When history falls victim to politics
Keith Windschuttle
The Age
July 14 2001

 

In 1999 the University of Queensland historian, Raymond Evans, published a collection of his essays entitled Fighting Words. The book begins with a nineteenth century quotation from Chief Seattle of the Onondaga tribe telling white people that, although they have taken the Indians' land, the ghosts of the dispossessed tribes would always haunt them. Evans was apparently unaware that in 1997 Albert Furtwangler revealed this speech to be a fraud. New Age environmental activists had re-written the original to support their own political agenda.

Even though he has fallen victim to someone else doctoring the evidence for political reasons, Evans still thinks historians should have political objectives. His book disparages traditional "objectivity" and says history should be put into the service of contemporary identity group politics, that is, the triumvirate of gender, race and class.

One result is the essay he co-authored with Bill Thorpe, published in the latest Overland and in The Age last Saturday. This is a critique of my articles in Quadrant last year where I questioned the current historical orthodoxy about the violence done to Aborigines. I argued these historians were not reliable. They exaggerated the statistics, manipulated the evidence and fabricated some incidents, including massacres, which never occurred. Even though he wasn't one of my original targets, Evans provides a good example of what now passes for scholarship in Aboriginal history.

Fighting Words recounts the now forgotten Battle of Patonga. On the Hawkesbury River, north of Sydney, Evans writes, "the indigenous inhabitants, the Dhurag, had once waged there a war of no quarter lasting more than two decades as they were slowly obliterated. Silent Patonga hid its secrets well."

The source Evans relied upon for this story was journalist John Pilger's 1986 book Heroes. Pilger had taken the story from David Denholm's 1979 history, The Colonial Australians. Denholm himself also relied on secondary sources.

Evans's account is therefore four times removed from the original evidence, and it shows. For a start, despite the reverence both express for Aboriginal people, neither Evans nor Pilger took the trouble to get their name right. They were the Dharug, not the Dhurag. Secondly, Denholm was describing a conflict in the 1790s on the Hawkesbury River near Windsor. None of this happened anywhere near Patonga, which is at the mouth of the Hawkesbury in territory of the Guringai not Dharug people. A war there in the 1790s was unlikely since the first whites did not arrive at Patonga until 130 years later.

In short, Evans does not have a clue what he is talking about. Patonga is a village with a few dozen houses, a caravan park and a beach surrounded by a national park. It never had any "settlers" in either the eignteenth or nineteenth centuries to provoke a war with the Aborigines. It was not subdivided until the 1920s and housing has never extended more than one hundred metres inland from the sand spit that forms the beach. It is a long way from Windsor. Even using two expressways today, it is still a two and a half hour drive.

Evans and Thorpe accuse me of the sin of omission and say I avoided incidents such as the Wiradjuri War in New South Wales in 1839. I can assure them that in the book I am now preparing I will definitely discuss what happened to the Wiradjuri, especially the Bell's Falls Gorge Massacre near Bathurst. Several books now discuss this event, as well as a NSW Department of School Education film. The new National Museum in Canberra has it prominently on display. The film tells how Red Coat soldiers surprised a party of Aborigines, mainly women and children. The soldiers forced them to the edge of the falls, where the women halted, clutching their children. "With musket fire they forced them to their deaths over the cliffs of Bells Falls Gorge." The National Museum says it was settlers not soldiers who did the deed, but otherwise agrees.

This story, however, is a complete fabrication. There is no contemporary evidence for it. The first reports did not appear in print until 1962, that is, more than 120 years later, when an article in the Bathurst Times by a local amateur historian reported it as one of the oral legends of the district. Since then, this folk myth has been cited in history books and retold as ancient Aboriginal tradition.

The scholarship of Evans and Thorpe is also on display in their deformed version of my original articles. They write: "Windschuttle claims there was only one 'genuine' massacre of Aboriginal people in Australian history (Myall Creek in 1838)". This is not true. In fact, I provided a detailed account of the 1928 Coniston station massacre in central Australia, as well as acknowledging others. My case was that massacres were unusual events, "rare and isolated", with their own specific causes. The picture of the Australian frontier as a war zone where whites could kill blacks with impunity is a myth concocted by politically inspired historians, unwarranted by the evidence.

All that Evans and Thorpe demonstrate is that we have reached the sad stage where we can no longer trust our historians to tell the truth about what happened to the Aborigines. They have abandoned scholarship for politics in a misguided attempt to support Aboriginal demands by defaming the British colonisation of this country. Anyone who checks their sources, however, soon finds the only reputation they have damaged has been their own.