The use and abuse of sources in Aboriginal History
Keith Windschuttle
Teaching History
Vol. 41, No. 4, December 2007

 

In the 1970s, when I was a postgraduate student in history at the University of Sydney, we were taught the best way to start a history thesis was to do a review of the literature. We were told that discovering and categorizing all that other historians had written on your topic was not only a good way to brief yourself on the overall subject but also to uncover questions that had not yet been asked, gaps that had not been filled and leads that had not been followed. While every graduate student hoped they could find something new or, better yet, something to overturn the prevailing ideas on the topic, we nonetheless took it for granted that much of what the earlier authors had said was true and well-founded in the sources, and that we were, of necessity, standing on their shoulders. In other words, the assumption on which we proceeded was that the historians who preceded us in the field were trustworthy.

Unfortunately, in the history of relations between Aborigines and Europeans, that assumption is no longer operative. The generation of historians who have dominated this particular field for the past thirty years have not produced a body of work from which anyone in the future could advance with confidence. Instead, the proper advice to give students today on writing a thesis on Aboriginal history, would be to act as if this work does not exist. If they want to find out what really happened, the only way to proceed is to go back to the original documents and start from scratch. Let me give some examples of why the current generation cannot be trusted.

In her book The Aboriginal Tasmanians the historian Lyndall Ryan claims that in the four years between 1804 and 1808 British colonists killed 100 Aborigines in Van Diemen's Land . [1] However, if you look up her source for this, the diary of the colony's chaplain Robert Knopwood, you will find he only recorded four Aboriginal deaths in that period. [2] In June 2003, in a discussion of my criticism of her work on Channel Nine's program Sunday , Ryan confessed her original footnote was wrong. However, she said her real source, was footnoted in the following paragraph — a report by the explorer John Oxley in 1810. However , anyone who looks up Oxley's report will find there is no mention in it anywhere of 100 Aborigines being killed. Pressed on the issue by journalist Helen Dalley, Ryan said: “I think by the way Oxley wrote that he seemed to think there had been a great loss of life from the Aborigines.” Helen Dalley then asked: “So, in a sense, it is fair enough for [Windschuttle] to say that you did make up figures? Ryan replied: “Historians are always making up figures.” [3]

Like most of what Ryan has said on this subject, however, this statement was not true either. All historians do not make up figures. To do so is a corruption of their profession. Historians must have evidence for their claims. And if they can't produce evidence they shouldn't produce figures. Ryan would have been more accurate if she had said: the historians of Aborigina l Australia are always making up figures. That statement would have been true.

The biggest single invention in this field is the claim by Henry Reynolds in his book The Other Side of the Frontier that 10,000 Aborigines were killed in Queensland before Federation. [4] The source he provides is an article of his own called “The Unrecorded Battlefields of Queensland”, which he wrote in 1978. [5] But if you track down that article you find something very strange. It is not about Aboriginal deaths at all. It is a tally of the number of whites killed by Aborigines. Nowhere does it mention an Aboriginal death toll of 10,000. Reynolds's claim, and the source he cites for it, are bogus.

Now, before I discovered this, I had been a true believer in the story of British invasion, Aboriginal resistance and large-scale killings by the colonists. I had never done any archival research in Aboriginal history but nonetheless used the principal historical works of Henry Reynolds, Lyndall Ryan, Charles Rowley and others, in my lectures. In my 1994 book, The Killing of History , a critique of postmodernist theory in history, I defended Reynolds as one of our “most revered” historians and I described Rowley's book The Destruction of Aboriginal Society as one of the great works of Australian historiography. [6]

In 2000, when I checked out the contents of Reynolds's footnote, it began to dawn on me that all was not right. The Other Side of the Frontier had been published in 1981. I realized there must have been other Australian historians, long before me, who had also discovered what Reynolds had done — yet they had never gone public about it. This smacked too much of collusion for my taste, so I decided to investigate the story I had long accepted.

There are two central claims made by historians of Aboriginal Australia: first, the actions by the colonists amounted to genocide; second, the actions by the Aborigines were guerilla tactics that amounted to frontier warfare. Lyndall Ryan claims that in Tasmania the Aborigines were subject to “a conscious policy of genocide”. Rhys Jones in The Last Tasmanian labels it “a holocaust of European savagery”. [7]

Henry Reynolds claims the Tasmanian Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur, recognized from his experience in the Spanish War against Napoleon that the Aborigines were using the tactic of guerilla warfare, in which small bands attacked the troops of their enemy. [8] However, if you check Arthur's biography by A. G. L. Shaw you'll find he never served in Spain . [9] If you read the full text of the statement Reynolds cites, you'll find Arthur was talking not about troops coming under attack by guerillas but of Aborigines robbing and assaulting unarmed shepherds on remote outstations. [10] Reynolds edited out that part of the statement that disagreed with his thesis. About the so-called guerrilla war, Arthur himself wrote in 1828:

there is no combined movement among the Native tribes, nor, although cunning and artful in the extreme, any such systematic warfare exhibited by any of them as need excite the least apprehension in the Government, for the blacks, however large their number, have never yet ventured to attack a party consisting of even three armed men. [11]

Reynolds claims that Arthur inaugurated the infamous “Black Line” in 1830 because “he feared ‘a general decline in the prosperity' and the ‘eventual extirpation of the colony'”. [12] Reynolds presents that last phrase as a verbatim quotation from Arthur. However, Arthur never said this at all. Reynolds changed his words. What Arthur actually wrote was not that he feared “the extirpation of the Colony” but rather “the extirpation of the Aboriginal race”. [13] Arthur was concerned about the survival of the Aborigines. 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 against isolated convicts and settlers would provoke a reaction that would get out of hand. The tactic they adopted of the Black Line, whose aim was to drive two of the island's nine tribes away from the settled districts onto uninhabited land, actually failed to accomplish this objective. Nonetheless, its intention cannot be characterised the way it normally is today, as a form of “ethnic cleansing” or “extirpation”. Since genocide is, like murder, a crime of intent, neither the Black Line nor any other government actions in Van Diemen's Land, deserve that label.

Lyndall Ryan says the so-called “Black War” of Tasmania began in the winter of 1824 with the Big River tribe launching patriotic attacks on the invaders. [14] However, the assaults on whites that winter were actually made by a small gang of detribalized blacks led by a man named Musquito, who was not defending his tribal lands. He was an Aborigine originally from Sydney who had worked for white settlers in Tasmania for ten years before becoming a bushranger. [15] He had no Tasmanian tribal lands to defend. He was just as much a foreigner in Tasmania as the Englishmen, Maoris, Tahitians and Hawaiians employed in the local pastoral, whaling and sealing industries of the day. Musquito's successor as leader of the gang was Black Tom, a young man who, again, was not a tribal Aborigine. He had Tasmanian Aboriginal parents, but had been reared since infancy in the white middle class household of Thomas Birch, a Hobart merchant. Until his capture in 1827, he was Tasmania 's leading bushranger but, as with Musquito, his actions cannot be interpreted as patriotic defence of tribal Aboriginal territory. [16]

Lloyd Robson, author of the award-winning History of Tasmania reports the following story of an eyewitness account of an atrocity, which if true, would have been one of the worst massacres in Tasmanian history.

About 1815, said [James] Hobbs , he saw 300 sheep killed by the aborigines at Oyster Bay as a result of which twenty-two Aborigines were murdered the next day by a party of the 48 th Regiment. [17]

Now, if you look up the source that Robson footnotes, you find that James Hobbs did not see this incident, he was re-telling a story he heard from someone else. It would have been difficult for Hobbs to have been an eyewitness to anything that happened in Tasmania in 1815 because between 1809 and 1822 he was living in India . [18] Moreover, Hobbs got the rest of the story wrong. There were no sheep at Oyster Bay in 1815. The first flocks came with the first white settlers to the district, George Meredith and William Talbot, in 1821. [19] And in 1815 the 48th Regiment could not have been killing any Aborigines in Van Diemen's Land because at the time it was on garrison duty in County Cork , Ireland . [20]

Now, none of this would have been difficult for Robson to check. It requires the reading of no more than three entries in the Australian Dictionary of Biography and a perusal of the brief history of the regiment. Yet if Australia 's award-winning history books — in this case the work of a professor of history at the University of Melbourne — are as unreliable as this, no one should use them as sources. Anyone writing a thesis on this subject must bring a skeptical eye to everything they read and must go back to the original sources to find any kind of solid empirical platform on which to construct their own work.

Let me offer another example of this kind. Both Lloyd Robson and Lyndall Ryan claim Tasmanian settlers killed Aborigines by offering them poisoned flour. Their sole source for this is a diary entry by George Augustus Robinson in which he recorded a conversation between a superintendent of the Van Diemen's Land Company and his convict shepherds. If you go back and check the original source in Robinson's diary entry of August 8 1830 you find him recording that the convicts asked the superintendent for some poison. He asked them why they wanted it. Robinson's diary continues:

They said: “Oh sir, we will poison the natives' dogs”. Mr R took it away with him, their object, he said, being to poison the natives by putting it in their flour &c. [21]

This is the only evidence for Robson's and Ryan's assertion that settlers used poisoned flour to kill Aborigines. It was nothing more than the superintendent's interpretation of what was, at most, an oblique statement of what his convict shepherds might do, not anything they actually had done.

The question of the stolen generations is one for which the current Tasmanian government is currently making large lump-sum payments in compensation. I hope the evidence on which they are doing so is better than that provided by Lyndall Ryan on the subject. Ryan's account of the alleged abduction of Aboriginal children by settlers in the early nineteenth century is replete with so much misinformation it is impossible to excuse it as error. In 1810, Ryan claims, Lieutenant-Governor David Collins warned settlers against kidnapping Aboriginal children. [22] However, there is no evidence Collins ever gave such a warning. None of Collins' orders in 1810, or any other reference cited by Ryan about the abduction of children, support her claim. Ryan footnotes the newspaper, the Derwent Star of 29 January 1810, as one of the sources she consulted. However, according to the Mitchell Library, that edition of the newspaper is not held by any library in the world. It has been missing since the nineteenth century. [23] Ryan claims that in 1819, Lieutenant-Governor William Sorell issued an order about the abducted children. She says: “Sorell ordered that all Aboriginal children living with settlers must be sent to the charge of the chaplain, Robert Knopwood, in Hobart and placed in the Orphan School .” [24] However, the proclamation Ryan uses as her source does not say that. It merely ordered magistrates and constables to count the number of native children living with settlers. [25] Moreover, there was no Orphan School in Hobart in 1819 or at any time during Sorell's administration. The first such institution in the colony, the King's Orphan School , was not opened until 1828 and Reverend Knopwood was never involved in running it. [26]

The so-called Tasmanian “Black War”, which has long been claimed as the worst-case scenario for genocide and the best-case scenario for Aboriginal resistance, and which Henry Reynolds calls the greatest internal threat Australia has ever faced, turns out to have been a minor crime wave by two Europeanised black bushrangers, followed by an outbreak of robbery, assault and murder by tribal Aborigines. All the evidence at the time, on both the white and black sides of the frontier, was that their principal objective was to acquire flour, sugar, tea and bedding, objects that to them were European luxury goods. In my book on Tasmania I quote statements to that effect from tribal Aborigines themselves. [27]

In the entire period from 1803 when the colonists first arrived in Tasmania , to 1834 when all but one family of Aborigines had been removed to Flinders Island , my calculation is that the British were responsible for killing 121 of the original inhabitants, mostly in self-defence or in hot pursuit of Aborigines who had just assaulted white households. [28] In these latter incidents, the Aborigines killed 187 colonists. [29] 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 1880s, the full-blood Tasmanian Aborigines did die out, it is true, but this was almost entirely caused by the introduction of diseases to which their thousands of years of isolation had given them no immunity, especially influenza and pneumonia. Moreover, the spread of venereal disease, especially gonorrhea, left many of the women infertile and so they failed to reproduce themselves. [30]

In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, at the same time as the historians of Aboriginal Australia were telling the story of resistance and genocide, Australia 's anthropologists were giving a very different account of black and white relations.

Professor Bill Stanner published in 1960 an account of the anthropological fieldwork he had done thirty years earlier on the Daly River in the north-west of the Northern Territory . He described the difficulty of getting food from the natural surroundings.

The life of a hunting and foraging nomad is very hard even in a good environment. Time and again the hunters fail, and the search for vegetable food can be just as patchy. A few failures in sequence and life in the camps can be very miserable. The small, secondary foodstuffs ? the roots, honey, grubs, ants, and the like, of which far too much has been made in the literature ? are relished tidbits, not staples. The aborigines rarely starve but they go short more often than supposed when the substantial fauna ? kangaroos, wallaby, goannas, birds, fish ? are too elusive. [31]

Then, in a passage reproduced frequently in the anthropological literature, Stanner wrote:

The blacks have grasped eagerly at any possibility of a regular and dependable food supply for a lesser effort than is involved in nomadic hunting and foraging. There is a sound calculus of cost and gain in preferring a belly regularly if only partly filled for an output of work which can be steadily scaled down. Hence the two most common characteristics of aboriginal adaptation to settlement by Europeans; a persistent and positive effort to make themselves dependent, and a squeeze-play to obtain a constant or increasing supply of food for a dwindling physical effort. [32]

These comments came on top of another paper by Stanner about the Fitzmaurice River district of the Northern Territory which, by the 1930s, was completely deserted of its once substantial Aboriginal population. They had not been dispossessed by pastoralists, or even had any conflict with them, because up to that time the region remained unsettled by whites. Instead, Aborigines had begun to drift away from the district around 1900, some to cattle stations to the south, to the east and across the Western Australian border, others to the little towns that dotted the north-south highway between Darwin and Alice Springs . The frontier history of this region was not a story of invasion and resistance, but one in which the Aborigines were willingly, often eagerly, seduced by the attractions of white society. Stanner wrote:

The evidence, and discussions with natives who had lived there as children, satisfied me that the aboriginal explanation is correct. They say that their appetites for tobacco and, to a lesser extent, for tea became so intense that neither man nor woman could bear to be without. Jealousy, ill will and violence arose over the small amounts which came by gift and trade. The stimulants, if I may call them such, were of course not the only, or the first, European goods to reach them: probably iron goods were the first, but it was the stimulants that precipitated the exodus. Individuals, families and parties of friends simply went away to places where the avidly desired things could be obtained. The movement had phases and fluctuations, but it was always a one-way movement.[33]

Stanner said voluntary movements of this kind occurred widely across Aboriginal Australia. He accused historians of over-dramatising other causes like violence, disease, neglect and racial prejudice. In emphasising these factors, he said, historians had failed to incorporate into their explanations just how powerful a magnet white society was, and how many Aborigines had vied with one another to join it.

Stanner did not recount this approvingly. He lamented what had happened, observing how the search for stimulants ‘led certain natives to their ruin', leaving them culturally impoverished — ‘a sort of Low Culture as distinct from the High Culture of tradition — and with only the vestiges of their former rich tribal lives'. [34] Nonetheless, he was reporting a very different kind of tragedy to the one that was being defined by the historians.

In 1972 another anthropologist Annette Hamilton published an article about why the Aboriginal people of the Everard Ranges district in South Australia had decided to abandon the bush in favour of the pastoral stations in the late 1930s. She said that Aboriginal culture itself had compelled them to come in:

There was nothing external to force their movements; here, as in many other places at other earlier times, they came as individuals of their own free will. It seems clear that the values and norms of their own society forced them to do it. [35]

The Everard Ranges clans were permitted in the 1940s to camp at the homestead of one pastoral station where, in exchange for labour, they were issued meat, flour, sugar and tea. Hamilton explained the cultural imperative behind their actions:

The twin principles which kept[traditional] Aboriginal society functioning were the need to find food and the desire to limit effort in doing so — vital elements in a hunting and gathering economy. Put in ecological terms, it was a question of maintaining an energy input/output balance favourable to human survival. When the news came that the whites had abundant, if strange, food, more than they could possibly eat, this was like news of Eden — or the super water-hole, in Aboriginal terms. Hence, just as they had always moved to the sources of food — the ripening figs, the run of witchitties, so they moved to the whites, not in order to take part in white society, not in order to experience social change, but in order to eat the food. [36]

Another observer who took a similar line was Paul Hasluck, who in 1940 wrote a survey of policy in nineteenth-century Western Australia called Black Australians . In the 1920s and 1930s, Hasluck had been a journalist on the newspaper, the West Australian . He spent a lot of time covering Aboriginal affairs in an era when one could still observe directly the first contacts between blacks and whites. In pastoral areas, he observed:

In some cases where a family of natives customarily camped on the sheep run a sort of understanding might grow up that when they wanted it there was always a ‘bit of tucker' to be had at the homestead and that when the settler wanted a few natives for mustering or other seasonal of occasional jobs he could find them down at ‘the camp'. Such arrangements and undertakings worked in a free-and-easy way without any fuss or formality, and where there was a settler who had the knack of ‘getting on with the blacks' or knew ‘how to handle them', there was a fair measure of satisfaction on both sides. There were some happy instances both in the south and north where the understanding ripened into a real attachment between the black family and the white family, and a second and even a third generation grew up with a mutual confidence that the blacks were to be looked after and the whites were to be helped.

Unfortunately, not all settlers had the happy knack and not all situations permitted so loose an arrangement. [37]

In 1981, the invasion/resistance model was subject to a further critique that remains, even today, unanswered. The Victorian historian Beverley Nance drew on the accumulating literature of anthropology to account for Aboriginal behaviour in the colony of Victoria in the nineteenth century. She was principally concerned with the apparent paradox that, while white people killed about 400 Aborigines in the colonial period, the Aborigines killed very few whites in return. Yet at the same time, the traditionally high rate of Aboriginal killings of other Aborigines continued unabated. For instance, in the fifteen year period between 1835 and 1850, she showed Aborigines killed only 59 whites but were responsible for the violent deaths of more than 200 other Aborigines. ‘These figures immediately raise the question,' Nance said, ‘of why did the Aborigines act more aggressively towards those of their own race than towards whites.' [38]

The answer, she said, lay in Aboriginal culture, especially in the relationships between tribes, their ideas about death, and their belief in sorcery. In the Port Phillip District , she argued, there was constant inter-tribal conflict because Aborigines believed that all deaths were caused by hostile tribes, and that all deaths had to be revenged. She quoted anthropologist Kenneth Maddock, who explained that Aborigines believed death always had a human cause. Death was ‘induced by the sorcerer using his art to separate irrevocably the bodily and spiritual parts of his victim's person'. [39] Sorcery meant that Aborigines ruled out the possibility of death by accident or misadventure. She also quoted the anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt who wrote:

Even wounding or death in fighting may be seen in this light. The immediate cause may be a spear thrust; but the real cause may be the hostile action of a third person, who has arranged the situation in advance to ensure that the victim was in the right position at the right time. [40]

The white colonists, however, always remained outside this pattern of relationships. The Aboriginal social universe was divided firmly between those with whom they shared kinship, social and marriage ties, and the ‘wild blacks' outside those affiliations, who were their adversaries. Nance reports that Aborigines did not classify whites as either intra-tribal friend or extra-tribal enemy. Once the Aborigines found the whites were ignorant of sorcery they deemed them harmless and sought to make links with them. This had the peculiar result that those deaths that were actually caused by whites were blamed on other blacks.

Aborigines continued to attribute deaths among them to Aborigines of hostile tribes, and whites remained outside the inter-tribal feuding … deaths caused by whites would have been attributed to foreign, hostile Aboriginal tribes. Whites, in killing Aborigines, may have been seen as merely the agents of Aboriginal sorcerers. [41]

As well as her historical evidence, Nance gave anthropological accounts of similar beliefs held in the Northern Territory and the East Kimberley in which Aboriginal sorcerers were thought to have ambushed and ‘prepared' their Aboriginal victims for the white man's bullet. [42]

In 1987, in Western Australia, one of the early supporters of the invasion/resistance model, the historian Bob Reece, turned around and became an outright critic of it. He rejected the notion that resistance was the typical Aboriginal response to European presence across the continent. [43] ‘In their enthusiasm to document the bloodiness of the process of colonisation,' Reece wrote, ‘Reynolds and others have not been so interested in documenting and highlighting that other major characteristic of Aboriginal-European interaction: accommodation.' He elaborated on this theme:

The picture that emerges from the Swan River situation during the first decade of European occupation is of a number of local Aboriginal groups who were not essentially inimical to the European presence, sometimes seeing it as a form of sanctuary or protection against traditional enemies. They were willing to share their resources, principally land, with the newcomers and when this proved impossible they attempted to make compensatory arrangements which would supply them with food and other items. … The whole process of interaction was characterised by a series of accommodations or adjustments made by people who did not appear to have had an essentially hostile reaction to the European presence but were acutely aware of the Europeans' power to impose their will if need be by force of superior arms. Indeed, they were anxious to use that power as a means of strengthening their position vis-à-vis outside Aboriginal groups who were feared enemies. [44]

The works I have quoted here by anthropologists and by historians influenced by anthropology are obviously interpretations rather than final and absolute truths. Nonetheless, they are far more plausible and far better researched than the histories of Reynolds, Ryan, Robson and their colleagues. Any new author who ventures into this territory would find that a combination of this anthropologically-informed history and a research process that goes back to the original documents holds far more promise than treading in the worn-out footprints of the current generation.

Notes

1. Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians , (1981), Allen and Unwin, Sydney , 2nd. edn., 1996, p 77

2. Mary Nicholls (ed.), The Diary of the Reverend Robert Knopwood 1803–1838 , Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Hobart, 1977; Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803–1847 , Macleay Press, Sydney, 2002, p 49

3. Sunday , TCN Channel Nine, 25 May 2003, http://sunday.ninemsn.com.au/sunday/cover_stories/transcript_1286.asp

4. Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia , Penguin, Ringwood, 1982, p 122

5. Henry Reynolds, ‘The Unrecorded Battlefields of North Queensland', in Henry Reynolds, ed., Race Relations in North Queensland , James Cook University, Townsville, 1978

6. Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History, How a Discipline is being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists , Macleay Press, Sydney, 1994, pp 95, 114, 117–8, 246

7.The Last Tasmanian , script by Rhys Jones and Tom Haydon, produced and directed by Tom Haydon, Artis Film Productions, Sydney, 1978

8. Henry Reynolds, Fate of a Free People , Penguin, Ringwood, 1995, p 66

9. A. G. L. Shaw, Sir George Arthur, Bart, 1784–1854 , Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1980, pp 5–16

10. Arthur to Murray , 12 September 1829, Historical Records of Australia , I, XV, p 446

11. Arthur to Murray , 4 November 1828, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies, Australia , 4, p 181

12. Henry Reynolds, Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers and the Land , Allen and Unwin, Sydney , 1996, p 29

13. Arthur, Memorandum, Sorell Camp, 20 November 1830, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies, Australia , 4, p 244

14. Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians , p 115

15. Windschuttle, Fabrication, Volume One , pp 65–73

16. Windschuttle, Fabrication, Volume One , pp 73–7

17. Lloyd Robson, A History of Tasmania , Volume I, Oxford University Press, Melbourne , 1983, p 50

18. E. R. Pretyman, ‘James Hobbs', Australian Dictionary of Biography , Vol 1, A–H, p 442–3

19. See entries for George Meredith and William Talbot, Australian Dictionary of Biography , Volume 2, I–Z, 1788–1850, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1967

20. T. C. Sargent, The Colonial Garrison 1817–1824: the 48th Foot, the Northhamptonshire Regiment in the Colony of New Souith Wales , TCS Publications, Canberra, 1996, pp 17–19. In Fabrication, Volume One , p 145, I wrongly thought the 48 th Regiment was in Van Diemen's Land in 1815.

21. Robinson, diary, 8 August 1830, in N. J. B. Plomley (ed.), Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson 1829–1834, Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Hobart, 1966, p 196

22. Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians , p 78

23. Windschuttle, Fabrication, Volume One , p 54

24. Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians , p 79

25. Government and General Orders of Lieutenant-Governor, signed H. E. Robinson, Secretary, 13 March 1819. Full text is in Plomley, Friendly Mission , pp 42–3

26. For history of the Hobart orphanage see Joan C. Brown, Poverty is not a Crime: The Development of Social Services in Tasmania 1803–1900 , Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Hobart , 1972, pp 8, 15, 22–4. That Knopwood never had charge of Aboriginal orphans or the orphan school can be seen from his diary entries for 1819, 1820, 1828, as well as from Rex and Thea Rentis, ‘Some notes on the ancestry and life of the Rev. Robert Knopwood', Papers and Proceedings Tasmanian Historical Research Association , 12, 1964–5

27. Windschuttle, Fabrication, Volume One , pp 124–9

28. Windschuttle, Fabrication, Volume One , pp 387–97

29. Windschuttle, Fabrication, Volume One , p 85

30. Windschuttle, Fabrication, Volume One , pp 372–6

31. W. E. H. Stanner, ‘Durmugam: A Nangiomeri' in J. B. Casagrande (ed.), In the Company of Man , Harper, New York , 1960, pp 69–70

32. Stanner, ‘Durmugam: A Nangiomeri', p 70

33. W. E. H. Stanner, ‘Continuity and Change among the Aborigines', Presidential Address, Anthropology, Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Thirty Third Congress , Adelaide, August 1958, p 101

34. Stanner, ‘Continuity and Change among the Aborigines', pp 107–8

35. Annette Hamilton, ‘Blacks and whites: The Relationships of Change', Arena , 30, 1972, p 41

36. Hamilton, ‘Blacks and Whites', p 41

37. Paul Hasluck, Black Australians: A Survey of Native Policy in Western Australia 1829–1897 , (1942) 2nd edition, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne , 1970, p 148

38. Beverley Nance, ‘The level of violence: Europeans and Aborigines in Port Phillip, 1835–1850', Historical Studies , 19, 77, October 1981, p 533

39. Kenneth Maddock, The Australian Aborigines: A Portrait of their Society , Penguin, Ringwood, 1975, pp 161–2, cited by Nance, ‘The Level of Violence', p 534

40. R. M. and C. H. Berndt, The World of the First Australians (1964), Ure Smith, Sydney, 1977, p 306, cited by Nance, ‘The Level of Violence', p 535

41. Nance, ‘The Level of Violence', p 538

42. Nance, ‘The Level of Violence', pp 538–9

43. Bob Reece, ‘Inventing Aborigines', Aboriginal History , 11, 1–2, 1987, p 17. The article was reprinted in Valerie Chapman and Peter Read (eds.), Terrible Hard Biscuits: A Reader in Aboriginal History , Allen and Unwin, Sydney , 1996.

44. Reece, ‘Inventing Aborigines', p 22