Exposing academic deceptions of past wrongs
Keith Windschuttle
Sydney Morning Herald
19 September 2000

The debate that has sprung up this month over the number of Aboriginal deaths on the frontier of the Australian colonies in the past two centuries is only partly about the quality of historical research into the issue. It is also about the foundation of the Australian nation. Was it based on the rule of law and civilised values that abhorred the killing of the defenceless? Or was it one that colluded in the massacre of many thousands of Aborigines who were doing no more than defending their traditional lands?

This is an issue that has important political consequences for us today. I do not subscribe to the Prime Minister's view that we have no responsibility for what was done by previous generations. If there were terrible deeds done in the past, those of us who have inherited this society are obliged to do what we can to rectify them.

So it is not surprising that the issue of how many Aborigines were killed on the frontier, and the circumstances behind their deaths, is one that still generates a great deal of passion. Nonetheless, I found it amazing to read Robert Manne's column in Monday's Sydney Morning Herald where my paper criticising the current orthodoxy among historians was compared to the writings of the Nazi sympathiser and Holocaust denier, David Irving.

This paper will be published in Quadrant in October, November and December when people can make up their own minds about it. But in the meantime, I need to defend myself by stating the paper's main points.

Manne claims I have "done no historical research in the area of Aboriginal history". Since he has read my paper, he must know this is false. The main point of my exercise was to go back and check the primary sources used by the principal historians in the field.

When I did this I discovered that there has been a major academic deception perpetrated about the total number of Aboriginal deaths in the colonial era. Since 1981, historians have accepted Henry Reynolds' claim that 20,000 Aborigines were killed before Federation. In his estimate of the total, Reynolds attributes 8000-10,000 deaths to Queensland and cites his own research published in the 1970s as his source.

But when I tracked down his original reference -- a typescript publication from James Cook University that is held by only a few libraries -- I found that it is not a study of Aboriginal deaths at all. It is a calculation of the number of whites killed by Aborigines. It does not even mention a figure of 8000-10,000 Aboriginal dead.

Manne's article does not discuss this deception, even though my exposure of it has since led Henry Reynolds to admit that he did not have evidence for the total figure and that all he was doing was guessing. The basis of his guess was that, because there is reasonable evidence that 800-850 Europeans were killed by Aborigines in Queensland, and because ten times as many blacks "may have been" killed as whites, the figure of Aboriginal deaths should be regarded as 8000-10,000.

It is this ratio of ten black deaths for every white that Reynolds calls an "educated guess". Yet he offers no evidence in its favour nor any argument about why we should accept it. There is nothing "educated" about such a guess. It is no more than unsubstantiated speculation.

This is not how historians should proceed. To guess at or make up the figures is irresponsible, especially when there are alternative methods available. There have been a small number of regional studies of frontier killings in Australia. These studies provide tables of the incidents where indigenes and colonists met their deaths, how many were involved, and the original source or evidence for the information.

However, when you read these regional studies, it quickly becomes apparent why Reynolds was not interested in using them and why Manne omits my paper's discussion of them.

For they show that the colonial frontier was not defined by the mass murder of Aborigines. Most killings of Aborigines occurred not in large numbers but in ones and twos. There were individual causes involved in each case that do not allow for any kind of easy generalisation, let alone the accusation of wilful genocide that is now thrown about which such cavalier disdain for evidence.

It remains true that there were some massacres, but they were rare and isolated events. In some cases, such as at Myall Creek in 1838, the colonial authorities tried and executed those responsible. In others, such as on Coniston Station in the Northern Territory in 1928, those involved were investigated but, quite unjustly, were not prosecuted for what were clearly terrible crimes.

Manne also fails to mention the fact that my paper is partly an argument against the claim in Phillip Knightley's new book, Australia: A Biography of a Nation, that the British colonisation of Australia was the moral equivalent of the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews.

Knightley bases his case on the evidence of four events that recent historians have described as massacres. I show that only one of them deserves this description. Two were not massacres. They were legitimate police operations to apprehend Aborigines who had murdered white stockmen and, in the ensuing struggle, there were casualties and fatalities on both sides. The third incident, at Forrest River, WA, in 1926, is pure mythology. Not only was there no massacre but there was no good evidence that any Aborigines were ever killed at all. The comparison between our colonial forbears and the Nazis is as false as it is odious.

Manne describes me as "a wild anti-capitalist leftist of the '60s who has, in recent years, lurched rather violently to the right". In fact, for most of my adult life, I subscribed to pretty much the same set of political views as he does now, including what I once thought, and wrote, was a very bleak story about the destruction of Aboriginal society.

In my days as a leftist, however, I took to heart what I once heard Noam Chomsky describe to an anti-Vietnam War rally in Sydney as the responsibility of the intellectual. It is "to tell the truth and expose lies." Robert Manne's account of what I have said fails this test badly.