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June 19, 2003 [feather]
Bad history down under

Last December, Australian historian Keith Windschuttle published The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One, Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847, a book challenging the widely accepted truism that the history of Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) is the history of the programmatic genocide of aboriginal people by British settlers. Here is how Windschuttle summarized his argument in The Australian when the book came out:


Tasmania, or Van Diemen's Land as it was known until 1855, is widely regarded today as the site of the most violent relations between Aborigines and colonists in Australian history. It is our worst-case scenario. Authors such as Lyndall Ryan claim the Tasmanian Aborigines were subject to "a conscious policy of genocide". International writers now routinely compare the actions of the British in Tasmania with the Spaniards in Mexico, the Belgians in the Congo, the Turks in Armenia and Pol Pot in Cambodia. The Black War from 1824 to 1831 and the Black Line of 1830 are two of the most notorious events in the history of the British Empire.

However, after examining all the archival evidence and double-checking the references cited by the most reputable academic historians of the subject, I have concluded that most of the story is myth piled upon myth, including some of the most hair-raising breaches of historical practice ever recorded. Here are some of the transgressions by its leading historians.


In that piece, which coincided with the publication of the book, Windschuttle went on to summarize how the story of genocide that is so central to Australian history (not to mention national identity) is in no small part the fabrication of historians who play fast and loose with facts, misquoting as needed and even making up statistics when necessary. He goes on to list just a few of the glaring errors he found when he checked the major historical work on the subject against the sources they cite. The representative list he gives in the article is long, but worth quoting in full:

Lloyd Robson claims that settler James Hobbs in 1815 witnessed Aborigines killing 300 sheep at Oyster Bay and the next day the 48th Regiment killed 22 Aborigines in retribution. However, between 1809 and 1822 Hobbs was living in India, the first sheep did not arrive at Oyster Bay until 1821 and in 1815 the 48th Regiment never went anywhere near Oyster Bay.

Robson and four other authors repeat a story that 70 Aborigines were killed in a battle with the 40th Regiment near Campbell Town in 1828. But all neglect to say that a local merchant told a government inquiry that he went to the alleged site with a corporal on the following day but could find no bodies or blood, only three dead dogs. "To tell you the truth," the corporal then confessed, "we did not kill any of them."

Ryan cites the Hobart Town Courier as a source for several stories about atrocities against Aborigines in 1826. But that newspaper did not begin publication until October 1827 and the other two newspapers of the day made no mention of these killings.

Ryan cites the diary of the colony's first chaplain, Rev Robert Knopwood, as the source for a claim that between 1803 and 1808 the colonists killed 100 Aborigines. The diaries, however, record only four Aborigines being killed in this period.

Ryan claims that in 1826, police killed 14 Aborigines at Pitt Water. But none of the three references she provides mentions any Aborigines being killed there in 1826 or any other time.

Ryan claims a band of white vigilantes massacred the Port Dalrymple Aborigines in December 1827. None of the five sources she cites mentions either vigilantes or a massacre.

Between 1828 and 1830, according to Ryan, "roving parties" of police constables and convicts killed 60 Aborigines. Not one of the three references she cites mention any Aborigines being killed, let alone 60. The governor at the time and most subsequent authors regarded the roving parties as completely ineffectual.

Ryan says the Black War began in 1824 with the Big River tribe launching patriotic attacks on the invaders. However, all the assaults on whites that year were made by a small gang of detribalised blacks led by a man named Musquito who was not defending his tribal lands. He was an Aborigine originally from Sydney who had worked in Hobart for 10 years before becoming a bushranger.

Henry Reynolds claims the chief agent of the Van Diemen's Land Company, Edward Curr, was one of the settlers making "increased demands for extermination" of the Aborigines. The full text of the statement Reynolds cites, however, is a pessimistic prediction of what might possibly happen if Aboriginal violence continued, not an advocacy of their extermination. "I am far from advising such a proceeding," Curr wrote.

Reynolds claims lieutenant-governor Arthur recognised from his experience in the Peninsular War against Napoleon than the Aborigines had adopted Spanish tactics of guerilla warfare, in which small bands attacked the troops of their enemy. However Arthur's military career never included Spain. The full text of the statement Reynolds cites talks not about troops coming under attack by guerillas but of Aborigines robbing and assaulting unarmed shepherds on remote outstations.

Arthur inaugurated the Black Line in 1830, Reynolds claims, because "he feared 'a general decline in the prosperity' and the 'eventual extirpation of the colony' ". But Arthur never made the statement attributed to him. Reynolds has altered his words.


While American bloggers were busy celebrating the successful toppling of Michael Bellesiles, whose falsifications and sloppy citations underpinned his much-lauded but also factually challenged Arming America, Windschuttle was quietly exposing a host of Australian Bellesiles to view. As with Bellesiles, politically motivated historians had allowed their agenda to drive their presentation of material; as with Bellesiles, the skewed portrait they painted of their nation's history was accepted too readily because it conformed to a particularly desirable story of what the nation is and who its people are. Arming America appealed to people who wanted to believe that guns were not a major part of early American culture, and who wanted to argue that the Second Amendment should not be interpreted to mean that all private citizens have a constitutional right to carry guns. The genocidal narrative of Australian history appealed to people's unresolved guilt about the colonization of that continent, blaming settlers for the deliberate extinction of the aborigines and in the process helping to fortify a reparative agenda in the present. Windschuttle argues that the reality is far more complex and far less satisfying because it does not provide a clear, politically correct focal point for blame: "True, the full-blood Tasmanian Aborigines did die out in the 19th century," he writes. "But this was almost entirely a consequence of two factors: the long isolation that had left them vulnerable to introduced diseases, especially influenza, pneumonia and tuberculosis; and the fact that they traded and prostituted their women to such an extent that they lost the ability to reproduce themselves."

The flap Windschuttle's book was bound to cause is still flapping. The June 9 edition of Australia's Herald Sun reports that because it is "now more moral to seem good than be right," Windschuttle continues to be "savaged" by his fellow historians. Unable to refute his argument, they have collectively attacked both his character and his credibility as a scholar: "Historians are always making up figures," quoth Ryan, defending her false statistics by libelling the historical profession. Windschuttle is "malicious," others say. He is a "cultural chauvinist." He has a "twisted view of history" that leaves "no room ... for historical imagination." His work is "replete with misconceptions, distortions, character assassinations" and it commits the heinous crime of aiming "to take the discipline of history back to some golden age when it was all about facts." The picture of Australian historiography that emerges here is one that will speak to anyone familiar with academic politics: dissent is not welcome, and truth is not valued; genuine inquiry--which involves challenging prior work--breeds not renewed investigation of material but bitter acrimony; to question existing knowledge is to betray those who framed it. Clio, thy name might better be Ego.

(hat tip: Fred R.)

UPDATE: Windschuttle published a long and detailed piece on the fabrication of aboriginal history in the September 2001 issue of the New Criterion. Thanks to Emmett H. for the link.

UPDATE UPDATE: King Banaian has additional reflections on Australian historical memory and on history-writing in general. And Eugene Volokh has another example of an Australian attempt to suppress academic dissent.

ANOTHER UPDATE 6/22/03: Henry Farrell responds with some apt criticisms of my post. Windschuttle's opponents, it appears, level many of the same accusations at him that he levels at them. The economist-blogger John Quiggin, for instance, says Windschuttle is the one grinding the political axe. Ironically, Quiggin argues, Windschuttle's desire to repudiate a version of history he finds politically repugnant has led him to embrace the historical relativism he openly deplores in his 1994 The Killing of History. Others have pointed out potentially fatal flaws in Windschuttle's research, most notably Henry Reynolds (one of the historians Windschuttle attacks). Here's an account of a debate between Windschuttle and Reynolds that, if accurate, certainly does suggest that Windschuttle's own assemblage of data leaves something to be desired. Flawed arguments and failed syntheses aside, though, the citational problems Windschuttle identifies in major works of aboriginal history remain to be corrected and explained. Ryan, for example, contends that while her footnoting may be sloppy, she does have data to support all her points. It will be interesting to read her formal response to Windschuttle when it appears.
posted on June 19, 2003 11:53 AM