home | news l

Debate rages over "peaceful" white settlement

ABC LATELINE

16 April 2001- Tony Jones speaks with Henry Reynolds and Keith Windschuttle. Henry Reynolds is one of Australia's most influential historians, who's responsible for some of the most comprehensive and original research, documenting the violence on Australia's frontier. He's written nine books and is presently a research professor at the University of Tasmania. Historian Keith Windschuttle's recent series in the conservative magazine 'Quadrant' attacked the work of Henry Reynolds and others. He's also the author of 'The Killing of History', how literary critics and social theories are murdering our past and he's the publisher of Macleay Press.

Henry Reynolds

TONY JONES: Henry Reynolds, how would you describe the battle of Pinjarra?

Was it a massacre or a legitimate use of force in an undeclared frontier war?

HENRY REYNOLDS: The word massacre doesn't bother me whether it's used or not.

It seems to me to have been a fairly typical action in what is essentially an insurgency where the forces went out and despairing of arresting individuals, decided they had to punish the group.

And that they reasoned that the sooner this was done and the Aborigines accepted European dominance, the better.

That nothing was worse than an ongoing small-scale, continuing guerrilla warfare.

It flew in the face of what the situation was supposed to be -- that the Aborigines were supposed to be British subjects who should have come under the law and who should have been arrested and arraigned and put on trial and then convicted and punished.

TONY JONES: Keith Windschuttle, you recently described this incident as both lawful and morally justifiable.

Clearly, Henry Reynolds doesn't agree with that.

KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE: Yes I think almost everything he said about it, just then, is wrong.

It wasn't a general police action to teach the Aborigines who was in control.

It was the specific action to arrest an Aboriginal named Noona who was responsible for the death of a private of the 41st Regiment who had been killed in an individual conflict.

It wasn't a guerilla warfare or any action like that.

The Aboriginal Noona had been identified by one of the other people in the fight who had got away and the battle of Pinjarra started by the attempt to arrest this person.

He resisted -- one of his friends killed a superintendent of police who was trying to arrest him, they also wounded another trooper who was on the spot, and there was a general melee in which both sides exchanged fire.

The troops had muskets, the Aborigines had spears.

It was a genuine battle.

The suggestion that it's a massacre suggests there were people who were innocent.

In fact, warriors who are resisting arrest with violent means that actually kill police, are not innocent by any means at all.

HENRY REYNOLDS: That's all very wrong.

They didn't kill anyone.

There were two minor injuries and one of the chaps fell off his horse and received concussion and died several days later.

But to say he was killed on the spot is grossly distorting what occurred.

I don't think in any way you would expect armed people, soldiers and police and settlers to ride into an Aboriginal camp, that this sort of action would be taken if the presumed murderer was a white person.

KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE: In this case it's very clear that the police and the troops involved had to do their duty.

They had to arrest this person.

You can't allow somebody to go around killing your own men and then say they're Aborigines we don't do anything about it.

HENRY REYNOLDS: if he says that it was a legitimate action to arrest a known offender, that's a reasonable thing to say, but the known offender was shot.

Why, then, were 20 or 30 or 40 other people shot?

KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE: Because all his comrades threw spears at the same time.

It wasn't 20 or 30 Aborigines who were shot at all. The only ones that were shot were those resisting and attempting to kill the officers. The guy didn't die from concussion, he bled to death from a spear to the head.

HENRY REYNOLDS: He did not, he died from concussion from falling from a horse.

KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE: Your source is not -- you don't even know what went on on the day.

You haven't read the Captain who wrote his diary on the spot.

HENRY REYNOLDS: Wait a moment, Keith. You can't assume that at all.

When you say my fellow was a bad observer, I think that's quite untrue. We're dealing with undoubtedly the most reliable diarist of early Swan River.

KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE: Who wasn't there at the time.

HENRY REYNOLDS: Let me finish, please.

The most reliable reporter of events of the Swan River, a competent man who was a friend of the Governor who was on the executive council and the senior legal officer of the colony.

He wrote his report on the day that he was given an account of it by the Governor who was leading the expedition. He wrote it not for publication.

He put it down in his own diary and I think he is a better and more reliable witness than those who took part who had something to hide.

TONY JONES: Can I just interrupt.

I'd like to take this discussion from the specific to the general.

Keith you made the claim that traditional scholarly standards are no longer applied to works of Aboriginal history and this is especially true with accounts of massacres on the frontier. Why do you say so?

KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE: Because of the uncritical attitude that historians have taken towards claims about massacres.

In the early 19th century in Australia, there war a number of people who had vested interests in talking up the violence of the Aborigines.

If you were an enemy of the governor, for instance, and there is a case in Tasmania -- jailed for criminal libel by Governor Arthur -- then you write reports to London saying, "The governor is a wicked man "and he's doing terrible things to the Aborigines "and you should recall him."

If you wanted funding for your churches you would say, "There is so much violence towards the Aborigines, "I need all this money to protect them."

If you were a military officer and your regiment had been accused, and many of them were, of laziness and incompetence, you said, "No we've been out fighting the blacks."

Similarly you had pastoralists who wrote memoirs for the grandchildren, "We had to fight flood, bush fires and the blacks."

All these people have particular reasons for exaggerating this story.

What the historians have done is taken everything they say at face value and have reproduced it. If somebody says eight Aborigines killed here, the historians say, "just add 8 more to the toll."

HENRY REYNOLDS: The trouble is with Keith that anyone at all who suggests there was killing on the frontier, he finds some reason he dredges up something to try and discredit them.

He is acting as a defence counsel for the settlers and the Government.

Now that's alright. I don't mind him doing that. But it is a very selective way that anyone who stands up and says, "They're killing blacks out there," he finds some reason to say, "No, they can't be believed."

Whereas those who say there weren't any massacres he says, "These are the people we should believe."

KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE: That's completely false. There was a Mile Creek massacre where 28 innocent Aborigines were killed.

You have to remember that the rule of law on which British society was founded did operate there and seven of those responsible were executed for the crime.

TONY JONES: Let's stick if we can to the method.

What do you say is required of historians where there's no forensic evidence, for example?

KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE: You need journalistic evidence, eyewitness accounts of someone who was there and saw the bodies and even second-hand accounts where there is an internal credibility will do.

But the method that Reynolds uses in Queensland is extraordinary and even though I taught this sort of history for 10 years I never investigated the material on which these estimates were based.

I thought that Reynolds had done some research. When I went into the research papers that underlie his claims in his book 'The Other Side of the Frontier' , I found that it's all based on mathematical formulas.

You take an estimate of the number of whites who were killed by Aborigines, you multiply it by ten -- and there's no explanation why you pick ten -- and then you add another 20 per cent to get 10,000 deaths in Queensland.

Yet Reynolds doesn't have any idea about -- doesn't have any credible account of eyewitnesses that there were bodies of 10,000 Aborigines in Queensland at all. It is simply the application of a mathematical formula, and that's not how you do history.

TONY JONES: Is it an accepted historical practice to use these ratios as a method of determining or suggesting how many people were killed in these frontier battles?

HENRY REYNOLDS: Let's go back a little bit.

Keith is telling me and telling your viewers the way I do history. Keith doesn't know how I do history. He never bothered to ask me. He has read an article I wrote about 25 years ago, or 20 years ago and makes assumptions about how it was put together.

And most of those assumptions are wrong Having spent a lot of time researching Queensland history, let me say that the evidence for extensive violence is massive and everywhere you go.

Every single frontier newspaper is full of discussion about conflict.

Now the debate in the 19th century wasn't whether Aborigines were being killed in large numbers on the frontier, it was whether it was justified or not. No-one that I have found in the literature doubted that this was going on.

What is more, there was a force, a quite discrete police force, a paramilitary force dedicated to that purpose, that rode the frontier for many, many years shooting people, and no-one had any doubt that that's what they were doing.

KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE: The native police that he's referring to now is something which in his own books he says, "The records of the native police were set up in 1857 but all the records from 1859 are lost", according to Henry himself.

So we don't really know what they did.

However in Victoria the records remain intact. We have very good evidence of what they did.

The author of a book based on those events, Murray Fels, says the native police in Victoria were a force for peace but they prevented depredations by Aborigines against whites and by white settlers against the Aborigines.

So in Victoria where we have good evidence, the Aborigines were a force for peace.

In Queensland, where the evidence is lost, you want us to believe they're a marauding band of killers. It's so implausible as to be a joke.

TONY JONES: Henry Reynolds, how do you as an historian guard against exaggerated claims, tainted evidence, second-hand reports when you put together an account of a massacre?

HENRY REYNOLDS: By having a lot of experience of researching the material and having some sense of what is likely.

Let me go back to what Keith said. This is an indication of how distorted the picture he's presenting.

Firstly, I know that that's what the native police did because the responsible ministers over many years said so in Parliament. They said the native police shoot Aborigines when ever they are seen. No-one said that was wrong. No-one contradicted that. They said so in Parliament, publicly and often.

If that isn't evidence, I don't know what is.

Let me finish.

KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE: Often is once as far as your own documentation is concerned.

They said it once in Parliament.

HENRY REYNOLDS: No Keith, that's the bit you've read.

I can give you many others. That is the responsible ministers who in public and in private who said the native police are there to shoot Aborigines whenever they are seen.

What do you they they were doing with their guns and vast supplies of ammunition, shooting bottles off fences?

KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE: If you don't have the records, you can't say.

You admit you don't have the records.

HENRY REYNOLDS: If we have a police force that is dedicated to dispersing the Aborigines, we know that in their instructions, dispersing meant to shoot at and if we know they were doing this for 30 or 40 years and it was one of the largest items on the Queensland budget, what do you think they were for?

Because the records were destroyed, quite understandably, you say nothing happened.

KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE: Not at all. You don't have the evidence to say what they did do. One comment in Parliament is not enough to explain 30 or 40 years of what went on.

HENRY REYNOLDS: It was not one comment. I explained to you.

KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE: You only ever cited one.

TONY JONES: Henry Reynolds you've said Keith Windschuttle is like a Holocaust denier but his questioning of the established orthodoxy does indicate some courage. How important is it that this process of questioning historical truths continue that this debate continue in your opinion?

HENRY REYNOLDS: I have absolutely no problem with this debate.

Some people say, shock horror how dare he. I don't say that at all. This is in my case this is work I did 20 years ago. It's something that I have long left behind.

But it is important that it is dealt with, and of course one of the problems is that history, as Keith himself has argued, to some extent gave up empirical sort of research. So no-one bothered to go on with this sort of work.

But I think we should treat the conflict on the Australian frontier as seriously as we treat the wars overseas.

That is, we set up proper research programs to go and do it in detail as we've done with the War Memorial dealing with our overseas wars.

TONY JONES: Is your case a campaign to force historical precision or is it an attempt to prove that modern historians are somehow tainted by ideology?

KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE: I got started in this business when I read the biography of a nation where he said that what the Australian settlers did in the 19th century had been done by no other civilised society until the Nazis attacked the Jews in the middle of the 20th century. Other things I knew about Australian history -- I know that was simply absurd. So I started to look at the basis on which those claims were made.

Henry doesn't compare the Australian settlers in the 19th century to the Nazis, but he leads other commentators up to the edge of that conclusion. They jump off and we've got this most anachronistic, inaccurate and this feud that really distorts the nature of history for all people.

We now have people who assume that the Australian settlers were a bunch of Nazis, therefore they go looking for evidence that proves that case.

It's both a political issue now about the character of the nation for the past 200 years but it is also an issue that is distorting the kind of research being done in our universities and generally.

TONY JONES: A final word Henry Reynolds?

HENRY REYNOLDS: I am quite convinced, after the work I've done, that my estimate of 20,000 Aborigines killed on the frontier will be borne out. I have no doubt about it.

I don't think 20,000 is the precise figure. It may have been a little less or a little more.

But there was substantial killing as you would expect as settlers came into Aboriginal country without any respect to their ownership or traditions. What else would we have expected.

TONY JONES: We'll have to leave it there.

Henry Reynolds, Keith Windschuttle, thanks very much for joining us tonight.

Source: ABC Lateline

Further information: history issues page - includes news index and external links

|| click to go to the top of this page