Why I'm a bad historian
Keith Windschuttle
The Australian
February 12, 2003

In the February edition of Australian Book Review, Alan Atkinson described an article of mine in the Australian (December 9) as "heart-sinking". I had provided a list of examples of the abuse of scholarship in Aboriginal history, showing that interpretations of frontier warfare and genocide were based on invented incidents, concocted footnotes, altered documents and gross exaggeration of the Aboriginal death toll in colonial Tasmania.

What made Atkinson's heart sink, however, was not this catalogue of misconduct. Instead he was dismayed that my critique was based on such an outdated concern as getting the facts right. "Windschuttle aims to take the discipline of History back to some golden age," he lamented, "when it was all about facts."

Atkinson is one of the contributors to the National Museum of Australia's book Frontier Conflict launched on Monday. The book's contents come from a conference staged in December 2001 ostensibly to debate the topic but actually to demonstrate that the historians who dominate this field dismiss my criticisms. Significantly, other authors who have questioned their orthodoxy, such as Perth journalist Rod Moran who has shown the "Forrest River Massacre" of 1926 never occurred, were not invited to participate, even though a museum exhibit gives a misleading account of this very incident.

The conference papers respond mainly to articles I wrote in 2000 and 2001 but they reflect the same attitude their authors have taken in the past two months to my own book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Few have been troubled by the malpractice of their colleagues. Instead, most have portrayed me as the bad guy for raising these issues. This "debate" has been revealing about the standards now prevailing within university history departments and about the consequences of the long-standing left-wing ascendancy in Australian historiography.

While some non-academic commentators were concerned at my book's findings -- Michael Duffy (Courier-Mail, December 14) wrote "allegations of scholarly fraud on this scale are virtually unknown" -- academic historians tried to disparage them. One contributor to the museum conference, Raymond Evans (Courier-Mail, December 20) said all I had uncovered in the work of Henry Reynolds, Lyndall Ryan and Lloyd Robson was "a clutch of regrettable mistakes", including no more than "half a dozen alleged gaffes" in Ryan's book The Aboriginal Tasmanians. Ryan herself (Australian, December 17) described these as "a few minor errors that can easily be rectified".

However, Ryan's book -- and this refers to her 1996 second edition which she claimed she had corrected -- goes well beyond a few forgivable gaffes. There are at least seventeen cases where she either invented atrocities and other incidents or provided false footnotes, plus another seven cases where the number of Aborigines she claims were killed or captured is either outright false or exaggerated beyond belief. Lloyd Robson committed a similar degree of fabrication.

Ryan has had more than a year to answer my major charges, first made at the museum's frontier conflict conference, which she attended. Yet her published conference paper avoids them entirely. Her only substantive response (Australian, January 4-5) has been to claim I left out one paragraph break in a passage quoted from her book. I plead guilty, but this trivial omission in no way distorted her meanings or the attribution of her footnotes to her text.

Michael Duffy also observed (Daily Telegraph, December 21) that intellectuals on the left "have always had a remarkable ability to switch arguments as soon as they sense they are losing". The co-editor of the National Museum's anthology, Bain Attwood, confirmed this in the Australian (January 6) where he claimed there was nothing new about my rebuttal of the Aboriginal genocide thesis. Academic historians had already abandoned the concept of overt genocide for more focused, local analyses, he said, citing the work of Reynolds, Ryan and Dirk Moses.

Hence my book was no exposé. "It's just old news from a tabloid historian. Only those ignorant of the academic historiography -- or unwilling to go and read it -- could believe otherwise." Moses himself followed Attwood (Australian, January 13), arguing that since I was "unable to describe historical writing accurately" no one should trust anything I say.

It is true Reynolds has admitted the colonial authorities did not intend genocide, which I acknowledged in my conference paper and twice in my book. Instead, however, Reynolds claims it was the Tasmanian settlers who wanted to exterminate them, which is why I devoted my longest chapter to analysing and disproving this claim.

Most of her readers have presumed Ryan's statement that Aborigines were "victims of a conscious policy of genocide" referred to conflict in early Van Diemen's Land. Not so, says Attwood. It merely denoted post-World War II assimilationist policies.

Unfortunately for Attwood and Moses, it is they who have trouble reading the literature. Ryan herself (Australian, December 17) had already confirmed my interpretation, acknowledging her work "asserts that the Tasmanian Aborigines did indeed constitute a threat to British settlers, that the Black War was 'a conscious policy of genocide', though not in the end a successful one, as the Aborigines survived."

Moreover, in the very anthology Attwood himself has just co-edited, Raymond Evans approvingly quotes none other than Dirk Moses providing a not so focused analysis of Queensland: "the use of government terror transformed local genocidal massacres by settlers into official state-wide policy".

The debate at the National Museum and in the press over the past two months suggests something is seriously wrong with academic history in this country. A small group of university teachers with overt left-wing political commitments believe they can decide among themselves what happened in this country's past. When challenged, they resort not to debating the substantive issues but to demonising their critic and mocking his concern for facts.

Historians, however, have a public responsibility to report the facts accurately and to cite their sources honestly. To pretend these things do not matter and that acceptable interpretations can be drawn from false or non-existent evidence is to abandon the pursuit of historical truth altogether.