Social history, Aboriginal history and the pursuit of truth
Keith Windschuttle
in debate with Stuart Macintyre
Blackheath Philosophy Forum
March 1, 2003
[Stuart Macintyre's response can be read here]

History is an intellectual discipline that goes back to the ancient Greeks. The first real historian, Thucydides, did a remarkable thing. He set out to distance himself from his own political system and to write a work that examined critically what happened to Greece in the Peloponnesian Wars. He not only told of his own side's virtues and victories but of its mistakes and disasters. Thucydides also distanced himself from his own culture and religion. Instead of the mythical tales that all previous human societies had used to affirm their place in the cosmos, he faced the fact that the Greek oracles could not foretell their future and that the Greek gods could not ensure their fortunes. In short, what was remarkable about Thucydides, and all those who have followed him, was that they made a clean break with myths and legends. Instead, they defined history as the pursuit of truth about the past.

The ability to stand outside your own political system, your own culture and your religion, to criticise your own society and to pursue the truth, is something we today take so much for granted that it is almost part of the air we breathe. Without it, our idea of freedom of expression would not exist. We should recognise, however, that this is a distinctly Western phenomenon, that is, it is part of the cultural heritage of those countries -- Europe, the Americas and Australasia -- that have evolved out of Ancient Greece, Rome and Christianity. This idea was never produced by either Confucian or Hindu culture. Under Islam it had a brief life in the fourteenth century but was never heard of again. Rather than take the idea of history for granted, we should regard it as a rare and precious legacy that is our job to nurture and to pass on to future generations.

Until about fifty years ago, the overwhelming majority of the history books written in the West were about two subjects: politics and warfare. The main characters who bestrode the historical stage were those men who ruled the political systems and who commanded the armies and navies. The reason was that history was written largely as a narrative of causes and consequences. Readers wanted to know how kingdoms, empires and republics had come into being, and why many of them had subsequently gone out of existence. Historians saw the social life of ordinary people as something that could flourish only under organized systems of political authority. They also recognized that successful warfare could expand a particular form of social life well beyond its origins, as happened under the Roman Empire, but also that military defeat could snuff out a social system and a culture literally overnight. So the writing of history was largely about trying to understand the major causes that operated in the human world, and these major causes were seen as politics and warfare.

In the last few decades, all of this -- the entire intellectual heritage of history writing -- has come under challenge within our universities. Academic historians have argued that the attempt to distance themselves from their own political system cannot be done. According to many, history is "inescapably political". In tandem with this has come the notion that history cannot be objective because there are no independent vantage points from which one can look down on the past. We can only see the world through the lenses of our own culture, so what we see is inherently subjective. And if that is so, then the pursuit of something as objective as the truth becomes a mere pipe dream. And we have to give up the idea of truth as an absolute concept and substitute a relative idea of truth. Under this notion, different cultures and even different political positions each have their own truths, even if they are incompatible with the truths of other cultures. This stance generally goes under the name of postmodernism.

Along with this critique has come a reconfiguring of the subject matter of history. In most university history departments, political and military history are now minor parts of the curriculum. The pre-eminent position is now held by the new field of social history, which celebrates the achievements not of great men but of ordinary people, especially those minority or disadvantaged groups supposedly outside the mainstream such as women, homosexuals, blacks and immigrants.

Overall, then, in the writing and teaching of history today, the views that are in the ascendancy are those that support a skepticism about the pursuit of objectivity and truth, and those that want to replace political and military history and their focus on great men, with social history and its focus on minority or disadvantaged groups.

I want to argue today that the direction history is now taking is a big mistake.

I'll start with the postmodernist view of historical truth and quote one of its advocates, the Manning Clark Professor of History at the Australian National University, Anne Curthoys, who (in Meanjin, 1991, 2/3) has written:

Many academics in the humanities and social sciences … now reject positivist concepts of knowledge, the notion that one can objectively know the facts. The processes of knowing, and the production of an object that is known, are seen as intertwined. Many take this even further, and argue that knowledge is entirely an effect of power, that we can no longer have any concept of truth at all.

There are two things wrong with this view. First, if we can no longer have any concept of truth, that is, if there are no truths, then the statement "there are no truths" cannot itself be true. It is an obvious self-contradiction. Second, this is a silly thing to say because we have very good knowledge not only about some things that happened in history but many thousands, perhaps even millions of things. For instance, we know all the names of all the leaders of all the nations for at least the past two hundred years and most of the leaders for many centuries before that as well. We know for certain the historical fact that John Howard has been Prime Minister since 1996 and that John Curtin was Australia's Prime Minister for most of World War II. We have the same degree of certainty about a great many of the events of history. Take the statement: "The United States and its allies defeated the Japanese in World War II." This statement is true. It is not a proposition about which there can be any rational doubt at all. The Japanese not only signed a surrender in 1945 but the world would not be the way it is today if this statement wasn't true. Moreover, this is not a statement that is dependent upon some particular cultural vantage point. It is true in American culture, Australian culture, Japanese culture, indeed in every culture on the planet. There is nothing relative about historical truths of this kind.

Let me now turn to the rise of social history and use as an example the National Museum of Australia, which opened in 2001. It was always going to be a museum of history but in the debates over what its contents should be, the view that won out was that it should be a museum of social history. One of its influential documents ("Introduction" to Negotiating Histories, NMA, 2001) argued:

The impact of postmodernism has meant that … triumphalist stories of national progress are no longer intellectually tenable. Many museum practitioners now see their work as a critical practice, committed to drawing out the ways in which constructions of race, class and gender (and sometimes sexuality and age) have shaped national histories.

The result is that most of the Europeans celebrated in the museum's exhibits are those who fit within the categories of "interest group" politics, that is, the politics of feminism, gay liberation, radical environmentalism, and the rights of Aborigines and ethnic groups. The white males who established Australia's political, legal and educational institutions and those who played major roles in building our economy barely rate a mention. The museum has a big electronic map showing the historical spread of introduced pests like rabbits, foxes and prickly pear. But there is no map of the spread of farming, grazing, mining or industry. One of the museum's exhibits celebrates a man who designs dresses for the Gay Mardi Gras in Sydney. Others include environmental activists, anti-nuclear campaigners and the trade unionists who vandalised Parliament House during a riot in 1996. Responding to criticism that the nation had better heroes than these to commemorate, the director took a relativist position: "Heroism," she said, "is in the eye of the beholder."

There are very good reasons, however, why history once paid only a small degree of attention to many of the worthy groups the museum now celebrates, and why it focused so much attention on Anglo-Celts of the male sex. To show why their society took the form it did and how it responded to its major challenges, historians once invoked causes of a political, military, economic and legal nature. Most of the now favoured sexual and ethnic identity groups played only small roles in this account. This was because for most of the time most of these people were not causally effective: they were the objects rather than the agents of history; they were on the receiving end of major historical events, not their instigators.

Now, none of this is meant to argue that you cannot write acceptable histories of women or ethnic groups. It is perfectly legitimate, for instance, to write an account of the history of the domestic activities of Australian women in the First World War, even though those women had no impact on the outcome. Similarly, ethnic histories are obviously important to members of those ethnic groups and there is nothing inherently unscholarly about producing them. However, for a national history or a national museum obliged to tell a national story, the social history approach has serious drawbacks.

For a start, histories of this kind are never, in themselves, sufficient to provide a complete explanation of the lives of the people discussed. Minority groups do not live in cocoons of their own making. Their lives are governed by the great political, legal and economic structures of Australian society. Any attempt to tell a national history, in either a book or a museum, is obliged to explain these major influences on the lives of all the nation's members. This means focusing on these major structures and the key decision-makers who brought them into being or changed their direction.

Another problem for social history is lack of coherence. By abandoning the traditional approach to history based on a narrative of major events and their causes, in favour of interest group politics, history loses its explanatory power. There is no integrated story that links events into an intelligible framework. In short, the attempt to use social history to tell national history becomes incoherent and unintelligible. This is the major problem of the historical displays at the National Museum and in most of the Australian history written by people employed by our universities today.

However, when historians indulge in the politics of their favoured minority groups by far the worst outcome is that they abandon the very objective that history was founded to pursue: the search for the truth.

Most of the authors who have written Aboriginal history in Australia over the past thirty years have not been overt postmodernists. Nonetheless they have accepted that history is "inescapably political" and they have taken the view that evidence can be treated in a cavalier fashion and that what matters is the 'big picture" or the political ends served. Authors like Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan have dedicated their work to what they see as Aboriginal political interests, especially the justification of Aboriginal political sovereignty.

The first volume of my work The Fabrication of Aboriginal History is about Tasmania, or Van Diemen's Land as it was known until 1855. Lyndall Ryan tells us that the Tasmanian Aborigines were subject to a "conscious policy of genocide". Both she and Henry Reynolds claim the so-called "Black War" from 1824 to 1831 was an example of frontier guerilla warfare in which Aborigines fought against the white invasion of their land.

However, after examining all the archival evidence and double-checking the references cited by the most reputable academic historians of the subject. I have come to the conclusion that most of the story is myth piled upon myth. Here are some of the transgressions by its leading historians.

Lyndall Ryan cites the Hobart Town Courier as a source for several stories about atrocities against Aborigines in 1826. However, that newspaper did not begin publication until October 1827 and the other two newspapers of the day made no mention of these alleged killings.

Ryan cites the diary of the colony's first chaplain, Rev Robert Knopwood, as the source for her claim that between 1803 and 1808, the colonists killed 100 Aborigines. Between these years, however, the diaries record only four Aborigines being killed.

Ryan asserts: "Even if only half the stories [George Augustus] Robinson heard were true, then it is possible to account for seven hundred shot." However, if you read Robinson's diaries and count the incidents, you find they record a total of only 188 Aborigines killed by whites, and many of these are dubious claims anyway.

Ryan says that the documentary evidence shows 280 Aborigines were "recorded shot" and that unrecorded killings would bring the total to 700. However, she provides no sources for these figures. Brian Plomley did a survey in 1992 but could find records of only 109 Aborigines killed. I could find records for only 118.

Ryan claims that in 1826, police killed fourteen Aborigines at Pitt Water. However, none of the three references she provides mention any Aborigines being killed there in 1826 or any other time.

Ryan claims that hostilities in the northern districts in 1827 included: a massacre of Port Dalrymple Aborigines by a vigilante group of stockmen at Norfolk Plains; the killing of a kangaroo hunter in reprisal for him shooting Aboriginal men; the burning of a settler's house because his stockmen had seized Aboriginal women; the spearing of three other stockmen and clubbing of one to death at Western Lagoon. But not one of the five sources she cites mentions any of these events.

Between 1828 and 1830, according to Ryan, "roving parties" of police constables and convicts killed 60 Aborigines. Not one of the three references she cites mentions any Aborigines being killed, let alone 60. The governor at the time and most subsequent authors regarded the roving parties as completely ineffectual.

Ryan says the "Black War" began in the winter of 1824 with the Big River tribe launching patriotic attacks on the invaders. However, all the assaults on whites that winter were made by a small gang of detribalized blacks led by a man named Musquito who was not defending his tribal lands. He was an Aborigine originally from Sydney who had worked in Hobart for ten years before becoming a bushranger.

In 1841, after they accompanied George Augustus Robinson to Victoria, five Tasmanian Aborigines attacked several shepherds and looted their huts in the Western Port-Dandenong districts. Ryan claims: "Their tactics had all the marks of sustained guerilla resistance to white settlement." However, these so-called "guerillas" were in what was to them a foreign country where they were intruders just as much as anyone from England. The notion that they were offering "resistance" to white incursions of the tribal lands of Victorian Aborigines, with whom they had no cultural, linguistic, tribal or kin connections of any kind, is utterly absurd. Yet this is what passes for historical analysis in the book described by Henry Reynolds as "by far the best and most scholarly work on the Tasmanian Aborigines in the twentieth century".

Lloyd Robson, author of the two-volume History of Tasmania, claims the settler James Hobbs in 1815 witnessed Aborigines killing 300 sheep at Oyster Bay and the next day the 48th Regiment killed 22 Aborigines in retribution. However, it would have been difficult for Hobbs to have witnessed this in 1815 because at the time he was living in India. Moreover, the first sheep did not arrive at Oyster Bay until 1821 and in 1815 the 48th Regiment never went anywhere near Oyster Bay.

Robson and four other authors repeat a story that 70 Aborigines were killed in a battle with the 40th Regiment near Campbell Town in 1828. However, all neglect to say that a local merchant told a government inquiry that he went to the alleged site with a corporal on the following day but could find no bodies or blood, only three dead dogs. The corporal then confessed: "To tell you the truth, we did not kill any of them."

Henry Reynolds claims the chief agent of the Van Diemen's Land Company, Edward Curr, was one of the settlers making "increased demands for extermination" of the Aborigines. The full text of the statement Reynolds cites, however, is Curr's pessimistic prediction of what might possibly happen if Aboriginal violence continued, not an advocacy of their extermination. Curr wrote: "I am far from advising such a proceeding … My own hands however shall be guiltless of blood, and I shall discountenance it as far as my authority extends, except under circumstances of aggression or in self defence."

Reynolds claims Lieutenant-Governor Arthur recognized from his experience in the Peninsular War against Napoleon than the Aborigines had adopted Spanish tactics of guerilla warfare, in which small bands attacked the troops of their enemy. However during his military career, Arthur never served in Spain. The full text of the statement Reynolds cites talks not about troops coming under attack by guerillas but of Aborigines merely robbing and assaulting unarmed shepherds on remote outstations.

My book has many more examples of this kind. I haven't even mentioned the case where Henry Reynolds actually changed the text of a statement by Lieutenant-Governor Arthur about the objectives of the Black Line. Were there time today, I could go on and on. But let me summarise.

The truth is that there was nothing on the Aborigines' side that resembled frontier warfare, patriotic struggle or systematic resistance of any kind. The so-called "Black War" was a minor crime wave by two Europeanised black bushrangers, followed by an outbreak of robbery, assault and murder by tribal Aborigines. All the evidence at the time, on both the white and black sides of the frontier, was that their principal objective was to acquire flour, tea, sugar and bedding, objects that to them were European luxury goods.

In the entire period from 1803 when the colonists first arrived, to 1834 when all but one family of Aborigines had been removed to Flinders Island, my calculation is that the British were responsible for killing only 118 of the original inhabitants, mostly in self defence or in hot pursuit of Aborigines who has just assaulted and robbed white households. In all of Europe's colonial encounters with the New Worlds of the Americas and the Pacific, the colony of Van Diemen's Land was probably the site where the least indigenous blood of all was deliberately shed.

Since the publication of my book last November it has been the subject of a heated debate in the press. Let me point out how our academic historians have responded.

In last month's edition of Australian Book Review, Alan Atkinson, Professor of History at the University of New England, described an article of mine in the Australian (December 9) as "heart-sinking". That article was largely a list of examples of the abuse of scholarship that I have just given, showing invented incidents, concocted footnotes, altered documents and gross exaggeration of the Aboriginal death toll. What made Atkinson's heart sink, however, was not this catalogue of misconduct. Instead he was dismayed that my critique was based on such an outdated concern as getting the facts right. He lamented: "Windschuttle aims to take the discipline of History back to some golden age when it was all about facts."

Some non-academic commentators were concerned at my book's findings - for instance, the journalist Michael Duffy wrote in the Courier Mail (December 14) "allegations of scholarly fraud on this scale are virtually unknown". However, university-based historians tried to dismiss them as unimportant. Raymond Evans of the University of Queensland wrote in the Courier-Mail (December 20) that all I had uncovered in the work of Henry Reynolds, Lyndall Ryan and Lloyd Robson was "a clutch of regrettable mistakes", including no more than "half a dozen alleged gaffes" in Ryan's book The Aboriginal Tasmanians. Ryan herself in the Australian (December 17) described these as "a few minor errors that can easily be rectified".

However, as I've already indicated, Ryan's book goes well beyond a few forgivable gaffes. There are at least seventeen cases where she either invented atrocities and other incidents or provided false footnotes, plus another seven cases where the number of Aborigines she claims were killed or captured is either outright false or exaggerated beyond belief. Lloyd Robson committed a similar degree of fabrication.

Ryan has now had more than a year to answer my major charges, first made at a conference in December 2001. Yet her response has been to retreat behind the postmodernist view of historical truth. She contrasts her view and mine about what happened in Tasmania: "Two truths are told. Is only one 'truth' correct?" (Australian, December 17) She puts the word "truth" in quotation marks to indicate it is only a relative concept. However, if two different interpretations of history are incompatible, as they are in this case, they cannot both be truths. The truth of one entails the falsity of the other.

Ryan also writes (Australian, December 17): "responsible scholars realize that no one can claim a final and complete 'truth'." Again, she puts "truth" in quotation marks. It is not difficult, however, to show that there are some truths in this debate that can be very easily established as final and complete. For example, Ryan claims that Rev Knopwood's diary recorded 100 Aborigines killed between 1804 and 1808. Anyone can check this by going through his diary and making a count. If you do this you will find that I have told the truth when I say there are only four Aboriginal deaths recorded in the diaries in that period. Ryan's figure of 100 killed is definitely false. The same method can be applied to determine, once and for all, the truth or falsity of the other examples I gave earlier.

The overall conclusion I want to draw from the history of Tasmania is this: in line with the current fashion for interest group politics, Tasmanian historians have pursued political ends. They have decided the big political goals they want to accomplish, which is Aboriginal sovereignty, and have then gone looking for evidence that fits that objective. However, the proper pursuit of history differs from this in the respect it gives to evidence. While it is true that almost all historians come to their task with the aim of establishing a certain point, or of solving a certain problem, one of the most common experiences is that the evidence they find leads them to modify their original approach. When they go looking for evidence, they do not simply find the one thing they are looking for. Most will find many others that they had not anticipated. If the historian is honest, then this unexpected evidence will suggest alternative arguments, interpretations and conclusions, and different problems to pursue. In other words, the evidence often makes genuine historians change their minds, quite contrary to the practice of politicised historians, whose aim is primarily to find evidence that fits their preconceptions. For the politicised historian, if the evidence poses problems for his conclusions, it is the evidence itself that has to be ignored, rejected or explained away. For the genuine historian, in the end it is the evidence itself that determines what case it is possible to make.

None of this means you cannot draw political conclusions from history. Indeed, history remains one of our best teachers of political lessons. But it can only teach us well if we set out to seek the truth. If we start historical research with our political minds already made up we are doing no more than re-circulating our existing political prejudices.

Let me finish by emphasizing that all historians have a public responsibility to report their evidence fully and accurately and to cite their sources honestly. To pretend that facts do not matter and that acceptable interpretations can be drawn from false or non-existent evidence is to abandon the pursuit of historical truth altogether. Historians who do so betray their professional duty to preserve the integrity of the ancient discipline of history itself.

Unfortunately, this is what a number of the Australian academics who have written Aboriginal history have done. They have betrayed their profession and misled their country. The debate over what happened to the Aborigines is not only about the Aborigines. Ultimately, it is about the character of the Australian nation and the calibre of the civilization that Britain brought to these shores in 1788. For some reason, the academic historians who dominate this field prefer to portray their own country as the moral equivalent of Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia. They are entitled to their opinion but they are not entitled to invent the facts on which that opinion is based. Nor are they entitled to deceive their students and the public at large as they have been doing for the past thirty years.