A distortion of history
The Windschuttle controversy is unlikely to subside any time soon. In fact, as more scholars have the chance to read The Fabrication of Aboriginal History and to evaluate the claims made therein, we’ll be flooded with columns and reviews. The Quadrant crew have already started their pre-emptive strike.
Miranda Devine teed off first by defending Windschuttle against Manne’s “soft plagiarism” accusation. Devine wrote that it was “obvious the section is a summary of pre-contact Aboriginal culture which paraphrases the footnoted sources.” Unfortunately, the academic responsible for the allegedly plagiarised work didn’t think it was obvious (my emphasis):
Now Professor Edgerton, while anxious not to be cited as upset by what Windschuttle has written, has cautiously entered the fray.
“It is true that Windschuttle several times paraphrases me in what could be seen as soft plagiarism,” wrote the University of California at Los Angeles academic. “But it is also true that Rhys Jones said some of this same sort of things [sic], as I cited in my book. Also, Windschuttle did quote me in one instance.”
He’s sympathetic to the Quadrant crew, so he tries to soften the blow, but it’s there. Windschuttle, the paragon of academic integrity, is a soft plagiarist. However, as Windschuttle apologist Roger Sandall has argued (and as Manne has admitted), “the textual similarities pointed to are irrelevant to the facts, interpretation, and general argument of his book.” True, but when you build your argument on allegations of shoddy footnoting, you’d better double- and triple-check your own referencing.
PP McGuinness, the captain of the Quadrant crew, was next up to the plate. He found himself in a muddle of self-contradiction, first acknowledging that “It is true that there is more than one ‘truth’ to be discerned in any historical account, and there are always shades of grey”, and then condemning “post-modernist twaddle about differing truths, shades of grey or whatever.” He must have had a momentary lapse into his former leftism. I’ve heard Alzheimer’s can do that. Apart from that entertaining backflip, he doesn’t offer anything more interesting than a recap of the evils of history-creating leftists who are fabricating evidence.
Sandall shares this view, and provides an inconsistency of his own. He decries “Reynolds’ 1999 self-serving claim that historical writing is ‘inescapably political’,” yet endorses Windschuttle’s “huge polemical effort”. If the orthodox historians are undermined by the alleged political motivations of their work, then why isn’t Windschuttle afforded the same treatment? It’s simple — if you agree with his aim (to oppose land rights, self-determination and a treaty) then you will accept his version of history as neutral. Sandall notes that “the author of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History is supposedly as biased as everyone else. But although [Reynolds] claims Windschuttle’s ‘use of the records is extremely selective’, he does not tell us which particular records, or what exactly Windschuttle is alleged to have left out. It is all exceedingly vague.”
Perhaps Reynolds is vague, but others are not. Shayne Breen’s Criminals and pimps: Keith Windschuttle and Tasmanian Aborigines (pdf) demonstrates that two of Windschuttle’s claims were based on a selective review of the sources. First, he suggests that the Tasmanians were swept aside by progress, as the primitive gave way to the modern. Moreover, the Tasmanian Aborigines were not only a primitive people but the most primitive people. Thanks to Windschuttle’s occasional dedication to footnotes, we can see that his evidence doesn’t stack up.
One tired old claim repeated by Windschuttle in support of his “most primitive ever” claim is the idea that the Tasmanians did not have the technology, the skill or the intelligence to devise a method for lighting a fire. This is the point commonly wheeled out to support “the most primitive ever” claim. Winschuttle recently told a Launceston journalist that even Neanderthal man could light a fire, which, in Windschuttle’s mind, locates Tasmanian Aboriginal culture somewhere on the other side of the Stone Age.
Windschuttle’s source for the view that the Tasmanians could not light fire is the 1966 publication Friendly Mission, Brian Plomley’s account of George Robinson’s journals. Presumably Windschuttle did not bother to check if subsequent work had been done on this topic. Had he done so, he would have discovered a 1973 paper by German anthropologist Gisela Volger that argues the percussion method was used, a 1991 paper by myself that supports and consolidates Volger’s arguments, an admission by Plomley in his 1993 book The General that in all likelihood he himself was mistaken on this point, a recent paper by Monash University biologist Beth Gott that further consolidates the percussion view, and overwhelming linguistic evidence for the percussion method currently being advanced by University of Tasmania MA candidate John Taylor.
Second, Windschuttle alleges that the Tasmanians died out largely because their men prostituted their women. He draws this conclusion by ignoring the role of the settlers in such “transactions”.
There is some evidence that Aboriginal men, especially along the northern and south-eastern coastlines, used women as trading commodities. Some of this trading was culturally-sanctioned, some of it was not. Sometimes women willingly participated, somtimes they did not. But no credible documentary evidence is available for widespread selling of women into prostitution.
There is, however, strong evidence that the abduction of women by colonists was practised across the island for much of the period to 1820. Indeed, the 1830 Aborigines committee found that the abduction of women was a major cause of attacks against colonists by Aborigines.
Windschuttle’s characterisation of Aboriginal men as pimps who sold their women into prostitution ignores the substantial and credible documentary evidence of abduction.
Breen concludes that “Windschuttle’s claim that many Aboriginal deaths resulted from the men selling their women into prostitution is a calculated guess. We will never have a body count, nor an accurate tabulation of the various causes of death…” This is somewhat ironic given Windschuttle’s condemnation of Reynolds’ estimation of the Aboriginal death toll.
Even more ironic is Professor Mark Finnane’s argument (pdf) that Windschuttle’s own numbers suggest that the ‘orthodox’ estimate of 20 000 Aborigines killed across Australia is too low.
Let us start with that figure of 2000 [Windschuttle's estimate of the pre-contact Tasmanian population] and develop a population count that takes account of the decline through disease and lowered fertility, consistent with Windschuttle’s account. If we use his population figures to calculate the rates of violent death at the hands of settlers, then in the thirty years of first contact (1804-1834) the chances of a Tasmanian Aborigine dying a violent death were 365.9 per 100 000 population. On the hypothetical assumption of a stable, not declining, population (Winschuttle’s average deaths of about 4 per year in a population remaining stable at 2 000 across the period) the death rate by violence would be no less than 190 per 100 000 per year.
… If we extrapolate to the Australian mainland these colonial Tasmanian rates of violent death, then out estimates of the numbers of Aborigines killed by colonists in the first thirty years of settlement fall in the range 11 000 to 44 000. This estimate depends on whether we take the low (200 000) or high (750 000) estimate of the pre-contact Indigenous population. Is extrapolation from Van Diemen’s Land to mainland Australia warranted? Well, Windschuttle concludes at p398 of his book that “in all of Europe’s colonial encounters with the New Worlds of the Americas and the Pacific”, Van Diemen’s Land “was probably the site where the least indigenous blood of all was deliberately shed”. One can only assume that the succeeding volumes will sustain the argument, and demonstrate that on the mainland of Australia, more blood was shed than in Van Diemen’s Land.
On Windschuttle’s figures we might conclude that Reynolds’ estimate of 20 000 slain Aborigines across Australia was too low. Windschutle has asked us to take a new view of the Australian frontier. On the evidence he has presented so far, this was less like a “nun’s picnic” and more like a Port Arthur massacre repeated over and over.
This is hardly an insignificant number. Even in Tasmania alone, we can see that the death toll was horrendous. Finnane’s calculation that the “death rate during the seven years of the Tasmanian Black War, based on Windschuttle’s own figures of plausible deaths, is more than three times the mortality risk of the Australian population in the First World War when over 60 000 soldiers died”, is supported by Murdoch University’s Geoffrey Bolton (emphasis added):
Rigorous in testing evidence, Windschuttle discards reports based on hearsay, exaggeration over time, and ignorance of local geography to reduce the number of Aborigines slain in Tasmanian frontier conflict between 1803 and 1834 to no more than 118. Over the same period 185 settlers and convicts were known to have perished at Aboriginal hands. These figures do not discredit Reynolds’ contention that the Tasmanians suffered losses proportionately higher greater than Australians killed in the two world wars between 1914 and 1945, with similar trauma.
Finnane also points to some strange statistical interpretation by Windschuttle:
In a passage dedicated to showing that colonists had no incentive to cover up deaths, Windschuttle argues that after 1828 “the documentary record does not show a sudden increase in the number of killings by whites” (p361). It is not clear what documentary record he is referring to but the one in his book documenting 118 plausible deaths shows quite the opposite (pp387-397). Counting only Windschuttle’s “plausible” deaths for this period it appears that 68 of the 118 deaths occurred in the period after November 1828. On the plausible assumption, consistent with Windschuttle’s arguments, that the population by 1828 may have been less than 500, the rate of violent death in the years from the declaration of martial law (1828-1834) would have been over 2000 per 100 000.
This is an incredibly high death rate for a society in which colonisation was supposedly relatively bloodless.
The most disturbing element of Windschuttle’s work is the degree to which he endorses the outright racist views of the settlers. In writing a paper on Windschuttle (pdf), I was struck on three occasions by the similarity of his argument to statements made by historical figures. First, in respect of his “violence as justified retaliation against Aboriginal criminality” thesis:
Disturbingly, Windschuttle’s logic here follows the logic of the racist settlers — the Aborigines were innately criminal or savage, and only by acts of extreme violence could they be trained to restrain themselves. As one 1864 editorialist wrote, there was “but one law for them that they will ever respect — the bullet; the sole logic, the cock of the rifle.’
Second, in relation to his contention that the Aboriginal population imploded:
Indeed, Windschuttle seems to endorse some of the ‘doomed race’ theory propounded by the settlers. When you put together the claims he makes — that massacres were few and far between, that the Aboriginal death toll was far less than is commonly believed, and most recently that (in Tasmania at least) more whites were killed by Aborigines than vice versa — the conclusion he intends the reader to draw is clear: the Aborigines were decimated at their own hands. Faced with the arrival of a superior race, they were swept aside by the progressive tide of history.
Third, in relation to Windschuttle’s “criminals and prostitutes” thesis:
Expressing a view similar to Windschuttle’s, the Chief Protector of Aborigines in Queensland defended the policy: ‘if left to themselves [the] half-caste girls become prostitutes and the boys cattle thieves’.
It is very concerning that the views of racist vigilantes and child-removers find fresh expression in the work of a modern intellectual who considers himself to be “saving” the Aboriginal people from a false history. Breen, too, is disturbed by this.
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. …
In the context of frontier conflict, Winschuttle characterises the Aborigines as intellectually and organisationally incapable of mounting an effective military challenge to their invaders. They were robbers and murderers with a natural criminal inclination. … The criminal view is a re-run of the colonial concept of savagery, a European concept with a long and nasty history. Much of the justification for the enslavement of black Africans in America, for example, was based on the view that all blacks were savages. … Windschuttle’s characterisation of Aboriginal men as pimps who sold their women into prostitution … is little more than a post-modern regurgitation of the colonial concept of savagery.
It is becoming clear that Windschuttle’s work, driven by the desire to deny Aboriginal land rights and self-determination, is riddled with inconsistencies, misrepresentation and soft plagiarism, and is underpinned by a modern version of colonial racism. I’m confident that The Fabrication of Aboriginal History will serve to reinforce the orthodox school’s version of events (except amongst those groups who never believed it anyway).
Breen’s conclusion seems apt: “Windschuttle’s book is well named. It is, as the title claims, a fabrication of Aboriginal history.”
Good post.
Thanks for all this, Robert. Funnily enough, I find his belief that Tas. Aborigines didn’t have fire to be the most damning evidence against him. The linguistic evidence is strong (apart from anything else) but common sense just tells us that it would be nigh-on impossible to survive without fire-making skills. Windbagschuttle’s willingness to accept this implausible idea is revealing I think.
It’s good to see some analysis of the content and ideological underpinnings of Keith Windschuttle’s work. Too few people seem to realise that the book is simply a part of his ongoing denigration and criticism of land rights, reconciliation and museum displays that mention massacres.
It’s intriguing that he claims that his book ‘examines how we can know about the past, the kinds of evidence we can regard as reliable, and how to detect false claims when they are made’.
A graphic example of ‘the kinds of evidence we can regard as reliable, and how to detect false claims when they are made’ occurs in the introduction where eh recycles his earlier attacks on former Governor-General Sir William Deane, the National Museum of Australia and ‘historians of Aboriginal Australia over the previous thirty years’. On page 7 he criticises Deane for making ‘his last symbolic gesture as head of state’ at Mistake Creek with an ‘apology for a massacre the local tribe suffered, and for all those perpetrated by whites on Aborigines’. Yet, as Windschuttle is well aware, and as the transcript of the ABC’s 7.30 Report (11/6/01) shows, Deane actually said: “I’d like to say to the Kitja people how profoundly sorry I personally am that such events defaced our land, this beautiful land”. His speech did not include an apology. Nor did it refer to the perpetrators of either the Mistake Creek massacre or any massacre ‘perpetrated by whites on Aborigines’.
Still, it is good that Windschuttle is encouraging future students of history to think about ‘the kinds of evidence we can regard as reliable’.
Cathie, I agree that the best part of Winschuttle’s work is the challenge it lays down. It tells historians to be very careful in their research, and to be prepared to defend their conclusions. That’s worthwhile, even if you think Windschuttle’s opinion is a racist foregone conclusion.
I’m going to have to do another post on this subject, because The Australian has devoted most of its Inquirer section to it.
In regards to Tasmanian Aboriginies not having use of fire, this has been a long standing theory (I _think_ Tim Flannery also holds this belief), but it’s not quite as simple as that. The claim is, they did not have the knowledge to START fires; they relied on lightning strikes, after which they lit a firestick and endeavoured to keep that alight, even sharing this fire amoung clans. I’m not a historian, I’m not claiming this is true or not, but I thought it was a longstanding belief about the lives of Tasmanian Aboriginies.
In regards to the book, I plan to read it soon, along with its traditional counterpart (forgotten the name of the author of that one…Robert?) and take them both on their relative merits. I believe the Aboriginal race was massacred in Tasmania – let Windschuttle try and convince me otherwise.
I also intend to have a look at Windshuttle’s new book, and to post further some time early next year.
I’ll be seeing if Macquarie University has a copy, as I don’t want my purchase the book and encourage other would-be controversialists.
However, it would have been all power to Windshuttle if he was attacking post-modern historians or focusing on lazy scholarship, which like all other human endeavours there is always the inherent possibility of error.
However, my early impressions, are that Windshuttle makes some similar errors of judgement, and that he seems to have have cooked up his own brand of kooky conspiracy theories.
He is not the only one, retired anthropoligist Roger Sandall who wrote “The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Essays” also seems to believe the academy is jaundiced towards a moral relativism which censors competing opinion.
His book was followed by an array of scathing reviews, in the Australian Book Review, the SMH, The Age.
This review however, points out that there is no mass censorship of views, considering the attention that both Sandall and Windshuttle have received.
“As if radio interviews, opinion-page columns and Saturday Extra front pages were not enough, Sandall was invited, at some months’ notice, to participate in a public forum devoted to his book, which is to take place at this year’s annual conference of the Australian Anthropological Society, to be held in September. Most anthropologists would kill for this kind of exposure. The few scholars to be favoured with such opportunities often cross the globe to take them up. Sandall declined the invitation, claiming that his book was not, after all, about anthropology.”
The complete review is at
http://home.vicnet.net.au/~abr/Sept01/patrickwolfe.html
While Sandall may have some points that there may be some romanticisation of Indigenous cultures, with many unaware of the fierce realities confronted by many such cultures, in my opinion he has been unable to prove his allegation that scholars are slanted towards a prevalant mind-set that hampers their findings.
Hello Robert
Don’t tell me you’ve gone on holidays when Australia is about to sink below the horizon.
Still, even on holidays, you won’t have missed the “fact” that museum professionals, historians and others are dead worried about our National Museum being attacked by a coterie that is set on proving that the government owes indigenous Australians nothing in the way of either a national apology, compensation, consciousness raising (through curriculum changes, museum displays, etc), land tenure, native title, reparation or Sorry Days.
The campaign is being waged by:
The currently active members of the coterie include: Keith Windschuttle (author and publisher), Rod Moran (author and The West Australian literary editor), Paddy McGuinness (columnist and Quadrant editor), Miranda Devine (columnist and Quadrant editorial board member) and Christopher Pearson (journalist, Quadrant editorial board member and The Adelaide Review editor). Their supporters include Michael Duffy (a columnist who apparently once ‘described many of the pro-Aboriginal intelligentsia as “white maggots” who are “trying to suck the blood” from the Aborigines’) and Paul Sheehan (journalist and author).
It is important for people both inside and outside Australia to be aware that the campaign is being waged and that Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History is not a book that stands alone. Numerous Internet links can be made available to those interested in the issue.
With best wishes
Cathie
PS The dot points in my Word version of this e-mail, after “The campaign is being waged by”, disappeared in the paste. Sorry about that.
I take back everything I said about you going on holidays. I hit the refresh button instead of the navigation button and overlooked your latest post. Good to know that you are on the ball.
Sounds as though you enjoyed Margaret River!
Cathie, I’ve fixed the formatting of your comment.
As to the museum board stuff, both Gary Sauer-Thompson (here, here, here and here) and Gummo Trotsky (here) have commented.
I’m most disturbed by the push to consider Aboriginal oral tradition as mutually exclusive of historical fact — something that Windschuttle has pushed and journalists appear to be internalising, as I mentioned on Gummo’s post.
”That’s worthwhile, even if you think Windschuttle’s opinion is a racist foregone conclusion.”
Rob, you deep thinker, you!
Chaz, of the thousands of words I’ve now read and written about Windschuttle’s opinion, you take one sentence and accuse me of shallow thinking. Read the whole post, and the others I’ve made, then come back.
Hi, can anybody help me? im trying to find evidence and recounts of the movement of Tasmanian Aboriginies to Flinders Island. Its an Essay for school and i also need help with Truganini.
It may be too late to warn you George, but if it so happens you’re not putting a politically correct perspective, be very careful what you write for school.
Good Luck
I have returned several times to look at postings. I hoped to see a discussion of whether windschuttles claims were effectively refuted. All that has happened is people attack him as a nasty person but do nothing about showing he was wrong. I begin to understand why someone who thought acdemic integrity was important would be irritated
By now, Tim will have found that the inability of the indigenous Tasmanians surprised those who came into early contact with them.
Carita, on reflection, may have realised that when Deane said, “– how profoundly sorry I personally am,” he was apologising.
For giw, reading Windschuttle’s book and noting Ryan’s use of sabbatical leave to duck a substantive response to the issue, may have been sufficient to “convince” him the postmodernists have waged a dishonest campaign.
Cathie may even have realised attacks on a legion of non existent strawmen is NOT (except in the propoganda sense) a viable defence aginst Windschuttle’s evidence.
Could now be the time for a fresh posting on the Home Page from the site’s proprietor, reviewing Lyndall’s position?
George. Listen and learn from Cassandra. He makes more sense than some of the other so called experts.
I don’t know who George is, but, to use an old expression I haven;t heard in years,
“By George, Jan is right!”
To use another old phrase,
“It’s Time!”, in fact more than time, for Windschuttle’s critics to actually read the KEY charges of deliberate fabrication, check the bogus “references” Ryan has used, and stop trying to nit pick around the edges on relatively trivial matters.
His critics rely primarily on attacking his MOTIVES, not his evidence. Perhaps it’s time also for them to acknowledge it’s their approach, not Windschuttle’s, which is driven by motives, rather than a willingness to analyse the evidence?
Sorry, Rob. This typewriter has multiple users and, in my haste to type quickly before you excommunicated me again, I hit the wrong thingy on the screen. That’s actually me above. May I take this opportunity to sincerely wish you all you deserve?
Windshuttle is the man it shows well how Australian people have been mislead, and the damaging rubbish that is being taught in Universities and schools.
it is with great interest i have followed the windshuttle debate and especially the mistake creek massacre.Having sat around the campfire with the gija lawpeople and hearing the numerous massacre stories that these people have to say, whilst the academic wars and empirical knoweledge deconstruction of their history is waged around them. The gija lawpeople’s question is why don’t these people come to country and talk to them about this history , their history.Peggy Patrick has invited mr windshuttle to country. Other gija lawpeople would like to show mr windshuttle the other massacre sites which abound in the area.They would like to show mr windshuttle country where the pastoralists still call them ‘niggers’.Didn’t mr windshuttle go to the ‘blood on the spinifex exhibition’ @ the ian potter museum which the gija lawpeople/artists so elequently painted the massacres of the area and published a book with paintings and the stories that relate to these numerous massacres. I wonder how many academics/writers went there and saw; and read their stories from their history.I went to the Bedford Downes killing fields with Paddy Bedford and it was not a picnic ground. There was a presence to that place that only comes from death. I wonder when all these academics/writers will go to country and see with their eyes what is being currently debated by all these gardia.
RE; Mistake creek and Blood on the spinifex.
As a great Australian said of these events,
” They used european horses, european guns and european ammunition.”
SPAM
Hi Robert
Is the Aboriginal population going down,? If so do you know why,?
It has gone up quite dramatically, Nicholas; but it’s too embarrassing to explain why.
Even more embarrassing for Newcastle University is Lyndall Ryan et al’s nervous avoidance of the key fabrication issues. Ryan did return to campus, and was even ‘promoted’, but when they hsd a campus launch for their attempted whitewash of her fabrications, that quaint book bearing the title of “Whitewash”, surprise. surprise, neither the students nor most of the acdemics were told.
Notices went up on campus advertising the launch of a book during a Fine Arts exhibition, bur I found no student who had realised it was a History [sic] book being launched, or that the famous Lyndall Ryan had returned (briefly) for its launching.
Not, of course, that many academics would have been surprised when they found out what had happened.
As one academic said, anyone interested in a fascinating Ph D area need go no further than the Three Wise Monkeys behaviour of those aware of what has happened here.
having only just started reading about Tasmanian Aboriginal history, I am reserving my right to comment until I know a bit more…!
However if anyone can send me in the right direction for actual numbers of the Tasmanian Aboriginal nations that perished at the hands of the settlers, albeit through violence, assimilation or disease, I would be most grateful.
Adam