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

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 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’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.

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:

• challenging the validity of written and oral material that points to indigenous people having suffered (in any way) at the hands of “white” Australians,
• using written source materials selectively to indicate that accounts of past suffering have been exaggerated,
• recycling information from the public domain in a way that implies that fresh research has disproved massacre stories,
• pretending that official records give an accurate and complete account of colonisation activities and the administration of indigenous affairs,
• pretending that written records can prove or disprove what happened in now controversial historical events,
• dismissing oral testimony about the removal of children as ‘recovered memory’,
• dismissing massacre stories as ‘bush gossip’ and ‘tales my granny told me’,
• making unfounded allegations against indigenous storytellers to diminish their credibility,
• using the acknowledgment that not all removals of indigenous or mixed-blood children were “bad” to invalidate use of the term ’stolen generations’,
• using journals, newspapers and complaints to government boards and ministers to attack museum professionals who dare to present information about massacres in their displays,
• magnifying errors of “fact” made by high profile Australians to undermine the credibility of the Bringing Them Home report, the High Court, the Mabo judgement, “orthodox” historiography, school curriculums and university history departments, and
• pretending that individual errors of “fact” invalidate entire bodies of work.

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.