Reviewing the History Wars

Abstract

The Fabrication of Aboriginal History is a shocking book, shocking in its allegation of fabrication and also in its refusal of the interpretive framework that earlier historians employed.Keith Windschuttle's book has two purposes: to examine the reliability of the historians who had written about race relations in colonial Van Diemen's Land and to propose a counter-history. It works by a loose reading of the work of those historians and a close reading of their treatment of massacres. Windschuttle treats the historians who have worked over the past 25 years on Aboriginal history as all implicated in the genocide thesis. He calls them 'the orthodox school' and he claims that they maintain the orthodoxy by covering up each other's mistakes and suppressing any contrary interpretation. He alleges that they were formed in the radicalism of the 1960s and accuses them of a deliberate politicisation of history.This school comprises prominent historians such as Henry Reynolds, Lyndall Ryan and the late Lloyd Robson, archaeologists such as John Mulvaney and Rhys Jones, local historians such as the late Brian Plomley and younger researchers such as Sharon Morgan. The ages of these scholars range over several decades; they vary widely in views and sympathies. The idea that they colluded in a political project is as absurd as his allegation that they victimise dissidents is offensive.He misreads those whom he castigates. Windschuttle repeatedly alleges that Reynolds and Ryan sought to depict the frontier as a place of indiscriminate white killing. Yet Reynolds was principally interested in the Aboriginal response to the newcomer, and consistently argued that it took a variety of forms, from co-operation and partnership to resistance and warfare. Ryan was concerned to relate the story of the dispossession and survival of Tasmanian Aboriginals, and frontier violence was only one part of her story. So far from them creating an 'orthodox school', other historians had long since challenged the emphasis on frontier violence and queried the idea of a frontier with Europeans on one side and Aboriginals on the other. The greater part of Windschuttle's book is given over to a minute examination of the massacres. He scrutinises the historians' treatment of these events, tracks their references back to the archives and compares their versions against the original source. This is by far the most damaging of his criticisms, as he finds some of the sources do not support what the historians reported while others do not even exist. He pays careful attention to chronology and topography, consistency and plausibility -when and where did the incident occur? who was there and can we trust their version of what happened? -to reduce the number of casualties. He imposes stringent standards of evidence -from reputable eyewitnesses and preferably corroborated -to rule out higher numbers.While Windschuttle applies these forensic techniques to prosecute historians, he also acts as the counsel for the defence for the colonial authorities. They were enga...

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