Sydney]] 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 [[Survival of the fittest|Darwinist]] 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.<ref>[http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/lab/85/grieves.html Vicki Grieves, 'Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History: A View from the Other Side, ’] pp.194-195. The WW1 analogy is taken from Mark Finnane.</ref> *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 forensically Windschuttle's use of sources, he finds his selection of material narrow, and his reading of their contents selective.’<ref>James Boyce, 'Fantasy Island, ' in R. Manne (ed.) ''Whitewash: on Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History, '' pp.17-78, esp.p.74, n.107:, p.77.n.179.</ref> *Shayne Breen, lecturer in Aboriginal history at the [[University of Tasmania]], 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.'<ref>[http://evatt.labor.net.au/publications/papers/101.html Shayne Breen, 'Criminals and pimps:Keith Windschuttle and Tasmanian Aborigines,'] [[Evatt Foundation]], 27 August 2003.</ref> ==Future volumes== At the time of the publication of Volume One it was announced that a second volume, to be published in 2003, would cover claims of frontier violence in New South Wales and Queensland, and a third, in 2004, would cover Western Australia.<ref>{{Cite news|url=http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/11/24/1037697982065.html |title=Our history, not rewritten but put right - smh.com.au |accessdate=2008-03-06 |work=The Sydney Morning Herald | date=25 November 2002}}</ref> On 20 January 2006, Windschuttle was reported as saying that the second volume would be published "within twelve months".<ref name="titleThe Australian: If Australias history brings shame, then let it be uttered [ 20jan06 ]">{{Cite web|url=http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/resources/history/aust20jan06.html |title=The Australian: If Australia's history brings shame, then let it be uttered [ 20jan06 ] |accessdate=2008-02-27 |work=}}</ref> On 9 February 2008, however, it was announced that the second volume, to be published later in 2008, would be entitled ''The Fabrication of Australian History, Volume 2: The "Stolen Generations"'' and would address the issue of the removal of Aboriginal children (the "[[stolen generation]]") from their families in the 20th century.<ref>[http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0, 25197, 23183633-5013404, 00.html Imre Salusinszky, Aboriginal 'genocide' claim denied, ''The Australian'', 9 February, 2008]</ref> The new volume was released in January 2010, now listed as ''Volume 3'', with a statement that Volumes 2 and 4 would appear later.<ref name="grossly-inaccurate">{{Cite web|url=http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/national/rabbit-proof-fence-grossly-inaccurate-keith-windschuttle/story-e6frf7l6-1225809985321 |title=Rabbit-Proof Fence grossly inaccurate: Keith Windschuttle |format= |work= |publisher=[[Herald Sun]] |accessdate=2010-01-10}}</ref> Announcing the publication, Windschuttle claimed that the film [[Rabbit-Proof Fence (film)|Rabbit-Proof Fence]] had misrepresented the child removal at the centre of the story. These claims were subsequently rejected by the makers of the film.<ref name="film-makers-dispatch-historian">{{Cite web|url=http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/arts/film-makers-dispatch-historian-to-the-fence-over-distorted-history/story-e6frg8pf-1225810385666 |title=Filmmakers dispatch historian to the fence over distorted history |format= |work= |publisher=[[The Australian]] |accessdate=2010-01-10}}</ref> ==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.” ==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 [[Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation|CSIRO]] had planned to produce food crops engineered with human genes. However, "Gould" revealed that s/he 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.<ref>http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2009/01/margaret-simons-and-an-apparent-hoax-on-quadrant</ref><ref>http://www.crikey.com.au/Politics/20090106-How-Quadrant-swallowed-a-giant-hoax-.html</ref><ref>{{Cite news| url=http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24879566-5013871,00.html}}</ref> 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.<ref>[http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/01/08/outing-sharon-gould-the-hoaxers-identity-revealed/ Margaret Simons, (8 January 2009), Outing ‘Sharon Gould’: the hoaxer’s identity revealed, ''Crikey'']</ref> 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." <ref>{{Cite news| url=http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/plausible-inventions-lie-alongside-the-facts/2009/01/06/1231004021057.html | work=The Sydney Morning Herald | title=Plausible inventions lie alongside the facts | date=7 January 2009}}</ref> 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." <ref>[http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2009/01/this-hoax-a-dud-cheque Keith Windschuttle, (7 January 2009), QED: This hoax a dud cheque, Quadrant Online]</ref> ==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) [http://www.questia.com/read/101567740?title=The%20Killing%20of%20History%3a%20How%20Literary%20Critics%20and%20Social%20Theorists%20are%20Murdering%20Our%20Past 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) ==Notes== {{Reflist|group=notes}} ==References== {{Reflist}} ==Bibliography== * ''[http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb6459/is_3_47/ai_n28990395/ 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 [http://www.sydneyline.com/Manne%20debate%20Quadrant.htm] * ''The return of postmodernism in Aboriginal history'', Keith Windschuttle, '''Quadrant''', April 2006 [http://www.sydneyline.com/Return%20of%20Postmodernism.htm] ==External links== * [http://www.questia.com/library/history/historians/keith-windschuttle.jsp Bibliography of online sources at Questia] *[http://www.sydneyline.com/ 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 **[http://www.sydneyline.com/Real%20Stuff%20of%20History.htm The Real Stuff of History] *[http://www.abc.net.au/corp/board/windschuttle.htm ABC Board bio] {{ABCBoard}} {{Use dmy dates|date=September 2010}} {{Persondata <!-- Metadata: see [[Wikipedia:Persondata]]. --> | NAME =Windschuttle, Keith | ALTERNATIVE NAMES = | SHORT DESCRIPTION = | DATE OF BIRTH = | PLACE OF BIRTH = | DATE OF DEATH = | PLACE OF DEATH = }} {{DEFAULTSORT:Windschuttle, Keith}} [[Category:1942 births]] [[Category:Living people]] [[Category:Australian academics]] [[Category:People from Sydney]] [[Category:Old Cantabrians]] [[Category:University of Sydney alumni]] [[Category:History of Indigenous Australians]] [[Category:Australian historians]] [[Category:Australian publishers (people)]] [[de:Keith Windschuttle]]'