Keith Windschuttle - Windschuttle's Responses, and Critical Replies

Windschuttle's Responses, and Critical Replies

In response to his critics, Windschuttle comments that they are "selective" in their critique, "politicised" in their judgment and do not address the "major charges" against the historians whom he criticized in Fabrication.

Windschuttle wrote: "Robert Manne's anthology Whitewash does not address the empirical evidence for genocide. In her essay in this collection, Lyndall Ryan does not attempt to uphold her original claim. Nor does Henry Reynolds defend his version of the topic"... "Yet this is supposed to be the place in which he and Ryan answer my major charges against them. This is very telling. I take their complete silence on this issue as an admission that their earlier claims are unsustainable".

He goes on to say: "Contrary to Manne's assertions, this death toll is not "almost entirely reliant" on Brian Plomley's earlier survey of a similar kind. As Fabrication states clearly, I "started with" Plomley's survey by checking his sources, but then did my own research, which included a complete reading of all the relevant files in the Tasmanian archives plus all the local newspapers up to 1832, as well as all the contemporary diaries and journals I could find".

In addressing some of his critics' claims, he wrote: "Vicki Greaves had read at least some of the book but apparently not very much of it. She claims my account of the killings at Risdon Cove in May 1804 "ignored" the testimony of the convict Edward White. Had she bothered to read the chapter on Risdon Cove, she would have found that White's testimony is discussed in more length and detail (pp. 22–4) than that of any other witness. Most of her other comments either misinterpret my case or attribute to me views I have never expressed, such as support for Social Darwinism".

Elsewhere he notes:

"The big problem in this debate for orthodox left-wing historians who rely on traditional empirical methods is the lack of evidence to give them a winning hand. Despite my opponents' claims to the contrary, the first volume of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History was an exhaustive study of all the relevant evidence on the frontier of Van Diemen's Land.

That evidence does not support claims of either genocide or frontier warfare in the colony. None of my critics have been able to come up with anything credible to show I am wrong. They are reduced to pinning their faith on speculation: the assumption of a frontier full of “unrecorded killings”.

....James Boyce, on whom editor Manne pinned so much hope, claimed I had overlooked a number of crucial private diaries and unofficial documents which told a story different to mine.

Yet, as John Dawson pointed out in Washout, no previous writer about the Aborigines in Van Diemen's Land had found the sources listed by Boyce contained anything worth reporting, not even Boyce himself in his own history of the Tasmanian Aborigines and the Anglican Church....

This is why the debate became so acrimonious. Without the historical evidence in their favour, my opponents have been largely reduced to two tactics: character assassination and language games".

In the wake of the 2011 Norway attacks, Windschuttle did not deny that perpetrator Anders Behring Breivik had read and praised statements he had made at a symposium in New Zealand in 2006, but stressed that he was "still at a complete loss to find any connection between them and the disgusting and cowardly actions of Breivik". Windschuttle went on to add that "it would be a "disturbing accusation" if people thought that he had ever used deliberately provocative language that might have caused Breivik to take up a rifle and shoot unarmed teenagers in cold blood".