Social history and Aboriginal legends
A reply to Gary Morgan
Keith Windschuttle
Quadrant
April 2002

My argument in Quadrant, September 2001, that the National Museum of Australia was a profound intellectual mistake had a number of premises but the main one was a critique of the following proposition expressed at a 1999 conference to justify the approach its curators had taken.

Many museum practitioners now see their work as a critical practice, committed to drawing out the ways in which constructions of race, class and gender (and sometimes sexuality and age) have shaped national histories.

Despite his long-winded reply, Gary Morgan fails to address my response to this assertion; in fact, he misses the whole point. I was not discussing whether the museum should or should not give equal space to every worthy ethnic, sexual and political interest group. I was arguing about historical causation -- whether race, class and gender can provide a causal explanation of national history. The National Museum defines itself as "a museum of social history" but I argued it is impossible to tell a national story using social history alone. This would have been true whether the museum used the old pre-Sixties definition of "history with the politics left out", or whether it chose the "gender, race and class" version that has prevailed since then. The social life that goes on within a nation is strongly determined by its political, legal, economic and military structures. If you avoid these dimensions, as the National Museum largely does, you cannot adequately tell how the nation has developed.

Similarly, it doesn't matter what statistical proportion of the population is constituted by middle class, Anglo-Celtic males. The fact is that people of this kind have controlled our political, legal, economic and military structures ever since the nation was founded. To avoid giving them any positive role in our history is to falsify it. This is the main reason the museum is a mistake. Nothing Morgan says makes the slightest dent in that assessment.

For a museum director, Morgan also betrays a startling ignorance of the history of his own field. His claim that early museums "simply displayed their collections in vast arrays" and in "cabinets of curiosities", shows he is completely unfamiliar with the motivations and objectives of his historical predecessors. As I argued, with examples, in my September article, museum displays once had scientific and educational purposes, presenting objects in a way that illuminated the connections between them or that illustrated scientific hypotheses and theories.

Morgan's ignorance of this is yet another illustration of the dismal outcome of the takeover of postgraduate education in museology by postmodern theorists in the 1980s. Sadly, this is also shown by his misunderstanding of the term "relic". Here is a museum director who doesn't know the meaning of one of the key terms of his profession. Relics are not "evidence of dead cultures" but things that survive from the past and help preserve a culture. In a number of religions, including Christianity, which is hardly a "dead culture", relics have an immanence that renders them objects of veneration.

Morgan's misrepresentation of traditional museums extends to his view of traditional history, which he caricatures as "full of names and dates". He says he hated this type thing at school but, frankly, I don't believe he was ever taught the subject this way. I learnt history at both primary and high school in the 1950s, a period now regarded by Morgan's preferred theorists as the depth of unenlightenment, but never once had to recite a list of names and dates. Morgan is simply repeating another imaginary postmodern construct designed to belittle the traditions of the discipline by those who want to redefine and politicise it for their own ends.

It is true, as Morgan says, that the National Museum responded to my September article by staging a conference in December to discuss the criticisms I made of its "Frontier Conflict" section. However, it is quite inaccurate to say this illustrated the museum's "preparedness to give opportunities for those holding various views to express them." The conference was designed to present only two viewpoints: mine and that of the orthodox school of Aboriginal historiography, which believes the Australian frontier was a scene of extensive and protracted violence against Aborigines that often amounted to genocide. The conference organisers invited papers from 26 historians, the great majority of whom they knew would present the orthodox story. The only speakers who did not toe the orthodox line were myself and three comparative neutrals, Beverley Kingston, Geoffrey Bolton and museum board member Christopher Pearson. The whole event was staged to show that the majority opinion among Australian academic historians disagreed with my critique. Given the composition of those invited to attend, it certainly succeeded in this strategic objective.

My September article made three main points about this section of the museum:

• It made a false claim that Aborigines caught spearing cattle in Western Australia in the 1890s had been executed. No one was ever executed for such a minor offence.
  
• Its claim that "numerous" men, women and children were killed by a police patrol at Forrest River in the Kimberley in 1926 omitted to mention that both a magistrate's committal hearing at the time and a major recent study by Rod Moran have concluded there was no good evidence that even a single individual was killed there.
  
• The centrepiece of the whole section, a photographic display of the so-called Bells Falls Gorge Massacre near Bathurst in the 1820s gave credibility to a mythological event for which there was no contemporary evidence. Although it is now claimed as part of ancient Aboriginal tradition, Aboriginal activists only learnt of it from an article about local legends written by a white amateur historian in 1962.

The responses to these points were:

• In a paper in which he rejected my criticisms of his role as historical adviser to the museum, Graeme Davison nonetheless agreed that no Aborigine had ever been executed in Western Australia for cattle spearing and advised the curator to change the text of this display.
  
• No one disputed the points I made about Forrest River, as far as I am aware. (I did not attend the whole conference.) The museum, in fact, evaded a proper debate of this incident by not inviting anyone to present a formal paper about it.
  
• David Roberts, the historian who originally exposed the myth of the Bells Falls Gorge Massacre, nonetheless said that in the 1820s there was some recorded conflict between local settlers and the Wiradjuri tribe. He argued the existence of the legend could be indirect evidence that some killings of Aborigines in the region, though not necessarily at Bells Falls Gorge, might have taken place.

In other words, at the level of empirical evidence, the conference left my criticisms of the Frontier Conflict display intact, except for some speculation about what might have happened at Bells Falls Gorge.

Christopher Pearson told an ABC panel discussion (in which our national broadcaster did not invite me to participate) he agreed with Roberts that because a legend survived about Bells Falls Gorge, this was itself evidence that something bad probably happened at least somewhere in the district at the time. This is, however, a most implausible position to take.

There is a very similar tale still told in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, where legend has it that the place called Govett's Leap was named after a bushranger named Govett who was pursued by troopers to the edge of the waterfall there. Rather than be taken alive, he spurred his horse over the precipice to his doom. When I was a child, my parents told me this piece of oral history in all seriousness. The local Chamber of Commerce has since erected on the main road a statue of Govett on his horse to capitalise on the location as a tourist attraction. However, this particular legend has no connection with historic events of any kind. The real Govett was not a bushranger but the government surveyor who named the site, and "leap" is an old Scottish term for a cataract or waterfall.

How many times do we need to learn the same lesson? Old legends and oral history, unless they are corroborated by original documents, are worthless as historical evidence, whether told by blacks or whites. Those who want to confer legitimacy on the legends of groups they support, such as Aborigines, are logically obliged to do the same to those of whom they might not approve, such as the myths and oral histories of neo-Nazis or Islamic jihadists. Historians who go down this road leave the search for truth behind.

Nonetheless, the National Museum still intends to keep its Frontier Conflict exhibit intact and to perpetuate the Bells Falls Gorge legend, which was the main objective of its expensive exercise in December. Of course, the school children and tourists who inspect it will not realise that what they are seeing is a piece of mythology. They will assume that, because the museum has the imprimatur of the government, its displays have been based on proper research and must be true. They will be badly misled as long as this charade continues.