The Fabrication of Aboriginal History book launch
Keith Windschuttle
Tattersalls Club, Sydney
December 9 2002

Several months ago at one of the regular Quadrant dinners, the topic for discussion on the night was bias in the media. Now, many people who have never been to one, might imagine that a Quadrant dinner is attended mainly by elderly curmudgeons muttering right-wing slogans as they dribble into their soup. There are one or two diners a bit like that but, by and large, this function is usually a pretty civilized and entertaining affair. Nonetheless, on this particular night the audience got increasingly restless as the two main speakers, Frank Devine and Paddy McGuinness, insisted on defending the media against the charge of bias, particularly the broadsheet press and even the ABC. They argued that while the media reflects the consensus opinions of the intellectual classes of our society, within these parameters Australian journalists on the whole do a pretty fair job. I think this is largely true. I'm saying this not just because my book has had a rather good press over the past couple of weeks, although I'd be less than honest if I didn't say this has given me a somewhat rosier view than I had before.

Now, there is an established consensus, or an approved set of responses, on a number of big issues that our intellectual classes are concerned about. Not only the media but the arts, the universities, the public service and even the judiciary take much the same line about them. For the past two decades, this has been especially true about the history of relations with the Aborigines, who are widely believed to have engaged in frontier warfare, and to have suffered massacres and genocide. It is important to recognize, however, that most of those who have spread this story did not initiate it and have been simply reporting what they thought was a true story told by those who were in a position to know: that is, our academic historians. So the responsibility for the opinions that now prevail on this subject rests squarely with them.

My book argues that the consensus they have created is largely misplaced. Our academic historians have failed their public responsibility to tell the truth about this issue and instead have perpetrated a long series of willful misrepresentations. They have portrayed Australia as a society reeking of atrocities against the Aborigines. They have charged a number of historic figures with having either directly or indirectly committed mass murder. However, my book argues that in many of the cases where they have done this, they have used either very poor evidence or evidence that can be shown to have been entirely fabricated. There are literally dozens of examples in this book alone, and this is only the first of what will eventually be a three-volume series. My argument is that in all of Europe's encounters from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century with the New Worlds of the Americas and the Pacific, the colonization of Australia was far and away the least violent.

While this book is an indictment of one important section of the academic history profession, I don't want anyone to think it is an indictment of the whole. There are still a number of good and honourable Australian historians whose work can be trusted. In fact, I am pleased that some of them were able to come along here tonight because they have made important intellectual contributions to the arguments I have used in this project.

Professor Patrick O'Farrell is one of our most distinguished historians. He is the principal historian of the Irish in Australia and the Catholic Church. I had the privilege of teaching in the same department at the University of NSW in the 1970s where he taught me some important lessons about historical methodology. In a number of book reviews, Pat made a very effective critique of the then emerging field of oral history showing just how unreliable it could be. Since then, however, oral history has grown to become a highly fashionable pursuit, especially in Aboriginal history -- there are now journals and courses in the subject -- but some of us still remember and can apply the critique that Pat originated.

Another University of NSW historian I have relied upon is Professor John Gascoigne, who is the author of what I think is one of the most important books recently published in this country, The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia. I find it surprising that even though the book has now been published for a few months, the mainstream press has not yet picked it up and given it the publicity it richly deserves. It overturns a number of the myths about early Australia, including those perpetrated by Manning Clark, and provides one of the best guides yet to the ruling ideas that were present at this country's founding. No one who has read John's book with an open mind could seriously entertain the idea, now so frequently bandied about, that there is some kind of moral equivalence between the founders of Australia and the Nazis of Germany.

Another historian who has made an important intellectual contribution to this book is my wife Elizabeth. She first introduced me to Van Diemen's Land through her own work on the women of the upper classes of eastern Australia and the Evangelical Christianity that inspired many of their public activities. Since I first embarked on this project, the suggestion for which I have received most derision from my critics is the claim that Christianity had a moderating influence on the behaviour of the early colonists. Yet once you go looking in the archives for the influence of Christianity in attitudes and policies towards the Aborigines you find it literally everywhere. George Arthur was appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land in 1824 precisely because he was an anti-slavery Evangelical with a successful record in his previous appointment of setting free the indigenous slaves of British Honduras. The early Australian colonies were a magnet for many Evangelicals like him. I would never have understood this without Liz's previous work on the subject.

I also want to acknowledge the contribution to this book by two philosophers who discussed with me the knotty problem of unrecorded killings on the Australian frontier. This is an issue upon which many of our academic historians depend very heavily. Without going into the details of it, Jim Franklin pointed out that their claim is hung on an unresolvable dilemma and Jean Curthoys showed me their argument is in fact circular, and assumes from the outset that which it seeks to prove. I've used both their arguments in Chapter Ten. Jim was also my Biblical advisor, supplying me with the words of Psalm 137 and putting me onto the Internet site that allowed me to do an electronic search of the Bible for the several quotations you'll find in Chapter Two.

I want to especially thank the editor of Quadrant, Paddy McGuiness, who supported this project from the outset by giving me a huge amount of space in 2000 to publish my first articles and then backing me up in the press when my critics were at their most ferocious. In fact, if Paddy had not put on a conference that year and asked me to give a paper to it, this project would not exist. What I initially thought would be little more than an extended book review has subsequently expanded into these volumes. If anyone ever writes an intellectual history of Australia in the late twentieth century, one of its most significant events would have to be Paddy's takeover in 1998 of the editorship of Quadrant. Under his regime, topics that were previously taboo became debatable again. The political correctness and cultural relativism that had dominated our intellectual classes and which had long seemed so impregnable, suddenly became vulnerable. The idea that had captured the humanities, that scholarship must be politicized, had its disastrous consequences exposed to view. If Quadrant has not been there as a vehicle to test my ideas I would never have ventured into this territory at all.

Another member of the Quadrant team who has made an essential contribution is George Thomas, the deputy editor. George kindly agreed to be copy editor of my manuscript. He not only saved me from a number of embarrassing mistakes but suggested that I add summaries to the text at several places for readers who would find the detail heavy going. Thanks to George, the book is much more readable than it otherwise would have been.

I also want to thank my cover designer Graham Rendoth for doing such a great job. He not only designed the cover for this volume but has given the three-volume series a unity that complements the whole work. A lot of people have remarked on how good the book looks and that is largely due to Graham's inspired cover design.

The debate over Aboriginal history is not simply about the Aborigines. Ultimately, it is about the character of the Australian nation and the calibre of the civilization that Britain brought to these shores in 1788. Pretty obviously, this book is a defence of the integrity of both the nation itself and the civilization from which it derives. I have no doubt this will lead the usual suspects to once again point their fingers and accuse me of every kind of ideological error and personal bad faith. I am beyond caring about that now, but let me emphasise that the targets of my critique are not Aboriginal people but the white historians who have written about them. These historians have not only failed their public duty to discover and record the truth about the past, they have also supported the continuation of policies that have been a disaster for Aboriginal people themselves, especially the policy of separating them from the Australian mainstream. The British who colonised this continent profoundly disrupted traditional Aboriginal society, it is true, but they also offered them the enormous benefit of access to all that the modern world has to offer, which a great many Aborigines have used to their advantage throughout the past 200 years. However, other Aborigines were locked up on reserves, away from white society, ostensibly to protect them from white violence but in reality to provide a captive audience for those missionaries and bureaucrats who our historians today praise as great humanitarians. In the 1990s the High Court and the Australian Parliament went along with this interpretation and supported legislation to introduce a new kind of separatism. In doing so, they set back by many years the policies of integration and assimilation that a proper reading of our history would show are the only ones to have worked.

Aboriginal history is not only a domestic issue. It has come to have international repercussions as well. Some of these will only become apparent when the United Nations finally brings down its covenant on the rights of indigenous peoples, which we are committed to support by international treaty. Others, however, are already evident, such as the way that Malaysia's Dr Mahatir has in the past week exploited the topic of Aboriginal massacres and genocide to demonstrate his anti-colonialist credentials to his own constituency and the wider Islamic world. Indeed, both at home and abroad, this is a subject long used by all those who want to milk anti-Western prejudices for maximum political gain. It is an important issue for both Australia's international reputation and our international relations. For all these reasons, we need to get this history right. This has been my major objective in writing this book.