KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE AND ABORIGINAL

R. J. STOVE

“Bring me my liar.”(Remark attrib- factual slovenliness), or Michel uted to Frederick the Great, when Foucault (whose allegedly path-break- wishing to have history read to him). ing insights into the history of prisons Precious few authors ever produce a and madhouses remained untroubled book which can be legitimately called by the slightest attempt to provide “life-changing”, so that readers’ minds evidence for his grand theoretical would be differently furnished if it speculations), or (now had stayed unwritten. Still fewer au- a solemnly vaunted television star, thors manage to produce two such presumably on the basis of his self- books. In the exalted company of confessed taste for interlarding his those who have achieved this latter ostensible reportage with pieces of feat is Keith Windschuttle. pure fiction), or Francis Fukuyama Nine years ago Mr. Windschuttle (enough said), or pundits more mis- gave us The Killing of History,1 a terse guided than even these, Mr. yet profoundly detailed guide to Windschuttle adopted the same tech- historiographical corruption’s most nique, and a very effective one too. fashionable forms, which saw off the Quote the guru in question so exten- pretensions to trustworthiness of half sively, and so fairly, that he convicts a dozen much-touted gurus. Whether himself from his own mouth; then, his target was Paul Carter (an Austral- and only then, pass sentence. As a re- ian nullity whose main distinction re- sult, Mr. Windschuttle never marred sided in citing French pseudo-philo- his narrative with the faintest hint of sophical verbiage as a justification for cheap cunning. He backed up — with

1. Keith Windschuttle, The Killing Of History: How a Discipline is Being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists (Macleay Press, Paddington, New South Wales, 1994). 32 NATIONAL OBSERVER AUTUMN the proper scholarly apparatus — turning up, selling well, and, quite every assertion he made, so that his often, sparking important debates, approach became far more effective in Europe, Britain and most espe- than any number of hasty and vitu- cially the . All we seem perative newspaper columns would to get are pamphlets and slim have been. monographs, coming out of some Anyone capable of writing The Kill- institute or think-tank, sparsely re- ing of History would have had every ported, finding limited distribution, reason for supposing that, after so sig- and soon forgotten.” nal a public service, he could relax. Touché: except that the situation has Such relaxation has never been Mr. grown worse even than Mr. Teich- Windschuttle’s style. We now possess mann implies, given that these “pam- the first in a planned trilogy, the over- phlets and slim monographs” tend to all title of which speaks for itself: The come from outfits which no longer Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Vol- maintain the most basic criteria of in- ume One, covering Van Diemen’s tellectual integrity.4 Mr. Windschuttle Land up to 1847,2 has already been a is therefore a bold man. He has scarifying embarrassment to ploughed ahead in the knowledge that panjandrums of official Aboriginal he will be expected to endure calumny history: chief of them Henry Reynolds and outright threats from those whose and the younger, less widely cel- jerry-built scholarship he has de- ebrated . It does for such plored, and who made it quite clear panjandrums what The Black Book of during the affair of Communism did for all Communists 1984-85 what value they place on civi- not clinically deranged. In particular, lised argument. (At that time, it has finally ended (at least in the field Reynolds positively boasted to The of Aboriginal affairs) the situation Weekend Australian’s Helen Trinca of which Max Teichmann bemoaned in his planned treatment for Professor a recent News Weekly:3 Blainey: “What you’ve got to expect “We can all make a list of books if you engage in that sort of public about Australian society which controversy is that you are going to never seem to appear; whereas, the be shot at . . . you have got to expect equivalents can be found regularly to be clobbered and people will really

2. Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One, Van Diemen’s Land, 1803-1847 (Macleay Press, Paddington, New South Wales, 2002). 3. Max Teichmann, “Physician heal thyself”, News Weekly, 14 December 2002. 4. A particularly extreme example of modern think-tanks’ fact-free, historically-illit- erate, and self-congratulatory polemics is John Hyde, Dry: In Defence of Economic Free- dom (Institute of Public Affairs, , 2002). 2003 KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE AND ABORIGINAL HISTORY 33 jump on you.”5) “are not taken seriously, then peo- Still more galling to Mr. ple can invent any atrocity and be- Windschuttle must be the realisation lieve anything they like. Truth be- that he need anticipate no help from comes a lost cause. . . . As even the the intellectual and moral bankrupts narrow focus of this first volume of mainstream Australian “conserva- alone is enough to make clear, the tism”, who are always readier to im- Aborigines were not the victims of pose new taxes or to steal old guns a holocaust. To compare the inten- than to give the feral Left any punish- tions of Governor [Arthur] Phillip or Lieutenant-Governor [George] ment more severe than a tiny tap on Arthur, or any of their successors, the wrist. Professor Blainey’s fate re- to those of Adolf Hitler, is not only vealed — if it needed revealing — conceptually odious but wildly what the defining characteristic of anachronistic. There were no gas such a “conservative” always is in a chambers in or anything crisis: so prominent a yellow streak remotely equivalent. The colonial that he could readily pass as an un- authorities wanted to civilise and derstudy for the Bananas in Pyjamas. modernise the Aborigines, not ex- Mr. Windschuttle’s agenda in this terminate them. Their intentions book, and its future successors, is a were not to foster towards simple one. There exists, he demon- Aborigines but to prevent it.” strates, not the slightest justification A similar passage crops up near the for loose talk about “” and end of Mr. Windschuttle’s study: “To “holocaust” in connection with Aus- compare these figures [of Aborigines tralian Aborigines’ post-1788 history. who died at whites’ hands] to the mil- He expounds his own conclusion af- lions deliberately put to death in Pol ter having recounted public expres- Pot’s Cambodia, Stalinist Russia and sions of remorse by Sir William Deane Nazi Germany is bizarre and offen- over a massacre which, despite the sive. It trivialises the experience of slight handicap of not being carried those peoples who have suffered out by whites (but by Aboriginals genuine attempts at extermination.”7 against Aboriginals), called forth As to how many Tasmanian Abo- Deane’s most flatulent rhetoric. “If the rigines did die during Mr. factual details”, Mr. Windschuttle Windschuttle’s time-frame, he finds complains,6 that 118 Aborigines were killed by

5. Helen Trinca, “Historians Tackle the Legend of Blainey Head On in New Book”, The Weekend Australian, 16-17 February 1985. 6. Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, page 9. 7. Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, page 398. 34 NATIONAL OBSERVER AUTUMN

British settlers between 1803 and 1834. were dead.”11 Hancock here rephrases Seventy-two of these killings took the principle articulated back in 1824 place during the warfare of 1824-31, by Leopold von Ranke, concerning the in which Aborigines themselves slew historian’s function: to show, as far as 187 whites, including women and he is able, “what actually happened.” children.8 Not what should have happened, nor what (if only for the purposes of ob- Aware that everything he writes taining sycophantic Eureka Street cov- will be checked and double-checked erage) you would like to think hap- by those seeking to belittle it — former pened; merely, and boringly, what ac- Quadrant editor Robert Manne even, recklessly and defamatorily enough, tually happened. accused him of plagiarism9 — Mr. Especially fascinating is Mr. Windschuttle has faithfully supplied Windschuttle’s description12 of the off- footnotes for every quote and factual stage role played by Spanish coloni- statement. He revives, and defends,10 alism and its reputation among the an admirable nineteenth-century tra- early-nineteenth-century British. “The dition which should never have been Black Legend” (La Leyenda Negra) of allowed to perish: that of printing endless Spanish cruelty — a myth dis- these footnotes where they belong, at seminated and believed partly the bottom of the page to which they through 1542 propaganda by an actual are related, rather than burying them Spaniard, the priest Bartolomé de Las up the back of the book, or (worse still) Casas — made British administrators dispensing with them altogether in the terrified of the Spanish imperial sys- interests of “accessibility”. tem, which to them represented eve- His method throughout has been, rything that colonial rule should avoid as he himself admits, the approach becoming. (Exemplifying the law of summarised by the late Sir Keith unintended consequences, British hu- Hancock: “It is wrong — in every manitarian Evangelicals borrowed sense of that word — to measure the from the dreaded Spain’s homiletic lit- thoughts and actions of people in the erature not only their concepts of uni- past by a measuring rod of knowledge versal brotherhood, but even their pre- and experience which did not come ferred phraseology.) That Mr. into existence until after these people Windschuttle should have noted this,

8. Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, page 398. 9. Robert Manne, “Pale Grey View of a Genocide”, The Age, 16 December 2002. 10. Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, pages 132-134. 11. W. R. Hancock, Professing History (Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1976), p. 61; Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, page 405. 12. Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, pages 32-40. 2003 KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE AND ABORIGINAL HISTORY 35 indeed should have explained it in This undue trust in Robinson’s in- detail, is one more reason why his accurate accounts derives as much work transcends most of his rivals’. It from bone-idleness as from any nobler would not readily occur to a Reynolds motive is indicated by Reynolds’ 1999 or a Ryan that intellectual develop- diatribe Why Weren’t We Told?,14 which ments occurring in foreign parts could posits the peculiar notion that Aborigi- have left any impact whatsoever — let nal history was terra incognita — a alone a beneficial one — on a cosmos “Great Australian Silence” — until so gloriously self-sufficient and majes- Reynolds graced us with his arrival. tically autarkic as mind. Mr. Windschuttle cites15 Melbourne Among the very few overtly censo- historian Robert Murray, who, when rious passages in Mr. Windschuttle’s discussing Why Weren’t We Told? in whole tome is his rebuke of the Tas- Quadrant, observed that he could find manian Aborigines’ Superintendent, counter-example after counter-exam- (1791- ple to Reynolds’ allegation of the 1866): “the founder of a long tradition Great Australian Silence “without of those who have made a lot of leaving the room where this review is 16 money out of the Aboriginal predica- being typed.” ment while watching their charges die As for Aborigines themselves, before their eyes.”13 Quintessentially whether they lived in Tasmania or on Australian despite his London birth, the mainland, the evidence is in: while Robinson realised at an early stage of lacking such refinements as the atom his Tasmanian career the sole path, bomb and (before 1788) gunpowder, then as now, to Australian worldly they still performed efficiently when success: you do not build a better it came to formalised mayhem. In 1983 mousetrap; instead, you fool and Professor Blainey pointed out17 that browbeat the government into provid- mainland inter-tribal warfare among ing interminable subsidies for the Aborigines killed off one person in tenth-rate mousetrap you built years every 270 each year: an impressive per ago. It is depressing to learn from Mr. capita death-toll in any culture. A Windschuttle how Robinson’s official cause for repeated astonishment is Mr. exaggerations and recounting of sec- Windschuttle’s account of how much ond-hand gossip regarding Aborigi- the standard figures for Tasmania’s nal conflicts have been treated as sa- whole Aboriginal population vary, cred writ by the likes of Reynolds. and how little they depend on any

13. Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, page 201. 14. Henry Reynolds, Why Weren’t We Told? A Personal Search for the Truth About Our History (Viking, Ringwood, Victoria, 1999). 15. Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, page 410. 36 NATIONAL OBSERVER AUTUMN data except the whim of Reynolds or a process baffling to evolutionists, but some other magus. This statistical ma- all too plausible to realists, these na- nipulation can be found among non- tives actually became less competent Australian authors also, as Mr. and less enterprising than their ances- Windschuttle notes.18 Kirkpatrick Sale tors had been, especially in the mat- and Sherburne Cook are but two of ter of tool manufacture. Selling of Abo- those Americans whose distortions — riginal girls to European settlers — and sometimes, to be honest, outright especially sealers and stockmen — in lies — concerning European con- exchange for food, often sugar, be- quest’s damage to North American came commonplace by the 1820s: with natives’ population levels have at- predictable outcomes in terms of ve- tained in ill-informed media circles the nereal disease, depopulation, and status of revealed religion.19 But that widespread infertility among other- Reynolds, Ryan, the economic histo- wise robust women. Some of today’s rian Noel Butlin, and the anthropolo- fiercest Aboriginal separatists turn out gist David Davies should have had to have been descended from these their guesswork (for that is all it ever irregular unions with white men, a was) accepted, often for decades, fact that must prompt speculation as without being forced to substantiate to whether the entire anti-white griev- their figures by publicly accessible ance industry of modern Australia sources, is alarming. amounts to much more than an exer- So, frankly, is Mr. Windschuttle on cise in self-hatred. Tasmanian Aborigines’ Hobbesian Reproaching one rash commentator lives in general: poor, nasty and short, who speaks of the “humanity and though they can be called “brutish” compassion” which Tasmania’s native only at the cost of wantonly insulting population showed, Mr. Windschuttle many brutes. Among such folk, almost is emphatic: “To talk about the Tasma- anything could happen, and usually nian Aborigines acting with ‘human- did, particularly if it involved a chance ity and compassion’ is to invoke con- for males to kick, stab, impale, gang- cepts they would have regarded with rape, break the spine of, prostitute, or complete incomprehension. These simply abduct the nearest female. By terms come not from Aboriginal but

16. Robert Murray, “Who Wasn’t Told?”, Quadrant, November 1999. 17. Geoffrey Blainey, The Triumph of the Nomads: A History of Ancient Australia (Sun Books, Melbourne, 1983), pp. 108-110. 18. Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, page. 365. 19.The sharp practices inherent in such Europhobic agitprop are revealed and de- bunked in D. P. Henige, Numbers From Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Popula- tion Debate (University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma, 1998). 2003 KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE AND ABORIGINAL HISTORY 37 from European culture . . . for [hunter- number of wise men curb the behav- gatherer tribes] the idea of loyalties iour of a self-destructive society? owed and sentiments shared beyond The post-Christian West’s example the boundary of kinship was literally gives no hope for believing that it can. 20 unthinkable.” And not, of course, for Leave aside for the nonce such ab- hunter-gatherer tribes alone. World surdities as the current antics of Aus- history — outside that numerically tralia’s populate-or-perish brigade. infinitesimal sector of it where White After all, such antics are so obviously Anglo-Saxon Protestant liberal mid- motivated by crude economic de- dle-class squeamishness has prevailed mands — the clergyman’s need to fill — is very largely the tale of what his empty churches; the social work- might be called ethical double-entry er’s need to perpetuate her job; the book-keeping, whereby a society has tycoon’s need to drive his workforce’s one set of obligations for its own mem- wages down to lower levels — that bers, and an entirely different set of they have little more intrinsic interest obligations for outsiders. (Most of than does any other form of racketeer- America’s foreign-policy woes since ing. Concentrate, instead, on a cultural 1945, to look no further, have arisen death-wish as it now manifests itself from a failure to comprehend this ba- in America. When the world’s most sic truth.) powerful nation, after the 11 Septem- At the same time, in one respect Mr. ber terrorist horrors, still exhibits so Windschuttle might be considered too fundamental an ignorance of the Third severe towards indigenous World mind and of multiculturalism’s Tasmanians. He writes: “Until the evil (an ignorance on which Patrick nineteenth century, their isolation had Buchanan’s warnings have clearly had left them without comparisons with not the faintest impact) that its House other cultures that might have helped of Representatives votes 245-138 to them reform their ways. But nor did give several million illegal immigrants they produce any wise men of their amnesty,22 it is not at all axiomatic that own who might have foreseen the primitive peoples have a monopoly on long-term consequences of their own suicidal mania, or even that Tasma- behaviour and devised ways to curb nian Aborigines’ form of it was out- it.”21 Perfectly valid. Yet the question standingly pernicious. thence arises, which Mr. Windschuttle Mr. Windschuttle’s explanation of does not attempt to answer: can any how Reynolds and Ryan came to ex-

20.Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, page 406. 21. Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, page 386. 22. Derek Turner, “The Death of the West — Why Our Sun Is Setting”, Right Now!, April-June 2002. 38 NATIONAL OBSERVER AUTUMN ude their nonsense could also be que- This differentiates it from European ried for possible incompleteness. He , and for that matter blames it primarily on what he calls from most British historiography “Sixties radical romanticism”:23 above (given that England’s main post-1066 all, on fads of anti-colonialist “libera- languages for government business tion” theory, popularised by Frantz were French until the mid-fourteenth Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, Che century and Latin until the early six- Guevera, and other even less scrupu- teenth). lous ideologues. Maybe; but were not Even today, anyone in Paris, Berlin, other factors equally important even Munich, Rome, Milan, Lisbon, or Ma- in the Sixties? And are not these other drid who seeks teaching work at a his- factors much more important nowa- tory department without knowing at days, since in 2003 we are much far- ther distant in time from Che’s death least two languages other than his own will be laughed out of the inter- than that event was from the Second 24 World ? view room. But American history Surely a good deal of the blame presumes no such linguistic skills must lie with those who have con- (save perhaps for those studying the demned most Australians to the men- early settlements of Texas, California, tal and spiritual prison of Florida, or Louisiana); and neither monolingualism. One reason for the does Australian history. Hence the ap- plethoric upsurge of Australian his- peal of the latter, as to the former, to tory (or “history”) courses is the very lazy, feeble, and petulant minds. Not fact that this subject makes, just as the to those minds alone, need one say, but equally fashionable subject of philoso- to those minds in disproportionately phy makes, no demands whatever high numbers. upon a student’s general learning. Such passing reservations over spe- Specifically, it nowhere presupposes cific sections of Mr. Windschuttle’s — or rather, it is actively inimical to work do nothing to minimise its over- — competence in a foreign language. all excellence. It demands to be read,

23.Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, page 404. 24. As recently as the early 1980s, among those who taught on pre-French-Revolu- tion Europe in Sydney University’s History Department during the present writer’s undergraduate years, the same situation prevailed. Every lecturer dealing with the subject regarded it as an elementary job qualification that he or she know at least enough French and German to read secondary sources in those languages (most lit- erature on German Protestantism, for instance, has only ever appeared in German). Several knew Italian and Spanish also; at least one knew, in addition, Russian and Serbo-Croat. Students without any foreign tongues were not penalised, but were not encouraged either. 2003 KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE AND ABORIGINAL HISTORY 39 as Professor Blainey’s finest output ture on Aboriginal history will be la- demands to be read, by every literate bouring on foundations that Mr. Australian. It will shape our outlook Windschuttle has constructed, and for as long as any literature can do so. will be expected to abide by standards Anyone who presumes to write in fu- that Mr. Windschuttle has set.