home | news l

Rewriting history over the death of a people

26 December 2002 - Claims that Aborigines in Tasmania were wiped out by disease and prostitution, not white settlers, have ignited a fierce debate in Australia, reports Nick Squires from Sydney.

For decades historians have argued that British colonial settlers in Tasmania came close to carrying out the world's first successful genocide.

There were an estimated 5000 Aborigines living in Tasmania when the British first arrived in what was then called Van Diemen's Land in 1803. Living in small groups, they had survived for millennia in the island's tangled rainforests and rugged mountains, hunting kangaroos and gathering shellfish along the coast.

By the end of the 19th century they had been all but wiped out, in what has long been regarded as one of the darkest periods in Australia's history. The actions of the British in Tasmania have been compared with the atrocities carried out by the Belgians in the Congo, the Spanish conquistadors in South America and the Turks in Armenia.

Now a controversial new book is arguing that the genocide of Tasmanian Aborigines is a myth, perpetrated by left-wing apologists and based on distorted or manufactured historical evidence.

In his book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, published this month, historian Keith Windschuttle argues that the number of Aborigines who were deliberately killed by British soldiers, settlers and emancipated convicts has been wildly exaggerated.

His claims have sparked a furore in Australia, and anger from the 6000 Tasmanians who claim Aboriginal ancestry today.

Windschuttle, a former lecturer at the University of New South Wales, argues that although widely accepted as historical fact, there was no deliberate policy of extermination by British colonial authorities.

'The British officials who were posted to Tasmania were enlightened humanitarians,' he said. 'The idea of killing Aborigines would have mortified them.' He argues that while the end result was the virtual extinction of Aborigines on the island, 'genocide is a matter of intention. The British had no idea that the diseases they brought with them would have the result that they did.'

While accepting that full-bloodâ Tasmanian Aborigines were all but wiped out by the 1870s, Windschuttle says these deaths were largely due to the accidental introduction of diseases such as influenza and tuberculosis, and the fact that Aboriginal women prostituted themselves and gave birth to mixed race children.

He questions the view that those Aborigines who did attack settlers were valiantly trying to protect their land and culture. Instead, he argues, the main reason for Aboriginal violence was 'their desire for British consumer goods'. They were, in short, little better than thieves and bandits, who had been corrupted by white society.

He describes the frontier skirmishes as nothing more than 'a minor crime wave by two Europeanised black bushrangers, followed by an outbreak of robbery, assault and murder by tribal Aborigines'.

Windschuttle's arguments fly in the face of historical orthodoxy. Most historians maintain that during frontier clashes between Aborigines and settlers, known as the black war, hundreds of Aborigines were killed.

In 1830, the colonial government in Hobart, alarmed by Aboriginal attacks on outlying settlements, organised the Black Line, in which around 3000 armed settlers swept across Tasmania in a bid to round up the remaining Aborigines and resettle them elsewhere.

The last 135 Aborigines were moved to remote and windswept Flinders Island, in Bass Strait, between Tasmania and the Australian mainland, in 1834. Within four years most had died of disease or despair. All that remained of an ancient people were mixed-race Aborigines whose descendants still live in Tasmania today.

Windschuttle says that much of the evidence cited by previous academics has been either made up or taken out of context, and that between 1803 and 1834 only 181 Aborigines were deliberately killed by the British.

'I first became suspicious of the official line two years ago,' he said. 'When I went back to the archives, I found that the counter-evidence literally came tumbling out at me.

'The myth started in the early 1800s with a newspaper editor who was jailed by the Lieutenant-Governor, George Arthur, for criminal libel. He wanted Arthur sent home in disgrace and so beat up the story from the outset.

'In the 1960s it was picked up by the left-wing, anti-Vietnam generation. There are dozens of examples where they invented events that never happened.'

Windschuttle accuses historian Lyndall Ryan, for instance, of citing the diary of Tasmania's first chaplain as the source for a claim that between 1803 and 1808 the colonists killed 100 Aborigines. Windschuttle says the diary records only four Aborigines being killed in that period.

While admitting that her 1981 book The Aboriginal Tasmanians contained 'a few minor errors', Ryan said the mistakes were not deliberate and insisted that the Black War was 'a conscious policy of genocide'.

Another academic who has come in for criticism by Windschuttle is the well-respected historian Henry Reynolds, who this week wrote a stinging critique of Windschuttle's book in The Australian newspaper.

Describing the book as 'infuriating and offensive', Reynolds accused Windschuttle of selectively using the historical evidence to suit a right-wing agenda which seeks to absolve Australians of guilt for their treatment of Aborigines.

'Windschuttle arrived at the front door of the Tasmanian archives with his mind made up, his thesis already formed,' Reynolds wrote. 'He listens to witnesses he wishes to hear and ignores or discredits those who provide information less easy to assimilate.'

The debate over the book has filled the letters pages of newspapers, with the majority of readers condemning Windschuttle's thesis. A reader in New South Wales argued that once deprived of their land, Aboriginal women faced two choices: prostitution or starvation.

In another letter, a Queensland man said Windschuttle had 'romanticised' history in favour of 'the invading heroes'. Tasmania's best-known Aboriginal rights activist, lawyer Michael Mansell, insists that 'several hundred' Aborigines were shot and killed by British settlers and soldiers in the 19th century.

'There was every attempt by the British to eliminate my people for the sole purpose of getting access to their land. Their own records illustrate that there were mass atrocities. Aborigines were openly hunted down,' he said.

'The facts show that by the end of the killing, there were only 15 or 20 Aborigines left, from whom we are all descended today.'

Windschuttle's book is likely to give comfort to the Australian prime minister, John Howard, who has criticised what he has called the 'black armband' view of history.

Howard has argued that the present generation of Australians should not be held responsible for what was done more than a century ago.

The publication of the book comes at a time when Aborigines in Western Australia and the Northern Territory are coming forward with accounts of massacres, which they say were carried out as recently as the 1920s.

The controversy has renewed debate over whether Australia should belatedly draw up a treaty with the Aborigines, 150 years after Britain drew up similar accords with the Maoris of New Zealand, the native Americans of Canada and other vanquished colonial peoples.

Source: Sunday Herald

related links :

• One country, two histories
  17 January, 2003 - The Guardian (UK) - Conservative Australian historians rewrite accepted view that colonists massacred Aborigines. When a historian publishes a book accusing his peers of poor scholarship, most people would dismiss the ensuing argument as just another academic row. Not in Australia, where a dispute over history has broadened into a public debate which threatens to change the politics of race.
• In the path of progress
  December 26 2002 - As historians squabble over the truth about Aboriginal massacres, Tony Stephens discovered a voice from the past that offers insights into the hardships borne by black and white.
• Our history, not rewritten but put right
  November 25 2002 - 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. 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.
• Debate rages over "peaceful" white settlement
  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.
• Genocide in Australia
  Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.

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