Keith Windschuttle - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

The appearance of the first volume provoked a lively polemical correspondence in the pages of The Australian, with its "agenda-setting capacity". It was positively reviewed by Geoffrey Blainey, who called it "one of the most important and devastating (books) written on Australian history in recent decades", although Blainey notes that not every side-argument in the book convinced him and that his "view is that the original Tasmanians were not as backward, mentally and culturally, as Windschuttle sometimes depicts them". On Windschuttle's analysis of the "fabrications", Blainey wrote: "While reading the long recital of these failings, I felt an initial sympathy towards the Australian and overseas historians who were under such intense scrutiny. But many of their errors, made on crucial matters, beggared belief. Moreover their exaggeration, gullibility, and what this book calls "fabrication" went on and on. Admittedly, if sometimes the historians' errors had chanced to favor the Aborigines, and sometimes they had happened to favor British settlers, a reader might sympathetically conclude that there was no bias amongst the historians but simply an infectious dose of inaccuracy. Most of the inaccuracies, however, are used to bolster the case for the deliberate destruction of the Aborigines". Claudio Veliz greeted it as "one of the most important books of our time". Peter Coleman, while speaking of its painstaking and devastating scholarship, regretted the absence from Windschuttle's work of any "sense of tragedy".

Within a year Windschuttle's claims and research produced a volume of rebuttal, namely Whitewash. On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History, an anthology edited and introduced by Robert Manne, professor of politics at La Trobe University, with contributions by Australian academics from a range of disciplines. Manne, who called the book "one of the most implausible, ignorant and pitiless books about Australian history written for many years", himself summed up the case against Windschuttle, noting that Windschuttle's evidence for Aboriginal deaths is derived from a scholar, Plomley, who denied that any estimate for them could be made from the documentary record; that a scrupulous conservative scholar, H. A. Willis, using exactly the same sources as Windschuttle, came up with a figure of 188 violent deaths, and another 145 rumoured deaths; that Windschuttle's method excludes deaths of aborigines who were wounded, and later died; that all surviving Aborigines transported by Robinson to Flinders' Island bore marks of violence and gunshot wounds "perpetrated on them by depraved whites"; that Windschuttle cannot deny that between 1803 and 1834 almost all Tasmanian Aborigines died, and the only evidence for disease as a factor before 1829 rests on a single conversation recorded by James Bonwick, and that Aboriginal women who lived with sealers did not, however, die off from contact with bearers of foreign disease; that Windschuttle likened Aboriginal attacks on British settlers to "modern-day junkies raiding service stations for money", whereas both colonial records and modern historians speak of them as highly "patriotic", attached to their lands, and engaged in a veritable war to defend it from settlement; that by Windschuttle's own figures, the violent death rate of Aborigines in Tasmania in the 1820s must have been 360 times the murder rate in contemporary New York; that Windschuttle shows scarce familiarity with period books, citing only 3 of the 30 books published on Van Diemen's land for the period 1803-1834, and with one of them confuses the date of the first visit by the French with the publication date of the volume that recounted their expedition; that it is nonsensical to argue that a people who had wandered over an island and survived for 34,000 years had no attachment to their land; that Windschuttle finds no native words in 19th century wordlists for "land" to attest to such an attachment, when modern wordlists show 23 entries under "country".

This in turn provoked Melbourne writer and Objectivist John Dawson, to undertake a counter-rebuttal, Washout: On the academic response to The Fabrication of Aboriginal History in which he argues that Whitewash leaves Windschuttle's claims and research unrefuted.

In their reviews, Australian specialists in both aboriginal and indigenous peoples' history were generally far less impressed than those who praised the book, which included Geoffrey Blainey, Claudio Veliz and Peter Coleman.

• Henry Reynolds interprets his book as an attempt to revive the concept of terra nullius, and regards it as "without doubt, the most biased and cantankerous historical work to appear since the publication of G.W. Rusden's three-volume History of Australia in the 1880s". *The historian of genocide, Ben Kiernan, who classifies the fate of aborigines as an example of the practice, situates Windschuttle's polemical history within a new campaign, led by Quadrant, but taken up by a "chorus of right-wing columnists" within the Australian mass media with a record of antagonism to both Aborigines and their "leftist" supporters.
• Stephen Garton, Professor of History, Provost & Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Sydney University, argued that the "the flaw in Windschuttle's argument is his belief that history can only be based on the evidence that survives. Evidence is always partial and only takes on a meaning if placed in an appropriate context. In other words historians always construct larger worlds from the fragments that survive".
• University of Aberdeen's Gregory D.B. Smithers, an Australian comparativist working on native histories, argues that Windschuttle's political agenda shows a "discomfort with the way the "orthodox school" by inflating Aboriginal deaths, impugns Australian identity and its virtuous Anglo-Saxon origins". Windschuttle's book plays to "the white wing populism of white Australians, who feel their racially privileged position is under attack". By reaction, Smithers argues, Windschuttle highlights "the nation's virtues", privileging the opinions of settlers and colonial officials, "while rejecting Aboriginal oral histories. Smithers argues that Windschuttle ignores documentary evidence that contradicts his own ideology, and fails to perceive that the island reserves created for indigenous Tasmanians were "racialized spaces" for a people regarded as a form of "social pollution"". He argues that the book is "a therapeutic history for white (Anglo-Saxon) Australians that distorts and distracts" and that in denying the reliability of historical evidence of racialized groups, Windschuttle employs a tactic used by historians to discredit historical accounts that do not fit with their presentist morality.
• For Stuart Macintyre, Windschuttle's book was not "so much counter-history as an exercise in incomprehension". He finds Windschuttle's method of calculating aboriginal losses flimsy, and the figures he allocates to each incident "no more reliable than those, which he dismissed as guesswork, of mainstream frontier historians". He concludes that the first volume is "a shocking book, shocking in its allegation of fabrication and also in its refusal of the interpretive framework that earlier historians employed, and that its author "fails to register the tragedy of what was a fatal encounter". When challenged on his lack of compassion, Windschuttle is reported as replying: "You can't really be serious about feeling sympathy for someone who died 200 years ago". For Macintyre, "It is the absence of any sense of this tragedy, the complete lack of compassion for its victims, that is surely the most disturbing quality of Windschuttle's rewriting of Aboriginal history".
• For University of Sydney historian Vicki Grieves, Windschuttle's approach reads as though indigenous people "were not the intentional targets of the colonisers but accidental targets, mostly through their inability to be realistic, objective, logical and moral, and thus the "seeds of their own destruction" lay within their own "psyche and culture". Even were one to concede Windschuttle's guesstimate for the pre-white population of Tasmania, by his own figures, the death-rate for his plausible deaths still works out as higher in percentage terms than the mortality risk of the Australian population during WW1, when 60,000 soldiers died. Windschuttle shows, she argues, a predilection for old colonial explanations, and Darwinist values, as though nothing had happened in between. Regarding native treatment of women, who in his account were viciously brutalized, Windschuttle appeals to the reader's moral outrage at the way a 14 year old native girl was traded. In doing so, he ignores the fact that the age of consent in Britain at that time was 12, and whites themselves on the frontier exchanged wives or traded them for tobacco and rum.
• James Boyce, in an extended review, notes that Windschuttle ignores native views for the period after 1832, precisely the date when almost all of what is known of Aboriginal perspectives began to be recorded. Examining Windschuttle's use of sources, he finds his selection of material narrow, and his reading of their contents "selective".
• Bain Attwood of the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies at Monash University dismisses him as a "tabloid historian" however Attwood concedes that "Boyce is unable to demonstrate" that the documents he says Windschuttle ignored "would have provided factual killings of Aborigines" and that ""revisionist" critics have demonstrated that the academic historians lacked documentation for most of the killings represented in their accounts".
• Shayne Breen, lecturer in Aboriginal history at the University of Tasmania, reads the book as "systematic character assassination", replete with "unsupportable generalizations", and nurtured by a "delusion" that only Windschuttle can find the historical truth. For Breen, "In making "the most primitive ever" claim, Windschuttle is not practising forensic scholarship. He is renovating a colonial ideology that decreed that Tasmanian Aborigines were the missing link between apes and man. This idea formed a central plank of what is known to scholars as scientific racism".