The truth about our Aboriginal history
Keith Windschuttle
in debate with Henry Reynolds
National Press Club, Canberra
19 April 2001

On August 21 last year, America's largest circulating daily newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, carried a front-page story about Australia. Written by Geraldine Brooks and Tony Horwitz, it told its readers that, beneath the surface of the apparently benign society that was about to host the 27th Olympic Games, lurked a dark and shameful history. The story opened with an anecdote about Risdon Cove near Hobart in 1804 when soldiers fired on a party of Aboriginal men, women and children out hunting kangaroos. This was "the opening shot in a war that would result in the near-extermination of Tasmanian Aborigines," the authors wrote. "Some of the 50 or so killed that day were salted down and sent to Sydney as anthropological curiosities."

This story was soon followed by another in the Bangkok Post, written by the expatriate Australian, Ben Kiernan, Professor of History and Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University. Entitled "Australia's Aboriginal Genocides", this article used terminology such as "ethnic cleansing" and "transit camps" to conjure images of Nazi Germany and the wars in the Balkans. Throughout the nineteenth century, Kiernan wrote, Aborigines "were hunted like wild beasts, having lived for years in a state of absolute terror of white predators." Among the atrocities he recorded was the 1804 incident at Risdon Cove, where he put the total death toll at 40. He also recorded that, as late as 1926, white police massacred 100 Aborigines at Forrest River in the Kimberley. "The two police officers involved," Kiernan writes, "were acquitted and promoted."

This version of Australian history reached its nadir last year in the book by the journalist Phillip Knightley, Australia: A Biography of a Nation. "It remains one of the mysteries of history," Knightley wrote, " that Australia was able to get away with a racist policy that included segregation and dispossession and bordered on slavery and genocide, practices unknown in the civilised world in the first half of the twentieth century until Nazi Germany turned on the Jews in the 1930s." He said the number of Aborigines who died by violence was huge. "Experts I have consulted say that 50,000 would not be an exaggeration," Knightley wrote. "It could be as high as 100,000."

While this material was being presented in the media, the NSW Department of School Education was showing the children in its care a film entitled Windradyne, Wiradjuri Resistance. The central action of this film is the Bells Falls Massacre north of Bathurst in the 1820s. The film tells how Red Coat soldiers surprised a party of thirty to forty Aborigines, mainly women and children. The soldiers then drove them to the edge of the falls, where the women halted, clutching their children. The script continues: "With musket fire they forced them to their deaths over the cliffs of Bells Falls Gorge." The narrative was illustrated by panoramic shots of the gorge itself, interspersed with scenes of Aboriginal children running and dying through the bush.

At the same time in Perth, the Western Australian Museum had a display about the Forrest River Massacre of 1926. The display quoted a man it called a "survivor" of this incident, an Aboriginal named Grant Ngabidji, who recalled the death toll: "picanniny, old old woman, blackfeller, old man, somewhere about a hundred".

I have used these examples because they all come from outside the realm of academic history. They are typical of the stories now recounted about Australian history in the news media, in our schools and museums. They show how deeply this version of history has now penetrated the wider culture. Our professional historians, however, are the ones responsible. They have created the intellectual framework for these claims and have given them an aura of academic respectability. The ultimate statement of this outlook is the newly completed National Museum in Canberra, which not only uses the Bells Falls Gorge Massacre as the central feature of its display on Frontier Conflict, but whose architecture borrows its central theme from the Jewish Museum in Berlin, built to commemorate the Holocaust.

I have also used these examples because, despite the prominence and influence they have had, not one of the points I have quoted from them here is true.

Take the incident at Risdon Cove. There were two separate reports from the British officers there at the time. Both said a settler and his wife had been surrounded in their hut and threatened by more than 200 Aborigines. Soldiers from a nearby camp came to the rescue and shot, at most, three people. One of the reports said three natives were killed; the other said two were killed and one wounded. These officers had no ostensible reason to lie or to downplay what happened. They were only doing their duty. However, at a government inquiry in 1830, a sealer, James Kelly, testified that he thought "40 to 50" blacks had been killed in 1804, even though he acknowledged he had not been there and would have been twelve years old at the time.

Despite this claim being no more than a rumour 26 years after the event, it has allowed those historians who want to beat up this issue to say witnesses have claimed "up to 50" Aborigines were killed. Hence, when translated into the wider culture, a defensive action with three adult casualties has become a massacre of fifty innocent men, women and children. The Wall Street Journal's claim that the bodies were "salted down" and sent to Sydney for anthropological investigation is another rumour first made in 1830 that had no contemporary corroboration.

We can be even more certain about the Bells Falls Massacre of the 1820s. This is a complete fabrication. There is no contemporary evidence to support it of any kind. In fact, the first reports of it did not appear in print until 1962, that is, 120 years later, when an article in the Bathurst Times by a local amateur historian reported it as one of the oral legends of the district. Even though the story was nothing more than folk myth, this did not stop it being taken up and reproduced in two 1988 books, Blood on the Wattle, by the journalist Bruce Elder, and Six Australian Battlefields, by the former politician Al Grassby. In 1989 Mary Coe's book Windradyne: A Wiradjuri Koori, published by the Aboriginal Studies Press, claimed the story as part of ancient Aboriginal tradition. The film for schoolchildren I mentioned above is from this book.

The event at Forrest River in 1926, described by Kiernan as one of the "hundreds of massacres" that took place in the twentieth century, has more plausibility. A Royal Commission found that two police, while on the hunt for an Aboriginal who had murdered a pastoralist, had themselves shot eleven natives in their custody and burnt their remains beyond recognition. Until recently, historians had no good reason to doubt its findings. However, in 1999 the Perth journalist, Rod Moran, in the book Massacre Myth, published a detailed analysis of the evidence to the Royal Commission and proved beyond reasonable doubt that no such killings ever took place. There were no eyewitnesses, no forensic evidence of human beings killed, nor any ballistic evidence. Moran produced a medical officer's analysis made at the time, and largely ignored by later commentators, that charred bones found at some camp sites were not of human origin or were of indeterminate origin. They were probably the remains of animals cooked over camp fires.

The figure of 100 dead at Forrest River, cited by both Ben Kiernan and Henry Reynolds, comes from Aboriginal oral history collected in the 1970s, fifty years later. However, the man whose observations the WA Museum claims to be those of a "survivor" was never at Forrest River in this period. Moreover, Moran shows that to burn a human body beyond recognition, in the open air, would require an average of two and a half tons of wood. To destroy one hundred bodies, the two police would have had to collect 250 tons of wood in country that is almost desert.

The total number of violent Aboriginal deaths cited by Phillip Knightley -- 50,000 up to 100,000 -- is another case of pure invention. The only "authority" to suggest a total this high is the book Blood on the Wattle by Bruce Elder, a journalist whose normal speciality is rock 'n' roll music. It is heavily ironic that Knightley, the author of a very good book on war reporting and propaganda, The First Casualty, has himself succumbed to the kind of atrocity stories he has criticised others for accepting.

Among academic historians, the current consensus is that a total of 20,000 Aborigines were killed by whites as the pastoral frontier moved across the continent. The authority for this figure is Henry Reynolds in his 1981 book, The Other Side of the Frontier. This total, however, is not based on evidence that there actually were this many deaths recorded. Half the figure comes from Reynolds own count of 10,000 deaths in Queensland. His methodology was as follows: he took an estimate that 800-850 white settlers had been killed by blacks in Queensland. He multiplied this by ten to produce 8000-8500 Aborigines killed. He then added another 20 per cent to bring the total up to 10,000. Nowhere does he explain why he chose a ratio of ten to one black deaths to white, (why not two to one, or fifty to one, or even money?) or why he then inflated the figure by 20 per cent to get the round total of 10,000. This is not how you do history. If you want to claim that Aborigines were killed by whites, you have to produce credible evidence, not a mathematical formula.

By "credible" I mean evidence that has been critically examined by sceptical historians. So far in this debate, this approach has been conspicuous by its absence. We should recognise there have been many people in the last 200 years who have wanted to exaggerate the degree of violence done to the blacks. The current school of historians have taken everything these characters have said at face value. But ours is by no means the first generation to play politics with the Aboriginal death toll.

In the early colonies there were some who were enemies of the Governor, such as Henry Melville in Van Diemen's Land jailed for criminal libel, who wrote lurid stories about widespread violence towards blacks, hoping that the Governor's superiors in London would recall him. There were missionaries to the natives who were financially inept, like Lancelot Threlkeld in New South Wales, who told their backers in England that they needed bigger budgets to protect Aborigines because there was so much colonial violence. There were military regiments accused, as many were, of laziness and incompetence, and who invented stories about killing Aborigines. At Campbell Town in Tasmania in 1828, for instance, the 40th Regiment spread a story that it had trapped 70 Aborigines in a gully and shot them all. But when a local settler went to the site the next day he found only the bodies of three dogs. The regiment's corporal then confessed: "to tell you the truth, we did not kill any of them, we had been out a long time and had done nothing". That hasn't stopped three books on Tasmanian history reporting this story as if no one had ever denied it. There are also the memoirs of some pastoralists, written in their old age, that recall when they opened up the country they had to fight drought, floods, bushfires and the blacks.

Now, some of these stories are fanciful, but some are true. Two of the worst massacres of whites in Queensland were in 1857 at Hornet Bank station where eight members of the Fraser family were killed, and in 1861 at Cullinlaringoe, where nineteen members of the Wills family and their servants, including six children, were killed. There is documentary evidence that the local police pursued the offenders and needed very little provocation to shoot most they caught.

But the most notable point about these incidents is their rarity. There are a small number of regional studies that do provide the detail of most Aboriginal killings in the frontier period. In these regions, the majority of deaths on both sides resulted from individual conflicts. Most killings were in ones and twos. Massacres, that is, intentional mass killings, were rare and isolated. Last year, in a reply to me in the press, Henry Reynolds admitted this quite readily. Unfortunately, this is not the impression left by the history he has written, or by any of his followers. Like Ben Kiernan, when they summarise the situation they write of "hundreds of massacres". They create the completely false notion that the Aborigines suffered the equivalent of the Holocaust.

Apart from invented facts, we also suffer the shoddy methodology of these historians. In cases where there are genuine Aboriginal casualties, they invariably chose the highest figure available, no matter how unreliable the witness. They accept Aboriginal oral legends, often more than one hundred years old, as serious historical evidence. If documents are missing they take this as a sign of malpractice -- someone must have destroyed the originals because they had something to hide. They don't test evidence for its reliability. Information from any source is used as long as it fits their thesis, the assumption being that, because it fits the thesis, it must be true. And if you challenge any of this and point out its flaws, you are a morally bad person who insults Aboriginal people and wounds their self-esteem.

If that happens, I am sorry. But this is not just a debate about what was done to the Aborigines. It is also about the character of the nation. The claim made by the majority position, that you can compare the Australian colonies of the nineteenth century with Nazi Germany in the twentieth, is absurd. The notion is wildly anachronistic, conceptually odious and historically false. Those historians who have erected this mythical edifice should stand back for once and look at their creation with a critical eye. They should then admit what a grotesque distortion of the truth it is.