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Landscapes in blood

14 December 2002 - The Aborigines of the Kimberley have turned to pictures to sway the debate about white massacres of their people. Debra Jopson reports.

Artist Paddy 'Kuwumji' Bedford features in 'Blood on the spinifex', 14 December to 16 March 2003, @ ground level galleries, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne.

'He ran and ran. The white men were chasing him on horseback and he hid in the water. A white man shot at him from up on the horse. The old man thought quickly and cut himself so that his blood came out in the water. The white man looked at it and said: 'All right. I hit him."'

That is how Kimberley artist Phyllis Thomas described her uncle's story of outwitting a pursuer by pretending a bullet had struck him. Thomas cannot read or write, so to record this story permanently she created her dramatic painting The Escape.

It is one of 12 such paintings by 10 artists about frontier murder which form a new exhibition to be opened by the former governor-general, Sir William Deane, at Melbourne's Ian Potter Museum of Art today.

Called Blood on the Spinifex, the exhibition depicts three massacres at Mistake Creek, Bedford Downs and Chinaman's Garden and survival stories - like those of Thomas's uncle - over the half century after whites arrived in the north-eastern Kimberley region of Western Australia in the 1880s.

According to the exhibition's curator, Tony Oliver, these artworks are a direct rebuttal of the attempt by Keith Windschuttle, author of a new book, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, to downplay the ferocity and frequency of frontier killings of the 18th and 19th centuries. "The whole thing is about an oral history versus a written history and that's what this show is partly discussing," says Oliver. "When you can't read and write, your main history is through oral history, the passing down of stories."

Oliver is an adviser to a group of feisty painters of the Gija people who had created the Jirrawun Aboriginal Art Corporation. He has heard the oral history of the north-eastern Kimberley killing fields by night around their campfires.

Oliver believes it took great courage to divulge the stories to him and then to other whites. Many had not been told before for fear that it would lead to a bullet through the head of the teller.

"Who can the oral historian trust to tell of murder against his people other than his own people? Retribution from the white man amongst indigenous Australians is not an abstraction - it is part of our shared history," Oliver writes in the exhibition catalogue.

The weight to be given to oral history is at the heart of the debate which flared recently between Windschuttle and Deane over whether white people killed Aborigines at Mistake Creek in the Kimberley in 1915.

Windschuttle said Deane had got it wrong when he apologised to Kimberley Aborigines over the massacre. Police records showed it was "a killing of Aborigines by Aborigines". Deane wrote in reply that "one simply cannot ignore the indigenous oral history" and that police throughout Australia were reluctant to file adverse reports against white settlers.

When news of the academic debate filtered to the Kimberley, the old people who had been handed down stories from three eyewitnesses about their forebears being killed at Mistake Creek by whites were frustrated over their inability to reply. They could not read or write.

But over the past few years, they have been finding new ways to tell their stories to city audiences. The exhibition is part of their answer.

"How is somebody who has an oral history meant to be involved in this debate? It's basically a European-dominated paradigm that these people haven't been able to enter," says Oliver.

"So they entered this debate through their own culture, through painting."

Linguist Frances Kofod has written down in English the stories she took from them in Gija and Kimberley Kriol.

They are painful. The late Timmy Timms painted a boab tree near Mistake Creek, where he said his mother's family had been murdered. It was at this site that Deane said "sorry". For that Windschuttle took him to task.

According to the catalogue, Timms's massacre account is very similar to the story found in 1915 police records. Timms spoke of a group of Aborigines camped in a gorge near Mistake Creek homestead. The group ate a cow after their dog had attacked it. As punishment, two white men, Bob Beattie and Mick Rhattighan, shot the Aborigines in the gorge. They were helped by an Aboriginal station hand from Darwin, Joe Winn.

A fleeing Aboriginal survivor told the Turkey Creek police, who couldn't find their horses straight away and took a while to move out.

Meanwhile, the remaining Aborigines in the gorge were chained up and moved to Mistake Creek. The police arrived just as the last shot was fired in their massacre. "White people call it Mistake Creek. We call it Gurtbelayin - the place where many were killed at one time," said Timms.

In notes to his painting, Chinaman's Garden Massacre, Rusty Peters has said how his uncle, a survivor, "went down afterwards to look for them. 'Where are my people? Where are my people? Where?' The white men had killed them all, poor things."

Timmy Timms's bold black and brown painting Bedford Downs Massacre has a white dotted circle in one corner, which he once explained represented the place where a group of Aboriginal people were poisoned and burned by white men.

Timms's sister Peggy Patrick was instrumental in taking a corroboree about this massacre to the Melbourne stage recently in the production Fire Fire Burning Bright.

Timms's son Freddie, chairman of the artists' co-operative, said of Windschuttle: "He don't know nothing about killing black people. It's what white people have done."

Authors like Windschuttle will have their rebuttals cut out for them in years to come.

Gija people giving cross-cultural training to Argyle Diamond Mine workers in their region gave them "chilling accounts" of 11 massacres there, the Aboriginal academic Professor Marcia Langton said in her catalogue notes for the exhibition. "We are finding more and more massacres now they are finding the confidence to speak," says Oliver.

Freddie Timms this week issued an open invitation to Windschuttle to visit the massacre sites with the Gija people and to hear their stories.

"He wants to come; he can come and look if he reckons no blackfellas got shot.

"Let him come and have a look. We'll show him around."

Source:The Sydney Morning Herald

Blood on the spinifex
14 December to 16 March 2003, ground level galleries, Ian Potter Museum of Art
Artists Paddy Bedford, Goody Barrett, Rameeka Nodea, Lena Nyadbi, Rusty Peters, Peggy Patrick, Desma Sampi, Freddy Timms, Timmy Timms, Phyllis Thomas Guest curator Tony Oliver, Arts Adviser, Jirrawun Aboriginal Art Corporation

This exhibition comes at a critical moment in the historical and social reconciliation of our nation and represents an opportunity to inspire better understanding between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. Ten Indigenous artists from the East Kimberley region in Western Australia convey through paintings what has been a 'secret' history of the colonisation of their lands, focussing on massacres committed by early settlers in Gija country.

Commissioner rebuts revisionist historian

Klynton Wanganeen
ATSIC SA Zone Commissioner

4 December 2002 - I am glad you published historian Keith Windschuttle's piece "Mass murder in the colonies a myth" on your Opinion page because that's all it is - his opinion.

For some time Mr Windschuttle has been putting forward his case that the occupation of Australia by the British and the removal of traditional lands, hunting and ceremonial grounds from the e Aboriginal people already living there was a benign, peaceful process. It was not.

He further claims the number of people killed by "rapacious colonists" was very low, not the many thousands other historians have recorded. Mr Windschuttle says his opinion is backed by written evidence from the times, such as official records, police reports and newspaper articles.

I ask: if you led, or participated in, a shooting party, or punitive raid, poisoned a waterhole or herded men, women and children on horseback and drove them off a clifftop - would you file an official report, tell police or write a letter to a paper?

Herein lies the problem with Mr Windschuttle, revisionist historian. If it is not on a file, noted in a report or printed in a newspaper then it didn't happen, according to Mr Windschuttle.

The weakness of this type of this type of approach was highlighted in a recent article by former Governor General Sir William Deane who said: "If one were to restrict acceptance of oral Indigenous history in relation to the killing of Aborigines to those cases where there was confirmatory police evidence or action, the resulting sanitised version of the events of the dispossession would be contrary to plain fact and even commonsense."

As any clear thinking Australian can tell Mr Windschuttle, Aboriginal people did not commit their stories or history to paper, files or books.

At the time the First Fleet landed our peoples had in place a complex system of law, languages, cultural and spiritual beliefs and land and natural resource management methods.

Trade routes extended for thousands of miles across our vast island continent and along those same trade routes passed our stories. Our history.

We have an oral history spanning thousands of years. Dreamtime stories, cultural knowledge, place names and geography are passed down by word and thought. That this knowledge and the stories have survived for thousands of years shows how reliable this system has been for us as the First Australians in recording our own history.

Our stories also talk about massacres, death, cruelty, racism and resistance. But Mr Windschuttle will have none of this. He is entitled to his opinion.... but remember, history is always written by the victors - not the vanquished.

Source: Adelaide Advertiser

Decrying the memories of Mistake Creek is yet further injustice

Sir William Deane

27 November 2002 - Dismissing indigenous oral history on the basis of 'no police record' ignores cultural context, writes William Deane.

Paul Sheehan ("Our history not rewritten but put right", Herald, November 25) uncritically accepts and repeats historian Keith Windschuttle's dogmatic denial of any non-indigenous responsibility in relation to the killing of Aborigines, including women and children, at Mistake Creek in the East Kimberley. In so doing, he conveys a false picture upon which he bases some criticism of me. I am led to respond only by reason of the hurt that Sheehan's article, if left unanswered, may cause to the Kija people of the region.

As regards details of the killings, there is conflict between the Kija oral history and local police records about the nature and extent of the involvement of a non-indigenous former police constable named Rhatigan. Otherwise, there is a remarkable degree of common ground between the oral history and the police records. There was a killing by shooting of at least seven Kija people. Undoubtedly, two Aboriginal employees of Rhatigan were involved, riding Rhatigan's horses and presumably using his firearms. There was pre-existing enmity between some of the Kija people and one of the Aboriginal employees, Wynn, who was from elsewhere in Australia. Wynn was apparently killed by an Aboriginal police tracker in the aftermath of the massacre. The other employee, "Nipper", subsequently surrendered to the police.

According to Kija oral history, recounted in some published non-indigenous works and repeated with complete conviction by present-day Kija people, Rhatigan had led the attack because he mistakenly believed, presumably at the urging of Wynn, that the Aboriginal victims had taken and killed (and were eating) his milking cow. In fact, the cow had merely wandered and was found after the massacre.

According to police records, to which historian Cathie Clement drew attention in 1989, there was no basis for a conclusion of direct
involvement of Rhatigan, notwithstanding his employees, his horses, his firearms and, apparently, his presence in the vicinity. On that version, Wynn and Nipper had carried out the killings on their own and on their own initiative.

At one stage I accepted that the killings occurred "in the 1930s". I now believe that Clement's work leads to the conclusion that they took place in 1915. In these circumstances, as Clement has stressed, one cannot simply ignore the indigenous oral history to the extent that it is not supported by police records.

It is clear that there was throughout Australia, including the Kimberley at these times, often reluctance on the part of police to file adverse reports or to bring proceedings against white settlers in respect of extreme physical retribution against Aborigines for the killing of livestock on traditional lands. It needs little imagination to conceive that reluctance could well be heightened in a case where a former police constable was involved.

At the same time, there would be few lawyers, at least of my generation, with relevant experience who are unaware of how misleading and unreliable untested police reports of alleged verbal statements by illiterate, particularly illiterate Aboriginal, accused or witnesses can be. If one were to restrict acceptance of oral indigenous history in relation to the killing of Aborigines to those cases where there was confirmatory police evidence or action, the resulting sanitised version of the events of the dispossession would be contrary to plain fact and even commonsense.

In the case of Mistake Creek, the oral history is remarkably strong. As published and as recounted by Kija people, it lacks any dreamtime element of the kind that can occasionally lead to confusion between fact and allegory. The foundation of that oral history presumably lies in the eyewitness accounts of three Kija people who survived the massacre.

For another, the police initially arrested Rhatigan on suspicion of wilful murder. They did not proceed with the charge. Nipper, the Aborigine who had surrendered to the police, was charged with murder. The charge against him was also eventually dropped when the police failed to produce any acceptable evidence. He was subsequently taken to Perth where he was employed in the police stables.

No one was brought to justice for the killings and the police version of events, in so far as it differs from the strong Kija oral history, was never tested in a criminal trial.

It is also relevant to note, as regards the police evidence, that Clement, upon whose research Windschuttle expressly relied (The Australian Financial Review, June 18 , 2001), has dissociated herself from Windschuttle's use of her work in his efforts to discredit the Kija oral history.

The Sisters of St Joseph, who have selflessly served the indigenous peoples of the East Kimberley for many years, have erected a small monument at the foot of the old boab tree at Mistake Creek to mark the place where the killings occurred. There, on All Souls Day each year, representatives of the Kija gather in prayer and fellowship with non-indigenous fellow Australians, to mourn those who were killed. "Theirs is", as I have pointed out, "the path of true reconciliation".

Sir William Deane was governor-general from 1996-2001

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald

Old news from a tabloid historian

Bain Attwood

6 January 2003 - In recent years nothing has unsettled Australia's history and identity more than the suggestion that the white colonisation of this continent is an example of genocide. It has particularly enraged Keith Windschuttle.

Windschuttle and some other writers in recent weeks have misled the Australian public by contending that leading academic historians in Australia, notably Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan, have, under the undue influence of political considerations, represented Van Diemen's Land as an example of genocide. What truth is there in this claim, and what is the evidence for it?

First to Reynolds. In his 2001 book An Indelible Stain?: The Question of Genocide in Australia's History, Reynolds explicitly rejects Tasmania as a case of genocide. Windschuttle asserts that Reynolds once argued the opposite, but has provided no evidence to support this claim.

In fact, on this issue Reynolds and Windschuttle seem to be at one. Both argue there has been a long tradition of misrepresenting Van Diemen's Land as a site of extermination. In An Indelible Stain? Reynolds critically surveys the work of many writers, including Lloyd Robson, who authored a major history of Tasmania, and Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term "genocide", before observing: "Tasmania is usually counted as the site of one of the world's authentic cases of genocide despite the fact that few of the scholars display any first-hand knowledge of Tasmanian history. Indeed, ignorance appears to encourage sweeping and definite pronouncements."

Two pages later, Reynolds again remarks "how little is known about Tasmania by this community of [international] scholars, the members of which almost automatically include Tasmania in their list of genocidal tragedies". Windschuttle has misrepresented Reynolds on the issue of genocide in Tasmania and added nothing original on the subject.

Next to Ryan. Windschuttle cites only two passages from Ryan's 1981 book The Aboriginal Tasmanians to support his allegation that she is "the principal historian of the ruling [genocide] interpretation". Ryan, he claims, "compared the fate of the Tasmanian Aborigines under the British to that of the Jews under Hitler, noting Clive Turnbull's 1948 book Black War provided 'a reminder that exterminating policies were not exclusive to Nazi Germany' ".

But Windschuttle misses the point. In prefatory remarks Ryan refers to Turnbull's analogy in order to describe and criticise what she calls "the myth of extermination" propagated by writers such as Turnbull, before advancing her principal thesis ­ the survival, not the genocide, of Tasmania's indigenous peoples.

Windschuttle finds further evidence to condemn Ryan towards the end of her book. "According to . . . Ryan," he writes, "these tribal people were 'victims of a conscious policy of genocide' " [emphasis added].

Again, Windschuttle has taken Ryan's words out of their context. Ryan wrote, in a chapter titled The Twentieth Century: "It is still much easier for white Tasmanians to regard Tasmanian Aborigines as a dead people rather than confront the problems of an existing community of Aborigines who are victims of a conscious policy of genocide."

Contrary to Windschuttle's account, this passage does not refer to "tribal people" in the colonial era but to the policy of assimilation, adopted in Tasmania after World War II, which denied Aborigines their Aboriginality. Consequently, Ryan called this "cultural genocide", which is rather different to Windschuttle's "genocide".

Windschuttle similarly alleges that I am one of "the supporters of the genocide thesis". Like many of the inflammatory claims Windschuttle makes about contemporary academic historical practice, he provides no evidence for this. I have never argued that any of the Australian colonies pursued a policy of genocide on the frontier.

What I and my co-editor Stephen Foster say in the introduction to Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience is this: "Recently . . . some historians have revisited the frontier to ask whether the concept of genocide might be applied to the colonisation of Australia . . . In the end, most non-Aboriginal historians will probably conclude, as . . . [a leading historian Bob] Reece did many years ago, that the most likely examples of genocide on the frontiers of settlement were highly local ones where stockmen and/or police forces were determined to destroy Aborigines. Many Aboriginal historians will probably reach a different conclusion."

Finally, let us consider the work of Dirk Moses, who has considered genocide in a comparative colonial context. In 2000, Moses criticised "historians on the Left" for a tendency "to comb the Australian past in search of evidence of genocide, and a proclivity to interpret any such evidence in the worst light". He considered Tasmania but concluded it was not an example of genocide, contending instead that it was "an extreme example of the segregationist solution", an argument Windschuttle has now echoed.

When Windschuttle writes, then, that the Van Diemen's Land frontier "was host to nothing that resembled genocide" and that "most of the story is myth piled upon myth", he is more or less repeating what Reynolds, Ryan and Moses have already asserted.

This is no expose, as he and his supporters claim. It's just old news from a tabloid historian. Only those ignorant of the academic historiography ­ or unwilling to go and read it ­ could believe otherwise.

Likewise, among academic historians there is no "orthodox interpretation that a policy of genocide existed in colonial Tasmania", as one journalist has claimed. This is a fallacy peddled by Windschuttle, who confuses specialist academic scholarship in the sub-discipline of Aboriginal history with the writings of non-specialist historians, journalists and other writers.

Driven by his political agenda, Windschuttle fabricates a form of political correctness among Australian academic historians that simply does not exist. In war, it is often said, the first casualty is truth. So, too, it seems, in history wars.

Bain Attwood is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University. He is the coeditor of Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience, which will be published by the National Museum of Australia this month.

Source: The Australian

Pale grey view of a genocide

16 December 2002 - A new book tries to rewrite Tasmania's Aboriginal tragedy, writes Robert Manne.

Last Monday Keith Windschuttle launched his revisionist account of the extinction of the "full blood" Tasmanian Aborigines, the first volume of a threatened trilogy, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History.

Windschuttle is a genuinely intriguing figure on the Australian intellectual scene. Once a radical Marxist, blind to the murderous nature of communist regimes, in recent years he has reinvented himself as a neo-Tory apologist for British imperialism, displaying now new forms of ideological blindness, of a diametrically opposite kind.

The question of frontier killings is at the centre of Windschuttle's new book. He claims to be able to arrive at a more or less precise figure of 118 shootings of Aborigines. He also claims it is "clear" that more whites than blacks were killed on the frontier.

Both these claims are absurd. Windschuttle reaches his figure essentially by adding the Aboriginal deaths revealed in the sources of an exhaustive study conducted by the pre-eminent empirical scholar in the field, Brian Plomley, into incidents where Aborigines attacked British settlers and their property, with deaths recorded in the diary of George Augustus Robinson. The trouble here is that Plomley's monograph, on which Windschuttle mainly relies, was not a study into the killing of Aborigines but of Aboriginal attacks on the British, a very different thing. Plomley was also the editor of the Robinson diary. The fact that he himself did not include the Aboriginal deaths recorded by Robinson in his latest study makes this plain.

Windschuttle is "puzzled" by Plomley's unwillingness to try to extract from his research a reliable figure for Aboriginal killings. There is no puzzle here. Plomley argued that anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the historical records would know that a very large number of Aborigines were shot by the rough bushmen - shepherds,timber-getters, sealers and so on. But he also understood that those who killed blacks were unlikely to report their deeds to authority. The Aborigines were British subjects. Except in the short time of martial law, reports of Aboriginal deaths risked triggering official inquiries. Why take the risk? No even remotely precise figure for the killings of Aborigines in Tasmania will ever be known.

Windschuttle's revisionism is by no means limited to corpse minimisation of this kind. Equally important is his attempt to discredit the common moral understanding of what he calls the "orthodox school" of historians who have researched frontier conflict, namely that in the extremely violent encounters in Tasmania it was the Aborigines who were more seriously wronged.

His argument runs like this. The "orthodox school" implicitly accepts that the Aborigines had certain rights to the possession of the lands on which for millennia they had lived. Windschuttle disagrees - the Aborigines did not make "productive" use of the country on which they hunted and gathered. They had, he argues, according to both reason and law, no legitimate claim.

Yet Windschuttle goes even further than this, actually denying that Aboriginal violence occurred because they resented the British occupation of their ancestral lands. According to him, the Aborigines had no sense of "belonging to the land" or of "trespass". Why, then, did they attack the British? According to Windschuttle, because they were criminally inclined. "Far from generating black resentment, the expansion of settlement instead gave the Aborigines more opportunity and more temptation to engage in robbery and murder, two customs they had come to relish."

The criminal behaviour of the Aborigines, he argues, posed for the British a painful "moral dilemma". The early "humanitarianism" displayed by Governor Arthur (a fact both Windschuttle and his enemy, Henry Reynolds, accept) only tempted the blacks to further outrages. There was no alternative to the ultimate policy of military toughness -martial law, attempted capture, expulsion from their lands.

Apart from its pitilessness, Windschuttle's case is riddled by self-contradiction. On the one hand he claims the "orthodox school" vastly exaggerates the level of frontier conflict, in order to glorify the military virtues of the Aborigines. On the other, he claims that the intensity of the Aboriginal threat was such that it was hardly either surprising or morally troubling that by 1830 elite opinion in Hobart was divided equally between "moderates" who argued for forcible expulsion and "hardliners" who advocated the total extermination of the blacks.

This is not Windschuttle's only self-contradiction. He argues that the obvious solution to the Aboriginal problem was speedy assimilation into British settler society. At the same time he argues that the most important cause of the destruction of Aboriginal society was their lack of immunity to European disease. The kind of assimilation Windschuttle advocates would have proven utterly deadly to the Aborigines, in the most literal sense.

Windschuttle is particularly scathing about the poor scholarly standards of the "orthodox school", examining their use of sources, their logic and their footnotes with an attention to detail worthy of Sherlock Holmes. There is no doubt that in his work of demolition he delivers some powerful blows. There is equally no doubt, however, that on many occasions his own work falls far short of the scholarly standards he demands.

Windschuttle is contemptuous of the anthropological blindness of those historians who impose contemporary values on the Aborigines. He dismisses Sharon Morgan's suggestion, for example, that the Aborigines were capable of displaying "compassion". Compassion is, he argues, a Christian virtue unknown to Aborigines (and presumably to Buddhists and Jews!). On the other hand, he has no problem with describing the sexual relations between Aboriginal women and British men as "prostitution", an idea that would have made no sense in Aboriginal society where, in certain circumstances, male-initiated extra-marital sex was culturally sanctioned and where a cash economy did not exist.

Windschuttle is also extremely contemptuous of scholars who ignore the evidence that challenges their conclusions. Yet he is guilty of failures of precisely such a kind. He mocks those scholars who claim British settlement caused problems of starvation for Aborigines. Yet he ignores altogether claims made in a book on which he relies, Robert Edgerton's Sick Societies, where it is argued that in Tasmania "the [Aboriginal] population nearly starved every winter".

The most unpleasant passage in Windschuttle is the one where he describes Aboriginal society as dysfunctional and misogynistic and where he accuses Aborigines of being "active agents in their own demise". For his argument, Windschuttle relies upon Edgerton. When I read the relevant section I discovered several occasions where Windschuttle, without attribution, seems simply to have copied out Edgerton's words almost verbatim or provided slightly altered paraphrases. Here he has comprehensively fallen short of the standards he requires others to meet. An old remark about the goose and the gander comes to mind.

Robert Manne is professor of politics at La Trobe University.

Source:The Age

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