Henry Reynolds vs. Keith Windschuttle on Aboriginal history
debate at Gould's Book Arcade, Newtown, Sydney
12 November 2000

Henry Reynolds

I've spoken in some funny venues in my time. This must be among the most eccentric but endearing. On the 11th of October, Bill Hayden gave a speech in Tasmania, at the University of Tasmania actually, called "Core cultural values: We ignore them at our peril". Interestingly enough, on the front page of the material sent to the media was a declaration which read "The writer of this paper is chairman of the editorial board of the magazine Quadrant". Being Governor General did not measure up with that great achievement. But we had been warned as to what to expect. Among many things, Mr Hayden said that the evidence given before the HREOC inquiry into the stolen children was very much based on faulty memory syndrome. Now this, I personally felt, was at best insensitive and at worst offensive, given the extraordinary sensitivity of the matter. Though he also went on towards the end and made reference to what he called my scholarly reputation, which he said had been invoked so freely to bolster the burden of guilt accusations against the nation. But he then informed his audience and the Australian media, to whom his papers had been sent, that that reputation was rather tattered now, and that Keith Windschuttle had carved up that reputation. Now, I know the metaphors are mixed, tired and predictable, but then indeed so was the text.

But indeed there had quite earlier, of course, been several publications by Keith Windschuttle, in particular an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, which you I presume have read, entitled "Exposing academic deception of past wrongs". This was followed up by a recent Quadrant article called "The myths of frontier massacres in Australian History". Now, in this, Keith told the Australian public that he had discovered, indeed, a major and academic deception, and in the Quadrant article said that many historians had actually manufactured stories about the widespread killing of Aborigines. They had indeed been guilty of outright fabrication. Now, you can just imagine the joy that such an exposure would have created in conservative circles in Australia. You can probably see them there at lunch in the Melbourne Club dribbling into their consume in delight, that we had been put in our place.

But of course there was some point to this, that since the publication of Charles Rowley's The Destruction of Aboriginal Society in 1970, there has been a consensus, by and large, about the reality of frontier conflict in Australia. And of course, this consensus has grown as the scholarship has increased. There has been now at least 20 years of serious, detailed research that has found an outlet in many books -- general, regional and even local. These studies have been in numerous disciplines, not just history but in anthropology, and sociology and even in some linguistics. There have also been a large number of theses: PhD's, Masters and BA Honours theses. Now, in my view, this work is one of the most impressive achievements of Australian intellectual life of the last generation. It is my view that the evidence for substantial, continuing frontier conflict is overwhelming, convincing and incontrovertible. Now, it was for that reason that in my book, The Other Side of the Frontier, first published in 1981, that I said that it was reasonable to suppose -- I didn't say more than that -- I said that it was reasonable to suppose that twenty thousand Aborigines had been killed in conflict etc. I regarded that as a modest, deliberately modest estimate, in order to counter the exaggerated claims of many that because the Aboriginal population had declined so much, then the death rate from conflict must have been much greater.

But this consensus which some of us would say results from the evidence, finds another explanation in the work of Keith Windschuttle. So if it's not the evidence, why is there this consensus? Well, it seems, my friends, that there is a conspiracy. I'm afraid to say, there is a conspiracy. I'm not quite sure who it is at the moment but all of those usual suspects: the lefties and the bleeding heart liberals and the black arm bearers and the new elite. Old Bill talking about elites, my goodness me. Living in Yarralumla doesn't put you in the elite, it seems. But not only is there a conspiracy at the moment, but there has been for a long time, that is, from at least the 1830s up to the present there has been this theme which can be seriously construed as a conspiracy. That is, from the 1830s onwards there was a cabal of missionaries, do-gooders and activists who, according to the theory I'm talking about, made up massacre stories to influence policy. And they were overwhelmingly committed to a policy of what Keith Windschuttle calls 'separatism'. Now I'm sure I'm reasonably simple, but I would have thought those who opposed killing aborigines were different to those who killed them, because killing them must be the most emphatic form of separatism imaginable. But it seems that the separatists are all about us. There are probably some of them here now. You may actually be standing next to a separatist. I'm not quite sure how you identify them, but they must be with us.

Now, this theme was taken up in another article in another Quadrant in September, 'The Break-up of Australia'. Here Keith Windschuttle remarked, and this remark was highlighted as a subtitle, Reynolds -- by which he was talking about me -- Reynolds hopes the Aboriginal claim for self government will be decided by an international legal tribunal and backed by the authority of the United Nations. The Australian political system will then have no choice but to accept the outcome. Now, I'm not quite sure how Keith knows about my hopes, because I don't think that's what my hopes are at all. And it might be not unreasonable for me to turn back to him, as he has done to so many other writers, and say 'where is the evidence?' for reading the hopes of my heart. That is not my view and nor is my view what he characterizes as separatism. Let me just quote to you that the separatists want Aboriginal people to "live within an Aboriginal state governed by Aboriginal culture and laws, where residents can recreate a pre-industrial, pre-capitalist lifestyle to keep the modern world at bay". Now I've been around Aboriginal politics for a long long time and I don't think I know anyone, anyone, who thinks that is a desirable future for Aboriginal Australia. I have no idea where that idea has possibly come from.

But, of course, one of the most important aspects of the Keith Windschuttle recent opus is, as I say, his argument that historians have betrayed their professional standards and engaged in deception and manufacture of stories. Not that I find much evidence to substantiate these claims. There are, of course, a number of charges. There is the charge about Forrest River, which is too detailed to go into here. His argument comes from a book by Rod Moran, the literary editor of the West Australian -- not that that is any thing against him, of course -- in which he presents a lot of evidence, but, as far as I'm concerned, doesn't substantially challenge the idea that there was indeed a massacre. He attacks Lyndall Ryan's work of 1974, and basically accuses her of deception, when since 1974 much of the more recent work, extremely detailed, extremely meticulous, particularly by the great scholar of the Tasmanian Aborigines, N. J. B. Plomley, has shown that her estimates of death by conflict were modest to say the least. He then calls doubt upon the very massive work of Roger Milliss. One of the, among many things, and obviously I'm being selective, one of the many reasons he said that Milliss's estimate of death was too large is that no one reported dead bodies, and if more had been killed they would have reported it. What alarms me is that this is a case of fundamental misunderstanding of the climate of New South Wales in 1838 when nobody, no white person on the frontier, would have reported to the authorities about the Aboriginal bodies.

Finally, it is above all the question of Queensland. When he looked at my work in which with a colleague we counted, pretty accurately I think, that perhaps 850 settlers were killed on the frontier in Queensland. And he then says but we didn't have any evidence for Aborigines being killed. Well, you may not need this, but I think perhaps I should go though it step by step. The 850 people were killed; many, many more would have been wounded; spears weren't all that lethal; maybe two thousand casualties; innumerable attacks on European properties; and the critical thing about the frontier is that settlers revenged every killing of Europeans many times over, and they said they did. They said they did, time and time again, openly and in public. So if two thousand Europeans were attacked, how many aborigines do you suppose were killed in return? After all, the Europeans in Queensland were on horseback and they had repeating rifles and they had six shot revolvers. But above all the Queensland story has to include the native police, a paramilitary force which rode the frontier from 1848, continuing in a modified form to 1907. For fifty years up to two to three hundred armed Aboriginal troopers with white officers roamed the frontier. They didn't arrest anybody, they didn't take prisoners, or those they did, every time were shot while escaping, and there were no prisons of the sort that existed in Western Australia. What do you suppose happened on the frontier with the native police? In 1861 in the Queensland parliament, the Attorney-General got up in debate and said the instructions are to the native police to disperse Aboriginal groups. Any large gathering is to be dispersed, and when they cause any trouble they are to be dispersed. And he said of dispersal, which it is idle to dispute, means nothing but firing into them. It means nothing but firing into them. And another member of the government in the same debate in the parliament reported in the newspapers said if extermination is desired, and that seems to be the only option, then the native police are the only appropriate force. I believe my estimate of 20,000 Aborigines killed on the frontier is modest and utterly sustainable by vast amounts of evidence.

Let me conclude by returning to the beginning. I believe that when Bill Hayden said, in effect, that almost anyone who went before that commission was somehow psychologically disturbed and was making their stories up, I felt that was gratuitous and insulting. I fear also that in many ways the writings of Keith Windschuttle fall in the same camp. I think they are insulting to all those Aboriginal families in north and central Australia who know what happened to their ancestors. They know what happened to their parents and their grandparents and their great-grandparents. Fortunately, I don't imagine Quadrant reaches those parts of the world. I also think that Windschuttle has been profoundly unfair to all of those people who protested against the killing on the frontier by suggesting that most of them were in some way psychologically unbalanced and made up the stories. I also feel that Keith has been very unfair to the historical profession by suggesting that large numbers of historians have manufactured or fabricated stories. I think that is insulting and offensive to the whole historical profession. I call on him now to provide the evidence of that and, if you don't mind me ascending into the demotic, Keith, it is time to put up or shut up.

Keith Windschuttle

Over the past twenty years, Australian historians have grossly exaggerated the degree of violence between Aborigines and colonists in Australia. They have claimed at least twenty thousand blacks were killed -- most of them shot dead -- to make the country safe for white settlement. However, I have tried to show their evidence is highly suspect. Most of it is poorly founded and some of it is outright fabrication. Judging by the outraged response in September when my argument gained some media publicity, you would think I was the first person to say this. Far from it. Let me give you an example. In 1995, a well-known Australian historian made a very similar critique when he rejected Lyndall Ryan's claims about the number of Aborigines killed in Tasmania. Ryan had claimed that 700 blacks died at white hands. But, according to this other historian, that figure is far too high.

Such assessment is fraught with difficulties. No reliance can be placed on reports of Aboriginal deaths. No systematic count of bodies was ever made. Guesswork and exaggeration were common … No one had any idea of the real figure.

This historian explained the inflation of the numbers in terms of the politics of those concerned: "There is a tendency among writers sympathetic to the Aborigines to exaggerate the numbers killed in order to emphasise the brutality of the colonial encounter." Instead of 700 Aborigines killed, this writer put the figure at between 250 and 400.

The book where this is said is entitled Fate of a Free People and its author is Henry Reynolds. It is strange indeed that when Reynolds makes a critique of Lyndall Ryan's figures there is not even a ripple of concern from the historical fraternity, but when I make exactly the same methodological points against Reynolds himself, it is likened to denying the Holocaust. I thought the response in the media in September by Reynolds, Robert Manne and their friends, bordered on the hysterical. What Reynolds might have done, had he been wiser, was concede my critique and agree that his original 1981 estimate was not well founded. Were he a real historian -- that is, a genuine seeker of truth -- he could have done this without too much damage to his reputation. The fact that he and his friends chose the opposite tack, denying what I said and responding with personal vilification, is itself good evidence that they have a different agenda.

If you read Fate of a Free People it is perfectly clear what this is. This book is not a proper work of history. Instead, it is an extended argument in support of land rights for Tasmanian Aborigines. In this book, like most of the others he has written, Reynolds is acting not like an historian but as legal advisor to the plaintiffs. When he examines the primary source documents, he looks only for evidence that supports his clients' case. He omits or suppresses any evidence that might count against them. This might be appropriate for a barrister in a court of law, but, for an historian, it means he not only writes bad history, he writes false history. I'll illustrate this with Reynolds' case for the Aborigines of Tasmania.

He says the events known as the Black War of 1824 to 1831 were a form of guerrilla warfare by the Aborigines in defence of their tribal lands. Before this there had been little conflict between the races, but once the colonists took over the central grasslands between where the Aborigines hunted kangaroos, peace turned into war. Put this way, the conflict seems perfectly understandable to our modern minds. Who wouldn't defend his most important territory against a bunch of interlopers? As Reynolds shows, there were some colonists at the time -- newspaper editors and even Governor Arthur himself -- who explained events in this way. Plausible though it might be to a European mind, the story, however, is only partly true and is an oversimplification. There were plenty of blacks at the time who attacked whites for quite different reasons.

For instance, in the first year of the Black War, 1824, almost all the killings of whites were done by a group of three Aborigines, a man named Musquito and his two offsiders. Now, Musquito was not defending his tribal territory or trying to reclaim his hunting grounds. He was an Aborigine, originally from Sydney, who had been brought down by the British to help them liaise with the locals. He eventually became a bushranger. His two offsiders were both Tasmanian Aborigines but they were "town blacks" who had spent the best part of the previous twenty years living among the whites in Hobart. In short, instead of warriors defending their traditional territory, the three of them were a gang of criminals who stole from the settlers, killing anyone who resisted them.

Similarly, in 1829, the second worst year for the killing of whites, the Aborigines who committed most of the murders were the Port Davey tribe. However, no one had taken their land nor disturbed their hunting grounds. Their territory was the south and west coasts, south of Macquarie Harbour. There were no whites in their area in 1829 and, in fact, there still aren't, even today. It remains uninhabited wilderness. Moreover, the Port Davey blacks didn't have hunting grounds. They lived mostly on the rocky coastline where their staple diet was not kangaroo but shell fish. The fact that the Port Davey blacks did most of the killings of 1829 was told to George Robinson by the culprits themselves, and he recorded it in his diary. Although Reynolds cites many other entries from this diary, this piece of information doesn't fit the case for his clients, so he fails to mention it.

Now, I'm not denying some of this conflict might have been due to the reasons Reynolds gives. But he fails to give enough weight to other factors that also operated. Aborigines in Tasmania and the rest of Australia were intensely curious about, and strongly attracted to, white society. Many of them joined white society. And those who chose to stay outside still coveted white consumer goods, especially clothing, blankets and processed food. Some observers in Tasmania at the time, such as the author Jorgen Jorgenson, gave a different but equally plausible explanation for the Black War. Jorgenson said the Aborigines had become so attracted to British processed food, especially flour, and had become so addicted to English tea and tobacco, that they began to steal them. To plunder the whole stock of a settler's hut or out-station, meant that they often killed the stockmen there. Again, this kind of thing is not guerrilla warfare; it is theft and murder, that is, criminal action in anyone's culture.

Even though, as I noted earlier, Reynolds reduces Lyndall Ryan's Tasmanian death toll by almost half, he still exaggerates the total. In 1992, Brian Plomley, who has written more about the Tasmanian Aborigines than anyone else, went through the records to compile a list of every recorded clash between Aborigines and colonists from the first settlement in 1803 until the end of the Black War in 1831. Plomley not only lists these clashes but he maps them and produces a whole array of tables and graphs showing things like the age, sex and occupations of the whites affected, the type of property damaged or stolen etc etc. However, the one table he does not produce is of the number of Aborigines killed or wounded. To find this out you have to actually go yourself through the chronological description he provides of all the clashes and pull out the data for your own tally. When you do this you find why he was reluctant to produce a separate count of his own. For it shows that over this whole period of conflict, there were very few Aborigines killed by settlers. Plomley's list contains only 109 Aborigines killed in the whole of the colony from 1803 to 1831. At the same time, Aborigines killed 187 white settlers. That is, more than twice as many whites were killed as blacks.

Now, this is the most comprehensive study by the most qualified scholar of this period. The number of Aborigines killed may well be an underestimate because some attacks on blacks might not have been recorded. Even so, the best evidence we now have points in the opposite direction to that usually claimed. It is only one tenth of the total claimed by earlier historians like Lyndall Ryan.

Bad as it is, the earlier exaggeration of the Tasmanian figures pales into insignificance before the greatest beat up of them all -- Henry Reynolds' claim in The Other Side of the Frontier that 10,000 Aborigines were killed in Queensland in the nineteenth century. As I show in the latest Quadrant, when you track down his actual evidence for this -- a study of his own done in 1978 -- you find it is not about Aboriginal deaths at all. It is a study of the number of whites killed by Aborigines. Nowhere does it mention 10,000 Aboriginal dead. The most it offers is one sole guess in a footnote that perhaps, maybe, possibly, ten times as many blacks were killed as whites.

One of the reasons modern historians have been sucked into this vortex of exaggeration and invention is because there is so much precedent for it. In the nineteenth century, the Christian missionaries did the same thing.

One important documentary source for Reynolds are the letters and papers of Rev Lancelot Threlkeld, who ran a mission at Lake Macquarie, near Newcastle, in the early nineteenth century. Threlkeld is one of the heroes of Reynolds' book This Whispering in our Hearts. In the 1820s and 30s Threlkeld reported lurid tales of barbaric acts by colonists against the natives, which Reynolds faithfully reproduces. However, Threlkeld's contemporaries were not so gullible. Whenever these reports appeared, the NSW Supreme Court judge, Sir William Burton, wrote asking him the source of his evidence. Threlkeld's replies to Burton are full of evasions and dissembling. In most cases he concedes he has no direct evidence. He was at times caught lying, such as when he accused stockmen on Stuart Donaldson's Beardy Plains run in New England of poisoning local Aborigines with rum laced with prussic acid. "They died about the place like rats," he said. Donaldson replied that not only were no Aborigines killed, but the men named were not employed at Beardy Plains and Donaldson never even had a run in the district. Threlkeld himself later conceded his claims were "not substantiated". All of this is in Threlkeld's letters and papers, which Reynolds cites as evidence for many of his other points. But nowhere does he mention the embarrassing fact that Justice Burton and others caught Threlkeld lying, time and again.

I should point out that Burton did not question these stories because he was a friend of those who did violence to Aborigines. He was the judge who sentenced to death seven of the eleven white stockmen responsible for the Myall Creek Massacre of 1838, one of the few genuine mass killings of Aborigines of the period.

The early missionaries took any rumour about violence towards Aborigines, no matter how unreliable or vague, and propagated it without checking its accuracy. Why would they do this? They wanted to show the need for their own institutions. By portraying colonial society as awash with violence towards the blacks, they justified their policy of separating Aborigines from white society. They wanted their missions to appear as havens in a heartless world. That way, they would keep their funding and their jobs. They hoped to be seen by their peers in the colony and their sponsors in London as the saviours of the Aborigines.

This policy of separatism has dominated white thinking about Aborigines ever since. It justified not only the missions in the nineteenth century but also the system of state-sponsored Aboriginal reserves from 1897 until the 1970s. Some of you here who are my age might remember the media and political campaign over Palm Island in 1971. This was an Aboriginal reserve off the coast of Townsville run like a jail. Its inmates had committed no crimes but were forbidden to leave. Young people could only marry with the consent of the superintendent. Palm Island breached almost every known principle of human rights and freedom. It was far worse than anything the American Civil Rights Movement had exposed in the USA. It was legalised white racism. It was part of the policy of separatism that underlay the Aboriginal reserves.

One of those responsible for Palm Island was the Reverend Ernest Gribble. He had earlier been in Western Australia and was the missionary who invented the story of the Forrest River massacre in 1926. Gribble is another of the heroes of Reynolds' book, This Whispering in Our Hearts. Reynolds treats him simply as a whistle blower about violence towards Aborigines and fails to discuss his role in Aboriginal policy. After Forrest River, Gribble returned to North Queensland where he was appointed chaplain of the Palm Island Aboriginal Settlement. For the next 26 years, he worked with a succession of secular superintendents to entrench the penal regime that so offended public opinion when it was finally exposed in 1971. In other words, the longest-serving official on Palm Island, the one constant figure who did more than anyone else to make it a site of such overbearing racism, was Rev. Ernest Gribble. In his homage to Gribble's career in This Whispering in Our Hearts, Reynolds fails to even mention in passing that he spent more than a quarter of his life on Palm Island.

The truth is that the greatest crime white Australians have committed against the Aborigines was to lock them up for almost 150 years, from the 1830s to the 1970s, on missions and reserves. But this was all done by people who claimed to be their friends, by those claiming to be the saviours of the Aborigines. Instead, they were incarcerating them in a system that robbed them of ambition, esteem and hope. It is the relics of the system of missions and reserves, now euphemistically labelled "remote communities", that today produce the shocking statistics of Aboriginal morbidity and limited life expectation that are such a national disgrace. In short, throughout our history, the people who have claimed to be the greatest friends of the Aborigines have really been their greatest enemies. And this is still true today.

In his book Aboriginal Sovereignty, Reynolds has summarised all the ideas that white radicals have dreamed up in the last twenty years. They want an Aboriginal state, governed by Aboriginal culture and laws, with traditional structures of society and political authority. This is all dressed up in the romantic garb of indigenous rights, cultural regeneration and the politics of the international "first peoples" movement. I am very surprised to hear him deny here today that he has said this. Anyone can check it out in his book for themselves. In reality, these ideas constitute little more than an updated version of the separatist policies of the nineteenth century missionaries. It is a proposal to segregate Aborigines in both political and cultural terms from the rest of Australia. Although some Aboriginal leaders have swallowed this line, it is yet another program in which white activists tell blacks what to do.

There is, however, another ideal that has been lost in all of this: that of integration. In Australia in the 1960s, black activists and white student radicals toured the countryside, emulating the American civil rights movement in denouncing segregation, whether it was in the workforce, hotel bars or municipal swimming pools. However, in the following decade, intellectual and political circles swept aside the concept of integration on the grounds that it was a racist form of assimilation and that black power and black autonomy were the only ways to go.

Nonetheless, despite all the hot air in the media, in parliament and in the courts about land rights, sovereignty and treaties, assimilation has continued, behind the scenes, year after year. The 1996 Census revealed just how far it has come. In 1996, 73 per cent of the total indigenous population of 386,000 lived in what the Census defined as "major urban" or "other urban" centres, principally in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart, Darwin, Townsville and Cairns. Moreover, in these urban areas, very few Aborigines live in exclusively Aboriginal communities or ghettoes. Most are now spread throughout the suburbs. In Sydney in 1996, for instance, there were 236 people living in the Eveleigh Street, Redfern, community, while there were two thousand Aborigines in Liverpool, twelve hundred in Fairfield, eleven hundred in Parramatta, one thousand in Marrickville and one thousand in Bankstown. There are more Aborigines living in the suburbs of Sydney (34,000) than in the whole state of Western Australia outside Perth (32,000). The greatest concentration of Aborigines is still in the Northern Territory where 27 per cent of the population is indigenous but, even here, the total Aboriginal population outside Darwin is only 37,000, that is, barely more than the Sydney suburbs.

This geographical distribution is confirmed by the social and cultural statistics. In 1996, in 54 per cent of Aboriginal households, one of the adults was married to or cohabiting with a non-Aboriginal person. When asked about their religion, 71 per cent of Aborigines professed Christianity. Of the total indigenous population, adherents of traditional Aboriginal religion accounted for a mere 2.06 per cent, that is, a total of only 7,952 individuals. The beliefs of these 7,900 people form the basis of the current romantic movement for the restitution of Aboriginal culture, despite the fact that 98 per cent of Aborigines do not share them.

In short, despite the efforts of our white intellectuals, the great majority of Aborigines have already voted with their feet. Apart from a handful of aging radicals like Geoff Clark, Michael Mansell and the Dodson brothers, most Aborigines have demonstrated they are not interested in the goals defined for them by white historians, clergymen, politicians, rock stars, judges and journalists. Instead of an Aboriginal state or treaty, instead of customary laws and traditional culture, most of them simply want to live like the rest of us. The assimilation of the great majority of the Aboriginal population is an accomplished fact. But don't hold your breath waiting for our academic historians to discuss this. It goes against the grain of everything they've told us. It demonstrates, yet again, how profoundly mistaken they've been about the relations between black and white people in the history of this country.