History Wars: the TLS debate

Battle weary
Alan Atkinson
Times Literary Supplement
August 29 2003

The History Wars was conceived among angry arguments about the extent of interracial violence on the Australian frontier, from the beginning of British settlement in 1788 into the twentieth century. The central figure in the debate is the Sydney writer Keith Windschuttle who, after a number of provocative articles (mainly in the conservative monthly, Quadrant), has now published the first volume of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Here, and in two future volumes, he aims to prove that Aboriginal casualties were far fewer than Australians have been led to believe by a generation of recent scholarship.

Stuart Macintyre, the main author of The History Wars (Anna Clark wrote one of the ten chapters), is one of Australia's best-known historians. He has made his name by exploring and promoting the importance of good history for Australians en masse. In a nation intrigued by its own past, to a degree which sometimes surprises the inhabitants of "older" countries, Macintyre has had many useful things to say about the way that past has been interpreted and understood.

Macintyre calls Windschuttle's book "shocking", particularly his allegation of a generation of lies, his argument for "fabrication". Macintyre concedes that some of the scholarship has been flawed, but wholesale and deliberate fabrication is another matter. Windschuttle has himself been shocked by such systematic dishonesty, as he sees it, on such an important topic, by so many for so long…

[full article available online only to TLS subscribers]

 

Australian History Wars
Peter Kelly
Times Literary Supplement
September 26 2003

Sir, --When the TLS commissioned a review about a sharply polarized academic Australian debate it unfortunately employed one of the declared partisans. Alan Atkinson's review of Stuart Macintyre's The History Wars (August 29) omits to mention that Atkinson himself has already taken sides by contributing to an anthology critical of Keith Windschuttle, author of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, and one of the major figures in the debate.

Windschuttle has exposed a thirty-year trail of academic misconduct including bogus citations of archival evidence, alteration of the text of key documents, gross exaggeration of historical statistics, and invention of incidents that never occurred. He has shown the widely accepted claim that Tasmania was the one clear case of genocide in the British Empire is baseless.

In response, the historical fraternity in Australia has closed ranks in an effort to preserve its public reputation. Atkinson's review should be read as part of that process. Indeed, Atkinson is actively engaged in denying what everyone involved knows to be the case: that the Left almost completely dominates academic history in this country.

Atkinson portrays Stuart Macintyre as a pillar of respectability: "… Professor and Dean of Arts at the University of Melbourne. He is a luminary in what was for many years the most distinguished history department in Australia. He is also a member of the Australian Labor Party." Atkinson does not mention that Macintyre is a politically engaged Marxist, who for most of his adult life was a member of the Communist Party in both Great Britain and Australia. He wrote the authorized (and anodyne) history of the Communist Party of Australia.

One of our few non-Left historians, Associate Professor Gregory Melleuish, in the Australian newspaper, recently named Macintyre as "the godfather of the history profession in Australia" since he holds several government positions that allow him to influence history education at every level, from primary school to university. Macintyre is also chairman of the humanities panel of the Australian Research Grants Council, the sole body that funds research grants. Last year, this led to more than one quarter of all historical grants going to members of his own faculty.

It is a pity that Atkinson's review did not leave TLS readers better informed about the true nature of the history wars in Australia.