home | news l

Our history, not rewritten but put right

25 November 2002 - Accusations of genocide have been based on guesswork and blatant ideology, writes Paul Sheehan.

At a ceremony in the Kimberley district of Western Australia, Sir William Deane, then governor-general, apologised to the Kija people for an infamous massacre by whites at Mistake Creek in the 1930s. He told the assembly: "I'd like to say to the Kija people how profoundly sorry I personally am that such events defaced our land, this beautiful land."

While the brutal dislocation of Australia's indigenous population has rightly become an acknowledged chapter of national shame, the accusation of genocide is something altogether different.

Deane, for one, might one day reflect on his role in defaming the Australian people on the basis of shabby evidence. Mistake Creek indeed.

As the historian Keith Windschuttle points out in his landmark new book, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, (Macleay Press, 2002): "... Deane got the facts of this case completely wrong. According to the Western Australian police records, the incident took place in 1915, not the 1930s. It was not a massacre of Aborigines by whites and had nothing to do with a stolen cow. It was a killing of Aborigines by Aborigines in a dispute over a women who had left one Aboriginal man to live with another. The jilted lover and an accomplice rode into the camp of his rival and shot dead eight people. This is not the kind of incident for which the Governor-General of Australia should be apologising.

"Even though he had been using the same incident in speeches for at least two years, Deane never bothered to do the most elementary research to find out the facts."

Deane has qualified his accusations by stating, as he did in his book, Directions: A Vision For Australia (2002): "It matters not whether this particular story is accurate in all its details, for the elements undoubtedly occurred in many parts of our nation in the 211 years of European settlement."

Windschuttle responds in his book: "But, of course, it does matter greatly whether stories about crimes of this magnitude are accurate in their details, and it is most surprising to find a former judge of the High Court thinking otherwise. If the factual details are not taken seriously, then people can invent any atrocity and believe anything they like. Truth becomes a lost cause."

Fabrication is the first of three volumes, with the other two to be published next year and in 2004. "I intended to do one book but there was so much material," Windschuttle said. The three volumes will form a frontal assault on the accusation of genocide which began with a claim, now accepted as fact around the world and taught in schools, that the Tasmanian Aborigines were exterminated by a policy of genocide.

Volume 1 is sub-titled Van Diemen's Land, 1803-1847. Windschuttle found a mountain of documentary evidence in Tasmania. He also found plausible evidence for only 118 Aborigines' deaths at the hands of Europeans and 187 whites killed by Aborigines. He found the basis for the genocide argument to be speculation, guesswork, outright distortion and blatant ideology, an ideology which reached its crescendo in the Bringing Them Home report in 1997. Once this report's claim of genocide was subjected to the forensic rigours of the courts, it fell apart, a fact many still cannot accept.

This is not an exercise in denialism. As Windschuttle argues: "If Australians of Aboriginal and European descent are to look one another straight in the eye, they have to face the truth about their mutual history, not rely upon mythologies designed to create an edifice of black victimhood and white guilt."

The strength of Windschuttle's book is in the mass of details. The three volumes of Fabrication will not be the last word on genocide, far from it, but will provide what has been lacking for so long - a devil's advocate view unintimidated by the prevailing ideological orthodoxies inside the academy and the media. Windschuttle follows paper trails, checks original sources and supplies names.

No one is named more than the historian Henry Reynolds. Among one of numerous examples, Windschuttle examines Frontier (1987), a book reprinted at least five times and used as a school text, which quotes a governor of Tasmania, George Arthur, in 1831: "Writing from his camp at Sorell to justify the famous Black Line, he argued that such was the insecurity of the settlers that he feared 'a general decline in the prosperity' and the eventual extirpation of the colony."

When Windschuttle quotes the original document we find that Arthur actually wrote something very different: "It was evident that nothing but capturing and forcibly detaining these unfortunate savages ... could now arrest a long term of rapine and bloodshed, already commenced, a great decline in the prosperity of the colony, and the extirpation of the Aboriginal race itself."

So Arthur was not expressing concern that the Aborigines presented a threat to the survival of the colony, as Reynolds clearly implies, he was concerned about the survival of the Aborigines themselves. Questioned on this by the Herald's Andrew Stevenson last week, Reynolds dug a deeper hole: "Nowhere did I suggest that Arthur thought they could wipe out the colony. That would be a silly thing to say."

But that's what he does say in Frontiers. It's on page 29.

Another prominent target is Robert Hughes and his book The Fatal Shore. Given that Hughes's theory that Tasmania was conceived as the world's first Gulag has already been dismantled by Professor Alan Atkinson in The Europeans in Australia (1997), and now the paltry sources of his Tasmanian genocide theory are exposed by Windschuttle, the enormously successful Fatal Shore is fast becoming The Fatal Flaw.

Windschuttle is not a lone dissenter. Other anthropologists, notably Roger Sandall, in The Culture Cult (2001), Professor Kenneth Maddock, Professor Peter Sutton and Dr Ron Brunton, have already written about ideology's incursions into anthropology. And another new book, Sex Maiming & Murder by Rod Moran (Access Press, 2002), reveals the source of much of the massacre mythology of Western Australia was the Rev Ernest Gribble, who Moran proves was a pathological liar. In an introduction to the book, Professor Geoffrey Bolton gracefully acknowledges that Moran's work has "contradicted the view previously taken by most historians, including Henry Reynolds, Neville Green and myself ..."

No doubt Windschuttle will be singled out for ritual abuse, but at least three more exposes are in the works. Finally, the accusers are going to be the accused.

Clip from: The Sydney Morning Herald

Our history retold ... by and for the new Right

LETTERS

November 27 2002

Congratulations to Paul Sheehan for his contribution to the debate about Australia's frontier history ("Our history, not rewritten but put right", Herald, November 25).

Unfortunately his hagiography of Keith Windschuttle is seriously flawed. He argues, fallaciously, that Henry Reynolds's accounts of Aboriginal/white relations are marred by "ideology" while those of Windschuttle and his supporters are ideologically neutral - "unintimidated by the prevailing ideological orthodoxies inside the academy and the media".

There may be more truth than intended in the sub-editor's heading - "put right".

Dr Wendy Michaels, Northbridge

Will Paul Sheehan now incur the wrath of Sir William Deane, Sir Ronald Wilson and the other perpetrators of divisiveness through untruths whose aims appear to have been guided by the emotional politics of the Left wing rather than concern for careful and objective reviews of historically available data?

W.B. Kirkpatrick, Darling Point

Paul Sheehan needs to be careful. I was the community adviser at Turkey Creek - the closest Kitja community to the site of the Mistake Creek massacre - for four years in the early 1980s.

The old people told me about the shooting of a number of people at Mistake Creek by local pastoralists because they had killed a cow.

Mistake Creek was one of a number of massacre stories I was told. These old Aborigines were not ideologues with a barrow to push about Australian history, just people lamenting something awful from their past. They'd say things like "poor buggers" or "we feel sad for them old people".

I have never read any of Keith Windschuttle's books, but if he relies on police records and other official documentation then he would have to explain why he accepts that record rather than Aboriginal oral history.

Allan Tegg, Annandale

While Paul Sheehan may take comfort in Keith Windschuttle's "mass of details" there are certain facts even he can't massage. Murders were committed, children were taken, fundamental rights were denied.

Surely we have reached a level of national maturity where we can stop arguing that, in one 19th-century encounter the death of "only" 118 Aborigines is either a plus or a minus for either side of this unsavoury debate.

If we applied equal vigour to addressing the indisputably appalling inequities existing today we could finally put to rest the bleaker elements of our history and move forward with justifiable optimism.

Rob Walsh, Gordon, November

My thanks to Paul Sheehan (and Keith Windschuttle) for debunking the outrageous drivel perpetuated by the loony Left over the years regarding indigenous Australians and the arrival of Europeans.

Perhaps we can now re-examine the nonsense of "the stolen generation" and put that one to bed too.

Malcolm Martin, Greta

Our genocidal history has been "put right", says Paul Sheehan. Not by historians, political scientists or international lawyers but by three anthropologists and a specialist in urban studies.

But this is not denialism, claims Sheehan; rather, a solid soon-to-be three-volume attack by Keith Windschuttle on, among other matters, "speculation, guesswork, outright distortion, and blatant ideology" in the Bringing Them Home stolen generations report.

In far fewer words than Windschuttle, my book With Intent to Destroy repeats previous research findings: that Australia has committed at least four, if not all, of the five acts of genocide defined in Article II of the Genocide Convention.

We killed, at different points in time, with the intention of destroying a people because of who they were; we caused them serious bodily and mental harm, because they were Aborigines; we forcibly removed their children and intended absorbing them to the point of their Aboriginality disappearing; we systematically attacked their essential institutions and inflicted conditions of life which resulted in their destruction as a people, if not in whole then in part. And, at times, we engaged in unilateral sterilisations.

By all means let us engage our history. But let's do it in a civil court, under the best of forensic rules, a la the David Irving trial.

Professor Colin Tatz, Director, Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Wollstonecraft

I read with interest and much comfort Paul Sheehan's article. Here is one man honest and brave enough to tell the truth.

For some time during Sir William Deane's time as Governor-General and more so since, I have been very concerned at his and other historians' misuse or loose use of the facts.

When a judge sits on the High Court surely he would have had to be more accurate in his search and analysis.

Add to this Sir Roland Wilson's inaccurate and biased Bringing Them Home publication.

What a shame the Paul Sheehans don't get more exposure in their attempts to tell the truth.

History is not guesswork or opinions and it's time these "self-opinionated" historians were exposed.

David Moyes, Cremorne

Clip from: The Sydney Morning Herald

A voice from the frontier

Saturday, September 22, 2001- While peers accuse Keith Windschuttle of revising history, Andrew Stevenson encounters, rather, a revised historian.

If Keith Windschuttle hadn't existed, John Howard would have been sorely tempted to invent him. He's the historian the Prime Minister has been searching for all these years, someone with the scissors to snip through the black armband which Howard believes has cast a pall over Australia's past, present and future.

The two men share some common history - both left Canterbury Boys' High in the 1950s - although their personal trajectories since then have sent them on different orbits. One became an articled clerk, a solicitor and ultimately the Prime Minister who stared down demands for an apology to the stolen generations, resisted calls for a treaty and decried the black armband school of history with its focus on a bloody and violent past in which Aborigines were forcibly dispossessed of their land.

The other spent his teenage years in the turf room of The Daily Telegraph with Frank Moorhouse and Mike Gibson, graduated to a country newspaper, edited Australia's first computer magazine before embracing Marxism while at the University of Sydney. He went on to edit its newspaper, Honi Soit, rattled the barricades while protesting against Australian involvement in the Vietnam War, prospered as a left-wing academic before taking a late U-turn.

The aging radical permits himself a smile of satisfaction as he explains himself: "In the '70s I was a Marxist, in the '80s I was a social democrat and in the '90s I'm a conservative: it's called growing up."

But growing up - and growing conservative - hasn't diverted Windschuttle from his modus operandi: find elites who have grown smug and self-confident in their own ascendancy and throw bombs at them. First it was the establishment and its dirty war in Asia, then it was Malcolm Fraser and his denigration of the dole bludger. The one-time media lecturer turned on university media courses and, later, the postmodernists who had taken over university arts faculties. Now, it's the view that settlement was a brutal affair in which tens of thousands of Aborigines died in a frontier war.

Show me the facts, repeats Windschuttle - to Henry Reynolds, the leading exponent of the black armband view; to the former governor-general Sir William Deane, whom Windschuttle accused of perpetuating the myth of a massacre that wasn't at Mistake Creek in Western Australia; and to ATSIC's chairman, Geoff Clark.

Implicit in his call for facts alone to drive historical debate is the threat to anyone writing in Aboriginal history to watch their tracks. Windschuttle will follow their footnotes to the last library to skewer them if they are wrong and drip too much blood on the wattle.

Why would anyone want to do that?

Windschuttle says it's about intellectual honesty - that he eschews politics and is willing and able to pursue the historical truth - unlike the Reynolds generation which, he claims, has sought to advance a political agenda by reworking the past.

"The Aboriginal cause has become the moral measure of whether you are on the Left or not," he argues. "In a way, the ... Aborigines have been given the role the working class used to have. Marxism prescribed the working class as the vanguard of society and that all came unstuck and the Left went looking for a new group on which to pin its hopes for salvation."

"Aboriginal history at the moment comes out of the New Left of the '60s and Henry is a typical '60s New Leftist. There's no secret about that and he says in The Other Side of the Frontier [Reynolds's landmark 1981 history]: 'This book is written for political purposes'."

Windschuttle's mantra is that empirical evidence has an integrity of its own. "My political agenda is that I think history has been ruined by political agendas. You can call that a political agenda if you want to. But I'm not just out to discredit Henry; I'm trying to find the truth of the matter and, as difficult as that might be, it's worth pursuing. My self is really irrelevant in this."

It's hard to reconcile Windschuttle's zeal and certainty, however, with his professed political disinterest. But he is insistent. "All I'm doing is wielding evidence and people can take my evidence or not - it doesn't matter. I'm not some bloody guru telling people how to think. It's a mystery to me if I have [a broader political agenda]. Defending John Howard? Hardly. It doesn't matter a damn, ultimately, what my political agenda is: the debate will be won or lost on the evidence."

Windschuttle knows he's won no friends with his crusade. He denies he has been cut. "Not apparently, although some of the people I thought are my friends might disagree with that," he says. But he's heard the vitriol with which he's been denounced in public debates and believes he has scared former colleagues with his insider knowledge. "The reason a lot of them hate me is because I've thought all their thoughts and am now questioning them. That's a threatening position for a lot of people."

Windschuttle has been all the way round the academic block during his career. He has an honours degree in history from the University of Sydney, a master's in politics from Macquarie, has taught at the then NSW Institute of Technology, the universities of Wollongong and NSW, as well as Macleay College, a private institution run by his wife, Elizabeth Elliott.

A former supervisor, Don Aitken, the retiring vice-chancellor of the University of Canberra, has no doubt - despite finding Windschuttle's work uncomfortable - that the historical revision is important. Already, he says, it has shifted the debate.

"I don't ask for people's motives. That's too hard. I look at what they read, I try [to] take it on board and when it's solidly done and well researched - as Keith's work usually is - then I have to say, 'Well, what do I do with that?'

"A lot of what he said is not what I would have wanted to read, but you can't just reject it. Even those who have criticised it haven't rejected it; they've countered it."

Windschuttle's first targets are massacres. He is halfway through a book examining the frontier records in Van Diemen's Land and NSW. His view is that relations between Aborigines and whites were overwhelmingly peaceful and the violent episodes "were sporadic outbreaks which have been beat up beyond all belief". No-one, he says, has checked the sources. "When you do look at the skeleton of the story and find that it is pretty shoddy then that's good evidence the rest of it is likely to be of the same kind of basis," he says.

While massacres, real or imagined, stand as dramatic stains on the historical page, Reynolds is sceptical of their relevance to the wider picture. "People misinterpret me [and claim] I think that everyone was killed in massacres. I don't. I think massacres were few and far between. Aborigines were mainly killed in small-scale tit-for-tat killings where they'd spear a couple of cattle and someone would go out and shoot two or three people."

Reynolds says the evidence of killings is necessarily circumstantial and would never sustain a murder charge. Yet it remains overwhelming, he says. "There are always going to be people who don't want to believe this and they will clutch on to whoever comes along and says it has all been made up. If you can take a couple of incidents and say there isn't really the evidence here - and I've got no doubt that isn't hard to do - some people will feel it undermines the credibility of the whole. But I don't think in the long run it will succeed because the circumstantial evidence of conflict is so overwhelming."

Windschuttle, who launched his campaign with a series of articles in Quadrant last year, has received significant support within the historical community. Some disagree with his politics but are pleased to see Reynolds taken down a peg or two. Others support his push for greater scholarly rigour - first made in his 1994 work The Killing of History, which has, Windschuttle says, sold 25,000 copies in the US.

Beverley Kingston, a retired associate professor of history at the University of NSW, says political correctness has made teaching history very difficult. "It is one of the reasons why history has become such a pathetic subject in universities. Student numbers are declining and history courses are beginning to look like smorgasbords with no content except for repetitive fine feelings or angst," she says.

"What Henry Reynolds has done to drive politics with history really bothers a lot of historians: it's taking things right to the edge. People don't know the difference between knowing about history and historical evidence and being concerned about current political questions. They are being mixed up all the time.

"Bringing Them Home [the Human Rights Commission report on the stolen generations] is an incredibly powerful and moving document and it raises all number of moral and ethical questions. But, for historians, it raises another series of questions: how much of this stuff is true?"

But on the question of frontier history, what does disproving some of the parts say about the whole? The University of New England historian Professor Alan Atkinson, a student contemporary of Windschuttle at the University of Sydney, argues Windschuttle seems to believe the job of a historian is easier than it is.

"His contribution is useful, very useful, and a lot of what he says is perfectly justified," Atkinson says. "He says the debate is about the way history is being practised but I'm not sure he's very consistent about that. He says we do not know how many Aborigines were killed and that historians tend to assume there were rather more deaths than there's evidence of.

"He then says there were fewer Aborigines killed than Henry Reynolds and others have said. He hasn't proved that at all - just that we don't know. In spite of his qualifications, Keith seems to be assuming that because he understands little bits, he understands the lot."

The historical records of a frontier, especially when one side was illiterate, are necessarily imperfect. In the written records Aboriginal voices are generally limited to, or mediated by, their contacts with the white police and legal system. The appropriate weighting deserved by oral history is the bone of much contention in the debate.

Kingston is concerned oral history of Aboriginal communities has been privileged over written records. But, counters Atkinson, in Aboriginal communities, at least pre-contact, oral methods of recording were extraordinarily precise. "In the pre-literate communities the means of training memory was extremely painstaking. It's also survived in European communities until fairly recently. It wasn't until the 1960s and '70s that we stopped training memories in schools when we stopped learning things by rote. Our memories are not trained at all now and therefore they're unreliable."

For his part, Windschuttle doesn't expect to turn history on its head overnight, no matter how successful his book (which is expected to be published early next year). "Look, the current interpretation took 20 years to get into place and I think it will take another 20 years to shift it. If by then."

Clip from: The Sydney Morning Herald

Once again, goal posts are moved

Michael Duffy

21 December 2002 - We all pick and choose our arguments to a certain extent but there need to be limits. This week we saw outrage at David Penberthy's shocking exposure of the good conditions inside detention centres.

"The conditions are not the point!" letter writers screamed. Well, not now, maybe. But they sure were the point for as long as the detention centres could be misrepresented as "hell holes" and worse.
People on what we might loosely call the Left have always had a remarkable ability to switch arguments as soon as they sense they are losing – nowhere more frequently than in Aboriginal affairs.

The big lies – Hindmarsh Island, the stolen generation – are invented and asserted strenuously. Anyone questioning them is accused of being a racist. Eventually the lies are exposed and suddenly their supporters have vanished, or so it seems. In fact, they have simply moved on to the next big invention.

Their current enthusiasm is the claim white Australians tried to commit genocide against Tasmanian Aborigines. Last week I said the response of historians to Keith Windschuttle's new book attacking this claim would tell us a lot about the honesty of academic life.

Readers will recall that three professors had already demanded that Windschuttle's articles should not be published in newspapers.

Since then, four more academics have written about the book. Not one of them mentioned the fact that Windschuttle is highly and frequently critical of another book, Lyndall Ryan's The Aboriginal Tasmanians, which is central to the claim of genocide.

If Windschuttle's criticisms are right, they comprise the most devastating attack on an academic reputation Australia has seen in a long time. To not even tell readers of this is quite a cover-up by some of the intellectuals who have been in control of Australian history for decades.

Having simply ignored one of the main thrusts of Windschuttle's criticism, the academics then moved in for the kill. According to Geoffrey Bolton, Windschuttle is a "polemical historian" who writes with "belligerence".

Henry Reynolds believes some will find the book "infuriating and offensive" and it is an "intensely political" book, whose author knew what he was going to say before he examined the evidence. So when people like Reynolds tore down previous versions of history they were performing a valuable task but when Windschuttle does the same to them, he is politicised and rabid. Once again, the goal posts are moved.

Professor Ryan said of Windschuttle's criticisms of her: "Two truths are told. Is only one truth correct?" Her answer was no, there should be "multiple stories and interpretations" within our history. In fact, when Ryan herself told her version of the truth there was room for only one truth – hers.

But now that her book is under serious assault she is going all post-modern on us. This is typical of the Australian Left, which is harsh and unforgiving on top but the moment it starts to lose an argument, plaintively asks why we all can't be nice to one another. The intention is to make its opponents seem obsessive and punitive.

Professor Robert Manne, who in the past has compared Windschuttle with Holocaustdenier David Irving, this week tried to smear his new book on the front page of The Age with allegations of plagiarism.

Based on documents provided by Manne and without even reading the book, Andrew Alexandra, an academic specialising in ethics, told The Age Windschuttle's behaviour "looks pretty slipshod".

However, once he read the book Alexandra wrote to The Age apologising unreservedly for his comment and saying the book contains "extensive referencing to the sources for the relevant factual claims".

The biggest lie the compassion police are trying to spread is Windschuttle is heartless and believes his claims mean white Australians owe nothing to Aborigines. Windschuttle makes it perfectly clear he believes we owe them a great deal. What we owe them is to stop the policies of self-determination, land rights, perpetual welfare and the propping up of a violent, anti-female, stone-age culture – policies Windschuttle's critics have supported strenuously.

He believes that history, correctly told, shows separation never worked and what the Aborigines are owed is assimilation. This debate is important because it shows why history matters: because how we see the past affects how we act now.

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

|| click to go to the top of this page