The historian as prophet and redeemer
Keith Windschuttle
Quadrant
December 2002

The centenary of Federation in 2001 was ostensibly to celebrate one hundred years of independent, democratic Australian government. Given the very few other societies that have recorded such an achievement, the event should have been an occasion to focus on national virtues. Instead, many of the centenary commemorations, especially those addressed by the then Australian Governor-General, focused on a great flaw that allegedly lay at the heart of the nation. In speech after speech he gave around the country, Sir William Deane turned the celebrations into an opportunity to lecture Australians about their failings over one issue. One hundred years of stable and successful government meant little compared to the treatment meted out to the Aborigines. The nation would remain diminished, he said, until it came to terms with this fundamental defect at its core. He told one audience:

that past oppression and injustice remain part of the very fabric of our country. They reach from the past to blight the present and to demand redress and reconciliation in the future.

Deane was anything but a lone voice. A number of the cultural expressions produced for the centenary took up the same theme and candidly identified where the fault lay: Australia had committed genocide against the Aborigines. The accusation was not simply of action by default, such as inadvertently introducing diseases that killed people who had no immunity to them. Australia was allegedly guilty of conscious, wilful genocide resembling the kind the Nazis perpetrated against the Jews.

When the National Museum of Australia was opened in 2001, it commemorated the genocide thesis in the very design of the building itself. Architect Howard Raggart borrowed its central construction — shaped as a lightning bolt striking the land — from the Jewish Museum in Berlin, signifying that the Aborigines had suffered the equivalent of the Holocaust. The museum's director Dawn Casey described the opening of the institution as “a birthday gift to Australia”, but to symbolically accuse the nation of the most terrible crime possible was a strange present to offer. Yet, apart from a handful of conservative objectors, the country accepted it without demur.

The reason was that the Governor-General, the architect and others who expressed similar sentiments were all reflecting the consensus reached by the historians of Aboriginal Australia over the previous thirty years. This is a consensus that has been largely accepted by the country's intellectual and political classes. It commands an overwhelming majority of support in the media, the arts, the universities and the public service. The historians have created a picture of widespread mass killings on the frontiers of the pastoral industry that not only went unpunished but had covert government support. In short, in the founding of Australia, it was not only the convicts who were the criminals but the colonial authorities as well.

In other words, the debate over Aboriginal history goes far beyond its ostensible subject: it is about the character of the nation and, ultimately, the calibre of the civilization Britain brought to these shores in 1788.

In 2000 I published a critique of the orthodox thesis in Quadrant , arguing that it did not have the empirical foundations its authors claimed. Rather than being common, massacres of Aborigines were rare and isolated events. Some well-known apparent atrocities had been exaggerated out of all proportion and some were entirely fictitious. The overall death tolls cited by the most reputable historians were no more than guess work and fabrications. Those authors I criticised subsequently responded in the press and at conferences. However, they discussed very few of my substantive claims and fell back largely on ad hominem abuse. But the most derisive comments of all were reserved for my arguments about the moral and legal restraints on the early colonists. I had argued that the notion of the frontier as a place where white men could kill blacks with impunity ignored the powerful cultural and legal prohibitions on such action. Most colonists were Christians to whom such actions would have been abhorrent. Moreover, it was against the law to murder human beings, Aborigines included, and the penalty was death. Now, the mere mention of Christianity in this context drew most ridicule of all, not only from leftist critics such as Robert Manne and Richard Hall but from putative conservative commentators, such as the Queensland anthropologist Ron Brunton, who called the suggestion “either disingenuous or naïve”.

Those Quadrant articles have now been expanded into what will be at least a three-volume study entitled The Fabrication of Aboriginal History . The first volume published last month is devoted entirely to the events in Tasmania. However, rather than softening the initial thesis, the research done for this volume, which amounts to the most exhaustive study yet made of the evidence about early conflict in the island state, has convinced me more than ever about the influence on the British colonists of Christianity and the rule of law.

Tasmania, or Van Diemen's Land as it was known until 1855, is widely regarded today as the site of the most violent relations between Aborigines and colonists in Australian history. It is the worst case scenario. Australian historians like Lyndall Ryan claim the Tasmanian Aborigines were subject to “a conscious policy of genocide” Ryan says Van Diemen's Land demonstrates that “extermination policies were not exclusive to Nazi Germany”. International writers now routinely compare the actions of the British in Tasmania with the Spaniards in Mexico, the Belgians in the Congo, the Turks in Armenia and Pol Pot in Camdodia. The “Black War” from 1824 to 1831 and the “Black Line” of 1830 are two of the most notorious events in the history of the British Empire. In the past year, even those few journalists who have responded positively to my critique of the prevailing orthodoxy, have still wanted to make an exception in the case of Van Diemen's Land. One of them wrote: “No Australian would deny the genocide committed against Tasmania's Aborigines.”

Evangelical Christianity and Enlightenment humanism

The British colony was founded in 1803 and for the next twenty years there was only minimal contact and very little hostility between blacks and whites. Between 1824 and 1831, however, there was a gradual increase in the level of violence, which eventually resulted in 187 colonists being killed by the blacks. In response, Lieutenant-Governor Arthur declared martial law in November 1828 and in October and November 1830 he launched the Black Line, a human chain of 2000 soldiers, settlers and convicts, which stretched across the south-east of the island in an attempt to drive Aborigines from the settled districts onto the Tasman Peninsula. Despite these dramatic measures, Arthur was worried that if the violence by the Aborigines continued at its current rate, retaliation by the settlers would get out of hand. In September 1829 he wrote to London:

It is not that there is anything actually alarming in our condition, but it is painful and distressing to the last degree to continue in this state of hostil­ity without the conviction that the most prudent measures are pursued, having for their end the protection of the community, with every possible regard to humanity towards ignorant savages, who appear to be influenced by the most revengeful feelings.

Why would he think like this? Why did this and every other statement Arthur made about Aboriginal violence talk about not only his responsibility to protect the colony but also his duty to have “every possible regard to humanity towards ignorant savages”. Even in his proclamation of October 1830 when he announced the Black Line, Arthur concluded with the same senti­ment.

But I do, nevertheless, hereby strictly order, enjoin and command, that the actual use of arms be in no case resorted to, by firing against any of the Natives or otherwise, if they can by other measures be captured; that bloodshed be invariably checked as much as possible; and that any tribes or individuals captured, or voluntarily surrendering themselves up, be treated with the utmost care and humanity.

Most orthodox historians think that comments like these are mere hypocritical cant. They represented the impossible task of reconciling Christian morality with the rapacity of imperialism. If this were true, however, the language of the colonial authorities would have been quite different. There would have been little to inhibit them from describing the Aborigines as subhuman beings who, if troublesome, should be shot like animals. To understand why Arthur never once expressed any attitude of this kind, and to see why he and every other governor of the Australian colonies would have been shocked by such a proposition, we need to see them not through the morality of present-day interest-group politics, but as creatures of their own time.

The Australian colonies were founded during the great Evangelical revival within the Church of England in the late eighteenth century. Evangelicalism was politically conservative, to the extent that it wanted to preserve the existing social hierarchy, but many of its expressions were socially radical. Its major worldly success was the abolition of the British trade and transport of slaves in 1807 through the efforts of its leading light, William Wilberforce. In the 1820s, as Van Diemen's Land wrestled with its growing Aboriginal problem, the Evangelical movement was demanding the complete abolition of slavery in the British Empire, an objective it finally achieved in 1833.

In its attitude to the indigenous people of the world, Evangelical­ism was consistent with secular English and Scottish Enlightenment thought, which supported the unity of mankind and the belief that all human beings had a common origin. In Australia, as in the United States of America, these Enlightenment beliefs were held not in opposition to Christianity but were disseminated through the churches themselves and through their campaigns for social reform. One of the icons of the Evangelical anti-slavery movement was a picture of a black slave with the slogan “Am I not a man and a brother?” Indeed, the Enlightenment itself, at least in its English and Scottish versions, should be seen as an extension of these Christian concepts. The Enlightenment secularised them to produce the notions of a common human nature and universal human rights.

One of the principal reasons why all the governors of the Australian colonies from 1788 onwards were instructed to treat the Aborigines as fully human beings was this con­currence of Evangelical and Enlightenment thought. Among the founders of both New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land there was an even greater concentration of Evangelical influence than found at home in England. These colonies were positive attractions to Evangelicals who, as Stuart Piggin's book on the subject, Evangelical Christianity in Australia , has shown, saw in them an opportunity to make a commitment to the world in three main areas. Piggin writes: “The vision of a reclaimed criminal class, a converted Aboriginal race, and the islands of the South Seas evangelised from an Australian base was large, even grand.”

In Van Diemen's Land itself, Evangelicalism remained an important religious and social force throughout the 1820s and 1830s. Lieutenant-Governor Arthur himself was, according to his biographer, “a devout and convinced evangelical”. Arthur's appointment in 1824 had been influenced by the reputation he had previously gained as an administrator in British Honduras where he was prepared to act on these ideals. When he first arrived in the Caribbean he declared himself “a perfect Wilberforce as to slavery”. In 1820 he was engaged in a prolonged dispute with local settlers over what he saw as their excessive punishment of slaves. The following year he issued a proclamation freeing those slaves who were descen­dants of American Indians. He threatened to send some of their owners to England for trial. His action provoked an eight-year legal contest that eventually preserved the Indians' freedom. Arthur wrote in 1822 to his patron Earl Bathurst: “If I have exceeded my authority, I rest my excuse on the great necessity of doing justice to the Indian.”

In 1824 Arthur was appointed to Van Diemen's Land by Bathurst, the British Secre­tary of State for the Colonies, a Tory who was sympathetic to William Wilberforce and the Evangelicals. Arthur himself appointed Evangelicals to important positions in his own administration. He appointed the Sydney Archdeacon William Grant Broughton to chair a government inquiry into Aboriginal affairs in Hobart. Broughton had just announced an Evangelical-inspired policy for the paternal care for the lower orders of the colony, especially its convicts and Aborigines, and a revival of missionary activities among them.

The man who eventually rounded up the Aborigines from the wild, and relocated them in a sanctuary on Flinders Island, George Augustus Robinson, had himself been a beneficiary of Evangelical philanthropy as a youth in England. In his early years in Hobart, he became involved in organizations in the same movement, including the British and Foreign Bible Society, the Auxiliary Bible Society and the Seamen's Friend and Bethel Union Society. One of the main reasons why Arthur gave Robinson his original job of superintendent of the Aborigines was his promise to take the Gospel to them. Robinson often expressed the prevailing Evangelical-cum-Enlightenment attitude that all men were created equal:

I looked upon them [the Aborigines] as brethren not, as they have been maligned, savages. No, they are my brethren by creation. God has made of one blood all nations of people and I am not ashamed to call them brothers.

It was not only those who took the Aborigines' side who thought this way. In a letter to Arthur in December 1827, in which he advocated arming convict stock-keepers to keep the blacks out of the settled districts, the landowner Roderic O'Connor expressed similar sentiments:

Religion, and the light thrown upon Europeans by the exercise of true Christianity, that immortal Code which teaches us, “To do unto others as we wish should be done to us,” the discussion and final abolition of the Slave Trade has taught us to look on all Mankind as “Friends and Brothers”.

Nonetheless, as Robinson's statement above indicates, not every­one shared these views and there were others who maligned the Aborigines as “savages”. The University of NSW historian John Gascoigne, in his new and illuminating study, The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia , gives the most accurate summary of the total picture. Gascoigne argues there was a tension at the time between the respectable classes and the lower orders on this subject:

Such admonitions to accept Aborigines as fellow human beings were often prompted by an attempt to overcome a popular, untheoretical racism which equated indigenous peoples with the monkey or animal kingdom. In the first half of the nineteenth century such visceral, unsci­entific racism was, to some degree, kept in check by elite opinion, whether a Christian or an Enlightenment-based anthropology which gen­erally emphasised the unity of humankind.

Few of the orthodox historians of Van Diemen's Land, however, recognize distinctions of this kind. They do not use religious beliefs, or any contest about them, in their explanations of human behaviour. Nor do they attribute to religion any causal influence. Indeed, they usually dismiss religious sentiment as so much humbug or a white­wash for much harsher attitudes.

These historians make no attempt to think themselves into the minds of their subjects. Instead, they attribute to them completely anachronistic views derived from twentieth-century European and American ideologies about race. For instance, the most recent historian of Tasmanian land settlement, Sharon Morgan, claims the colonists were motivated by notions of “white supremacy”. She derives this concept not from British or Australian history but from an American study comparing race relations in the USA and South Africa. Had she or any of the other members of the same orthodoxy examined the mentality of the administrators of the British Empire in the early nineteenth century, they would have found that Arthur's sentiments about treating the indigenous inhabitants, whether they be Indians or Aborigines, with justice, were in accord not just with current sentiment in the 1820s but with the official policy towards indigenous people to which all his predecessors had been committed since the first settlements in Australia. The instructions the Colonial Office gave David Collins when he founded the British colony in Van Diemen's Land in February 1803 were:

You are to endeavour by every means in your power to open an inter­course with the natives, and to conciliate their goodwill, enjoining all persons under your Government to live in amity and kindness with them; and if any person shall exercise any acts of violence against them, or shall wantonly give them any interruption in the exercise of their several occu­pations, you are to cause such offender to be brought to punishment according to the degree of the offence.

These were familiar words. They were a verbatim copy of the instructions given to Governor Arthur Phillip when he was forming the First Fleet. They were transmitted intact to all subsequent Governors and Lieutenant-Governors in the Australian colonies for the next two decades.

British colonialism and the rule of law

It is worth emphasising that the instructions not only required colonial officials to seek the good­will of the natives but they also paid as much attention to curbing violence against them and punishing any offenders on this score. In January 1805, Lieutenant-Governor David Collins issued a general order confirming the legal status of the natives:

He has received it in command from His Majesty to place the Native Inhabitants of whatever place, he should settle at, in the King's Peace, and to afford their Persons and Property the Protection of the British Laws. It cannot then be doubted that the immediate Inhabitants of this Colony are equally entitled to the same Protection.

Sentiments of the same kind were impressed upon all colonial governors until self-government in the 1850s. Each of the governors, in turn, felt it their duty to publicly remind their settlers and convicts that the natives enjoyed the protection of the law.

To see these comments in their historical context, we need to realize that none of the early governors of the Australian colonies were politicians trying to woo a constituency by striking poses of moral rectitude or of statesmanship. Nor did they need to mollify the clergy or any other moral interest group. The colonies were not democracies and the governors were not responsible to an electorate. Their masters were in the Colonial Office in London. The Lieutenant-Governors of Van Diemen's Land were primarily administrators rather than politicians and they had little reason to be overly concerned about how well their public pronouncements were received locally. When they proclaimed a government order they expected it to be obeyed.

So declarations like those cited here involved more than a ritual cutting and pasting from one inaugural speech to the next. The governors took them seriously enough to make references back to them later when they made important statements about law and order in the colonies. For instance, in April 1828, when he established a series of military posts on the borders of the settled districts to prevent Aboriginal incursions, Arthur began by reminding the settlers of David Collins's 1810 proclamation that promised punishment for unlawful violence against the natives. For good measure, he also quoted his own words of May 1824 saying anyone who illegally offended the Aborigines would be punished as if they had done the same to a white settler.

The academic historians of Tasmania, however, claim such sentiments were mere hypocrisy, worthy words that lacked substance because no action was ever taken by the authorities to back them up. Lyndall Ryan claims: “No European was ever charged, let alone committed for trial, for assaulting or killing an Aboriginal.” Sharon Morgan concurs: “Not one European was ever charged with murdering an Abo­riginal, let alone convicted.” Despite their confident tone and their mutual confirmation, these statements are untrue.

In fact, the very first case before the Supreme Court of Van Diemen's Land in May 1824 was against William Tibbs, a convict charged with the manslaughter of an Aborigine. Tibbs pleaded self-defence but was found guilty and sentenced to three years sec­ondary transportation. In November the same year, another convict was charged with “indescribable brutality” to some native women and given twenty-five lashes. Some settlers, including the chief agent of the Van Diemen's Land Company, Edward Curr, felt bound to bring such charges against their own employees. In 1828 Curr tried to charge one of his superintendents with being an accessory to murder after one of his convict servants had killed an Aboriginal woman.

In the book Frontier –—from which the ABC television series of the same name derives, and which has long been compulsory viewing in virtually all public schools in New South Wales and Victoria — Henry Reynolds claims that by 1830 what he calls the guerilla warfare waged by the Aborigines threatened the very existence of the colony. “Writing from his camp at Sorell to justify the famous Black Line,” Reynolds observes, “he [Arthur] argued that such was the insecurity of the settlers that he feared ‘a general decline in the prosperity' and the ‘eventual extirpation of the Colony'.” However, Arthur never believed this at all. If you check the original statement he made, you find Reynolds has altered his words. What Arthur actually wrote was that he feared not “the extirpation of the Colony” but “the extirpation of the Aboriginal race”. Arthur was concerned about the survival not of the colony but of the Aborigines. Even in the midst of military operations against them, Arthur was apprehensive about their continued existence as a race of people and worried that, if the sporadic hostilities continued at their current rate, retaliation by the settlers would eventually wipe them out.

Rather than being complicit in violence, the colonial authorities believed their responsibility was to curb any aggression that settlers or convicts might direct against the Aborigines. They thought the colonial situation held considerable potential for conflict between ordinary settlers and the natives and it was their responsibility to keep it in check. This was especially so in a penal colony where many of the convicts were hardened criminals and many of the free settlers were themselves ex-convicts and impulsive men. The authorities' greatest fear was that Aboriginal violence would provoke a reaction among the settlers that would get out of hand. When Arthur's Executive Council discussed the proclamation of martial law in 1828, the protection of the Aborigines from a backlash of this kind was high in its priorities:

Great and well-founded alarm generally prevails, and unless the measure recommended be adopted, the Council apprehend that the settlers, find­ing themselves unprotected by the law and the government, will be driven to take the remedy into their own hands. The case will then become one of a war of private persons, the duration of which it is impossible to conjecture, but the end of which will in all probability be the annihilation of the aboriginal tribes. A war of this kind, confined as it would be to casual and petty encounters, whatever may be its result, must necessarily be attended with a great destruction of human life. On the other hand, if the Government interposes promptly and vigorously, it may reasonably be hoped that by the combined operation of the troops and armed settlers, under the guidance of their officers and intelligent magis­trates, peace and tranquillity may be restored, with comparatively little effusion of blood.

Violence in Van Diemen's Land: a summary

My own study of Van Diemen's Land finds that this objective was largely realised. Let me briefly summarise its findings about the degree of violence. 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. In the entire period from 1803, when the colonists arrived, to 1834, when all but one family of Aborigines had been removed to Flinders Island, the British were responsible for killing 118 of the original inhabitants — less than four deaths a year. During the so-called “Black War” from 1824 to 1831, the Aborigines killed a total of 187 whites. This compared to seventy-two blacks who died at white hands over the same period.

The full-blood Tasma­nian Aborigines did die out in the nineteenth century, it is true, but this was almost entirely a consequence of two factors: the long iso­lation that had left them vulnerable to introduced diseases, especially influenza, pneumonia and tuberculosis; and they traded and prostituted their women to such an extent that their society lost the ability to reproduce itself. Their numbers were small to begin with — less than 2000 people in the whole island — so it did not take much for the inevitable arrival of the outside world to cause the demise of such a fragile population.

Despite its infamous reputation, Van Diemen's Land was host to nothing that resembled genocide or any attempt at it. The idea would not only have appalled the local authorities but also the majority of the settlers, even those who had suffered Aboriginal violence. The only sentiments openly expressed in favour of extermination were a handful of public statements made by settlers in 1830–31, in the immediate aftermath of particular Aboriginal atrocities. These comments have been milked for maximum effect by academic historians but the archive record clearly shows the prospect of extermination divided the settlers deeply, was always rejected by govern­ment, and was never acted upon.

Nor, on the Aborigines' side, was there anything that resembled frontier warfare, patriotic struggle or systematic resistance of any kind. The Aborigines were nomadic hunter-gatherers who did not have a concept of possessing territory or of deterring trespassers from it. The so-called “Black War” began as a minor crime wave by two Europeanised black bushrangers, followed by an outbreak of violence by tribal Aborigines from 1828 to 1830. The principal reason for this violence was the Aboriginal desire for British consumer goods, especially flour, sugar, tea, blankets and bedding. Excluded from the labour force and having no legal way except begging to acquire what to them were highly desirable luxury products, tribal Aborigines chose to plunder them from the huts and homesteads of settlers instead, and to kill any whites they found in their way. Of the 187 whites killed, the majority were convicts working as shepherds and stockmen on isolated properties in remote locations. At the time they were killed, most were unarmed. Ten per cent of the victims were white women and children. The actions of the Abo­rigines were not noble: they never rose beyond robbery, assault and murder.

When the colonial government finally marshalled its resources against them in a determined way by mounting the Black Line, the Aborigines quickly abandoned their actions and surrendered. The military action the govern­ment eventually took was tempered by the humanitarian spirit of the age: the Aboriginal death toll from the Black Line was three. Neither the authorities nor the free settlers hated the Aborigines: they pitied their savage state and sought ways to ameliorate their condition.

The claim that any of this deserves the label “genocide” is an anachronistic absurdity. To compare these figures to the millions deliberately put to death in Pol Pot's Cambodia, Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany is bizarre and offensive. It trivialises the experience of those peoples who have suffered genuine attempts at extermination. Why, then, have historians persisted with such a story? Why have there been so many people who want to believe these fictions?

Radical politics and the Great Australian Silence

Part, but by no means all, of the reason lies in the academic politics of the period since the 1960s. The universities in that turbulent decade were the scene of the revival of two nineteenth-century ideologies, Marxism and Romanticism, which supported and fed off one another. Among historians, the notion that Aboriginal resistance to British colonization in the 1820s was a precursor of mid-twentieth century guerilla struggles in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia derived from the political activism of this period. In his autobiography, Henry Reynolds describes how, as a young lecturer at Townsville University College in the 1960s, he and his wife became involved with local clergy, Communist Party and trade union officials in both the anti-Vietnam war campaign and the burgeoning Aboriginal political movement. Some historians of Aboriginal Australia had even more direct inheritance from radical politics. Lyndall Ryan's parents, Jack and Edna Ryan, were well-known members of the Communist and Trotskyist political movements from the 1920s to the 1940s. Other academics who began to write Aboriginal history at this time either had similar family connections or else developed a commitment to leftist politics under the influence of the radical climate of the times. Reynolds writes:

The sudden emergence of Aborigines on the national political stage came without warning or prior reflection from historians. All this provided strong motivation to research and write and explain. There was a sense of urgency. We were self-appointed missionaries who were required to enlighten the public.

These academic “missionaries” not only rejected the conservatism of their professors and heads of schools, they also became impatient with the Marxist theory that the leading role in history was to be played by the blue-collar working class. As a result, they welcomed “interest group” politics, in which women, students, gays, blacks and ethnics were all portrayed as oppressed by the prevailing social structure. The class struggle was replaced by the “gender, race and class” liberation movements. After the fall of Communism in 1989, most quietly shelved Marxism to focus on their preferred interest group. Many of them abandoned the cause of the workers to take up the cause of the Aborigines.

The central theme of Reynolds's political autobiography, Why Weren't We Told? is that an older generation of Australian historians failed their respon­sibility by completely omitting Aboriginal people from their works. It fell to his generation, Reynolds maintains, to take up this cause and to write them into history. Even though he acknowledges that this rewriting process has now been going on for more than thirty years, Reynolds still gets very angry when he recalls the neglect. He says that when he gives public lectures, many people approach him who still feel the same:

It hasn't mattered where I spoke, what size the audience, what the occa­sion of the actual topic dealt with. Why didn't we know? Why were we never told? … They believed their education should have provided the knowledge, the information, and hadn't done so. They felt let down, cheated, sold short. Why were they never told? Why didn't they know?

Reynolds claims the neglect of the Aboriginal presence was a twentieth-century phenomenon. In the nineteenth century, books about Australia invariably gave the Aborigines a prominent place. However, this changed around the turn of the new century with the development of an Australian cultural and political identity that coin­cided with the emergence of Australian nationalism. After the nation was formed at Federation in 1901, historians wanted to focus on its virtues and to forget its dark underside. It was not until the genera­tion of the 1960s emerged impatient with what they saw as a compla­cent, celebratory story that all this changed:

Australia, we felt, had been badly let down by its historians. They provided no material, no analysis, no stories which would enable the community to understand the nature of contemporary relations between white and black Australians ... If we raised our voices we felt that was necessary to shatter once and for all the great Australian silence.

The term “the Great Australian Silence” was coined by the anthro­pologist Bill Stanner, in his 1968 Boyer Lectures for the Australian Broadcasting Commission. The case Stanner made in those lectures, however, hardly amounts to the indictment of twentieth century historians that Reynolds claims. In his lectures Stanner acknowledged that his survey of the literature deliberately excluded books and articles written specifically about the Aborigines. He said there was actually a “large array” of these works including three devoted specifically to Aboriginal policy. Stanner's thesis was confined to an analysis of ten general non-fiction books about Australia published between 1939 and 1962. He admitted that all of them had some discussion of the Aborigines, including one volume to which he contributed a chapter himself. Even on his own evidence, Stanner's case is not convincing.

Reynolds, however, accepts Stanner's claims uncritically and goes on to offer his own survey of the general histories available in the 1960s as corroboration of the thesis.

Five other major histories of Australia by established scholars published between 1954 and 1967 showed a collective desire to consider the Abo­riginal question as something that belonged to the early colonial period and had no modern sequel. All dealt with the Aboriginal policies of early governors, the Tasmanian Black War and conflict in the pastoral frontier in the 1830s. Only one author dealt with the second half of the nine­teenth century and even he confined his attention to Western Australia.

But hang on, this is supposed to be an account of how the Aborigines were, in Reynolds's own words, “virtually written out of Australian history”. And yet here we are being told that five of the history books of the day discussed the Aboriginal policies of the early gover­nors, the Tasmanian Black War and conflict on the pastoral frontier in the 1830s. But, if they covered all this ground, even if they did cut the story short in the mid-nineteenth century, why is Reynolds is so angry? What justification could there be for his repetition of the rhetorical questions: “Why didn't we know? Why were we never told?” On his own admission, five of the main textbooks of this allegedly most reactionary period told their readers quite a lot about Aboriginal history. So what if they didn't tell it all down to the present? Reynolds himself wrote a book on Tasmania, Fate of a Free People , and yet, except for twenty-two pages at the end, the whole of his text is devoted to events in the early colonial period. On his own argument, this should make his own work every bit as culturally condescending and insensitive as those of the earlier historians he condemns.

The truth is that “the Great Australian Silence” is largely a myth. Aborigines were not left out of history because of Australian nationalism or the desire to tell a celebratory story or any other imaginary cause. They might not have been treated in the way Reynolds and his colleagues would have liked, but to claim the omissions of earlier historians left their readers “let down, cheated and sold short” is a transparent case of damning the authors of the past in order to make their successors appear all the more virtuous.

One way of reading early Australian history is to consult the biographies of the governors of the colonies, especially those who held that position before democratic self-government was instituted in the 1850s. There were eight of these books published between 1937 and 1987. Anyone who checks them out will find that the relationship between the govern­ment and the Aborigines is a topic that all the biographers discuss. Nonetheless, most of these works do not devote a great deal of space to the issue: five to ten pages are usual in works that total from 300 to 500 pages. Is this, then, evidence of neglect, tokenism or an ideologically-inspired silence?

The reality was that, for almost all the governors, any problems they had with the Aborigines were minor compared to the other issues with which they had to grapple. This is true even of Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur of Van Diemen's Land. Despite the drama with which Aboriginal historians like to surround the so-called Black War and the Black Line, these issues were by no means the greatest of Arthur's concerns. His primary responsibility was as supervisor of a penal colony. Administration and policy for the convicts was a far more important issue to him than anything to do with the Aborigines. Other matters that also weighed far more heavily were the legal and political progress of the colony, the development of land policy, the growth of com­merce, and the construction of roads, bridges and government buildings. As a result, his biographer, A. G. L. Shaw, devotes about eleven of his 115 pages on Arthur's career in Van Diemen's Land to his Aboriginal policy and practice. This is about the right weight the subject deserved.

The dramatic imperative in Australian history

One of the main problems of being an historian in Australia is that the history of this country has been so uneventful. There were no revolutions, civil wars or struggles for independence. The campaigns for reforms from which Australian democracy most bene­fited were all made in England. The great issues that at several times over the last two centuries shook Europe and America to their foundations were all resolved here without much fuss. As a result, in the writing of history the most publicly successful Australian authors have been those who could cook up something dramatic from the most meagre ingredients.

For instance, the reality of the Australian convict system was that it was a successful program of penal reform that turned most convicted criminals into useful labourers and law-abiding citizens. However, by far the most widely read book on the subject has been Robert Hughes's The Fatal Shore , which portrayed early Australia as a cesspool of sadism and cruelty, the British precursor to Stalin's gulag archipelago. As I argued earlier, two of the principal intellectual influences on the early Australian colonies were Evangelical Christianity and Enlightenment humanism, both of which were spread through the established church where, as in America, rationality and religion were not incompatible but worked in harmony. But Australia's most celebrated historian, Manning Clark, built his reputation by constructing a story of the conflict between Enlight­enment secularism and the Protestant and Catholic versions of Chris­tianity.

Historians of this dramatic bent have enlivened every period of the Australian past with struggles between contesting social classes: in the convict era, it was emancipists versus exclusives; in the gold rushes, diggers versus troopers; in the pastoral economy, squatters versus selectors; in the industrial economy, labour versus capital. The gold rush immigrants of the 1850s were actually intent on making themselves rich in as little time as possible, but one of the most successful historical theses of the 1950s and 1960s, Russel Ward's The Australian Legend, discovered them to be the founders of collectivist values and participatory democracy. As a result, trade unionists of the far left today carry their Eureka Stockade flag as a symbol of radical activism. In late nineteenth century Australia, the ambition of most “selectors” was, like small farmers everywhere, to make a living as independent proprietors and eventually become large farmers. However, one of their number, Ned Kelly — in reality a small-time thief and offhand murderer — has since been apotheosised by historians and award-winning novelists as an Australian Robin Hood, a “social bandit”, and an icon of Irish independence and Australian republicanism. In nineteenth century Australia, women gained legal rights, entered male professions and graduated from universities much earlier than in most Western countries. Conservative politicians gave them the vote decades before their English counterparts, without the need for any campaigning by suffragettes. However, the most successful feminist historians have adopted a plot that portrays valiant Australian heroines confronting an unyielding patriarchal hierarchy to reform the most chauvinist society in the Western world.

The story constructed by Reynolds, Ryan and other members of the orthodox school of Aboriginal history has the same motives and the same veracity. Indeed, according to Reynolds, his story outdoes all the others in its dramatic appeal:

The much noted actions of rebel colonists are trifling in comparison. The Kellys and their kind, even Eureka diggers and Vinegar Hill convicts, are diminished when measured against the hundreds of [Aboriginal] clans who fought frontier settlers for well over a century.

Reynolds is also aware he is buying into the most enduring dramatic theme of the modern era: the struggle of the downtrodden against the powerful, and their brilliant triumph or their valiant defeat:

There is much in their story that Australians have traditionally admired. They were ever the underdogs, were always outgunned, yet frequently faced death without flinching.

The appeal of such romantic drama, of course, is by no means confined to Australia. It has proven perennially successful in all democratic societies and in all forms of the entertainment media, from the novels of Victor Hugo to the toga-and-sandals epics of Hollywood. Aboriginal history is one more variation on a formula well-proven in the cultural marketplace. The only problem is that, just like the stories of Jean Valjean and Spartacus, it derives more from the creative imagination than the historical record. Reynolds and his colleagues have constructed a great drama that has swept all before it, but at the cost of deceiving those readers who came looking for the truth.

History, sin and redemption

There is a much deeper dramatic theme at work here as well. Left-wing politics may be enough to explain the appeal of the Aboriginal story in academia, where the left rules the humanities, but not to other sectors of our intellectual and political elites. This is a story that has attracted some of the most eminent jurists, politicians and clergy of this country, including several High Court judges and former Prime Ministers, few of whom would have been so strongly attracted by the simple appeal of a political struggle against the established order.

Although we now inhabit a largely secular society, the chords of Christianity reverberate deeply within our culture, even among those who pride themselves on their rationality or their atheism. It is a well-known truism that in the modern era, radical politics was a substitute for religion for many who could not do without it. This was especially true of those intellectuals attracted to the great utopian projects of Marxism and socialism.

It is less appreciated that some of the more recent versions of inter­est group poli­tics have been a product of the same yearning, for both the religious and the non-religious alike. In his classic text, The Historian's Craft , the great French writer Marc Bloch reminds us:

Christianity is historical in another and, perhaps, even deeper sense. The destiny of humankind, placed between the Fall and the Judgement, appears to its eyes as a long adventure, of which each life, each individual pilgrimage, is in its turn a reflection. It is in time and, therefore, in history that the great drama of Sin and Redemption, the central axis of all Christian thought, is unfolded.

In short, the idea that we are fallen creatures, racked with sin, but who can be redeemed, is attractive to many people. This is especially so in the prosperous societies of the West, which readily harbour the guilty suspicion that their success must have been at the expense of someone else. In the green version of this Christian drama, we have sinned against the environment and the planet itself. Such a notion is even more attractive to those who feel they have the ability to rectify the situation.

For such people, the story of Aboriginal depredation is tailor-made. Who among them would want to live in a largely benign, uneventful and moderately successful minor nation? How much more exciting to inhabit a country fatally flawed by, but oblivious to, its own terrible dark past. How much more rewarding to give oneself a chief role in its moral salvation.

In other words, the principal subjects of this great drama have not been the Aborigines at all. Its real heroes were always intended to be its authors — the white historians who rescued the blacks from the Great Australian Silence. These historians have set themselves up as prophets blessed with a vision denied to ordinary Australians. They have also held out the invitation to their readers among the political and intellectual elites to join them in becoming their nation's redeemers.

Since 1996, the persistent demand for Prime Minister John How­ard to say “sorry” to the Aborigines has been integral to this ritual. So has been the lobbying for a permanent apology in the form of a monument to black “resistance fighters” at the Australian War Memorial. Sir William Deane's contrition in 2001 was part of the penitence. Those who possess this gospel will withhold their blessing until the nation recognises and confesses its mortal sin. Not until it does so, until it apologises, seeks forgiveness and makes offerings in atonement, will they declare it fit for redemption.

If this thesis is true, however, if the drama of sin and redemption is the driving force of Aboriginal historiography, then it turns out there is not a very great distance between those historians who accuse our colonial forbears of massacres and genocide, and those colonial forbears themselves. Both inhabit a position on the same cultural spectrum derived from the evangelical Christianity and Enlightenment humanism that were present at our founding. Indeed, the critique made by the historians of Aboriginal Australia would have been literally unthinkable without the intellectual heritage brought to this continent by their colonial forbears. In short, the accusers and the accused share the same cultural values.

This, of course, makes all the moral posturing over Aboriginal history somewhat absurd. One side in this debate is not possessed of any radically different morality, let alone any position of high moral authority. Indeed, all of us who have inherited this British version of Western culture share pretty much the same set of core values. This is not to say they are identical. As I've suggested, they constitute a spectrum or a scale along which people take either more determined or less enthusiastic positions. As I've also suggested, there are religious and secular versions of the same set of ideas, such as equal rights and a common human nature.

The debate over Aboriginal history, then, is not a debate over values but a debate over facts. It is about what really happened in the past. On this score, what I have tried to demonstrate in my work on the subject is that we have been badly misled by our historians. In Van Diemen's Land, most of their case is poorly founded, a good deal of it is seriously mistaken, and much of it is outright fabrication.

Australian society has never been perfect — no society created by human beings ever could be. But nor is it in urgent need of redemption for its sins. The notion derived from Aboriginal history that there is a dark blemish at the core of our culture is simply not borne out by the facts of our history.

This is the text of the 2002 Harry Eddy Memorial Lecture given by Keith Windschuttle to the Workers' Educational Association Sydney on October 26 2002. It is based on research from his new book, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, Van Diemen's Land 1803–1847, which was published on November 22 by Macleay Press, Sydney