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  Fabricating Aboriginal History May 25, 2003 Reporter : Helen Dalley Producer : Paul Steindl  The tranquil groves of academe have been shattered by the sound of verbal warfare — historians battling over long-held claims that White Australia had massacred Aborigines before Federation. On one side, the eminent historian Professor Henry Reynolds, who has claimed that white settlers killed 20 thousand Aborigines, including as many as 10,000 in Queensland. On the other side, former left-wing academic Keith Windschuttle, the author of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, who claims that most historians of Aboriginal Australia had invented evidence about the murder of Aborigines by white settlers. It's enough to make Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf look like a bedtime story...Whatever happened to the Socratic dialogue, you may well ask, as you ponder the war of words between Australian academics over Aboriginal history. There are seemingly no questions, just assertions, as the two sides argue vociferously over how many Aborigines were massacred by white settlers before Federation. Listen to former left-wing academic, Keith Windschuttle, as he gets stuck into eminent historian Professor Reynolds at a recent public forum in Tasmania: "I started with Henry Reynolds claim that ten thousand Aborigines had been killed in Queensland before Federation ... Reynolds had provided false citation of his evidence. In the three years since then, I have been checking the footnotes of the other historians in this field and have found a similar degree of misrepresentation, deceit and outright fabrication."  And Reynolds' reply: "One of your problems, Keith, is that you are so self-righteous, you are unbelievably self-righteous ... You vilify people whose evidence you don't like, and you accept uncritically, the whole book [The Fabrication of Aboriginal History] does this, it's not unusual, we are all like that. But don't put yourself up as an arbiter for rigorous historical method, because you're not." The audience applauded wildly.But that didn't stop Keith Windschuttle, who's on a public mission to rewrite the story of black versus white conflict in early Australia. "After examining all the archival evidence and double-checking the references cited by the best known historians in the field," says Windschuttle, "I've come to the conclusion that most of the story is myth piled upon myth." Windschuttle's book, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, is a full frontal attack against what he calls the "orthodox" or accepted history fed to students by the leading historians of the past three decades. The so-called "black armband" view of widespread massacres, even attempted genocide, of Aborigines by white British settlers, is a view Windschuttle himself once held: "For most of my adult life, I was a true believer of this story. I used to tell students that the record of the British in Australia was worse than the Spaniards in America."  A true believer no more, Windschuttle now directly targets historians like Professors Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan for allegedly pushing untruths about the extent of frontier warfare in Tasmania. His book details their alleged mistakes and inaccuracies, which he claims, prop up a story about the founding of Australia that was a lie. But his targets are fighting back, accusing Windschuttle of selectively using sources, and even worse, being a denier of the Aboriginal struggle. Professor Reynolds says: "The book is full of vilification of Aboriginal Tasmanians, make no mistake about that at all."And what are young Australians learning about white colonisation? Year 12 students at an independent school in Sydney expressed their views to Sunday. A female student said: "I guess we've all been taught that the Aborigines had been killed. There was genocide going on, and blankets being given out with typhoid, things like that. I guess our understanding was that they were sort of massacred." A male student said: "I suppose during my schooling I have never been told a specific definition of genocide, but I have always been taught that there was genocide of Aboriginal people since white settlement." This led Windschuttle to conclude: "This is a very well-established, long-entrenched view. And that's partly why ... I'm being subject to a fair degree of hostility, because the intellectual classes, and I'm including teachers in that group, in the media, the arts community, they have long believed this story." But the truth is that, in the early days of the colony in Tasmania, 73 years after white settlement; there were no full-blood Aborigines left. Was it genocide? Windschuttle lumps all the so-called orthodox historians together, and claims they say it was: "There was no genocide in Australia. The idea that Australia, as some writers have said, was the moral equivalent of Nazi Germany in its treament of the Aborigines, I think the view is completely false. In fact, I think it's grotesquely false. The original settlers and the colonial authorities wanted to civilise and modernise the Aborigines. The last thing they wanted to do was exterminate them." Professor Cassandra Pybus says of the Tasmanian Aborigines: "They died of European diseases, they died from European bullets. They died from eating European food. They died from starvation. They died as a direct consequence of us being here. I have never said we killed them. I don't know who ever did say we killed them." But Professor Lyndall Ryan claims there was a "conscious policy of genocide," including the infamous "Black Line", in effect, a human cordon of British troops and settlers aimed at getting rid of Aborigines from areas close to white settlement. Professor Henry Reynolds disagrees with her, and says he's never claimed genocide occurred in Tasmania: "One, genocide is a crime of Government. And two, there has to be an intent. There has to be an intent to kill a group of people, even if that isn't fully carried through ... Now in my view, the British Government, that is the British Imperial Government, never had the intention to wipe out the Tasmanians."  Reynolds himself was seen as a radical revisionist a few decades ago, when he challenged the then traditional view of colonisation, by asserting that Aborigines were not just the poor victims. He maintains Aborigines put up a spirited, organised defence of their homelands against whites, calling it guerilla warfare. The 1940s' Chips Rafferty film, Bitter Springs, portrays many of the tensions that led to violence between blacks and whites on the frontier. Conflict arose over traditional hunting grounds. And when settlers turned pastoralists, Aborigines retaliated by stealing sheep. But the film reflects the view that Windschuttle would like Australians to return to, that whites only shot Aborigines in self-defence in sporadic skirmishes on the fringe. Windschuttle says: "There was no frontier warfare. The Aborigines did not put up any kind of resistance to white colonisation. In fact, they were overawed, they were fascinated by the white people, they wanted to see the products they had."Windschuttle told Sunday there was plenty of bloody confrontation, but he calls it a crime spree, not warfare: "...The overwhelming evidence from both the white side and from reports from Aborigines themselves, not written by them, but people reporting their words, is that ... their main aim was to steal flour, sugar, tea and bedding, and to them, these were luxury goods." Henry Reynolds replies: "Well, that's just silly, that's just plain silly ... in fact the most recent publication by the Defence Department on the Atlas of Australian War, the first chapter by Major-General John Coates talks about the black war in Tasmania both as war and guerilla war. That is, most people who have studied this, who are military historians, consider it as war." Keith Windschuttle dismisses accusations of a right-wing agenda: "I've been following the evidence, I've been following the trail of the footnotes by the historians and checking what's in the archives, and I'm simply reporting back on what I find." By following the trail of footnotes, Windschuttle uncovered what he says is damning evidence of fudged figures and exaggerated claims: "In some cases, there are claims by the historians I'm criticising that can be shown to be absolutely false. People who were supposed to be on the spot were somewhere else ... and there are other cases where historian Lyndall Ryan has made a whole range of claims about events that happened and she's given footnotes to them as historians are supposed to do, and when you look up the footnotes, you fnd there's nothing there." Professor Ryan replies: "There are a couple of references missing, but they are readily found in the archives, and can be checked, and he's chosen not to do that." You may not agree with Keith Windschuttle that there has been a fabrication of Aboriginal history by some Australian historians, but you would have to agree that this battle is proving our history is anything but boring. Click here to read a transcript of the story. |
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