The revisionists and Keith Windschuttle: a history wars retrospective

This post will examine whether revisionist Aboriginal historiography is political, and whether it therefore shows disregard for the truth. It will examine these arguments in the light of recent debates between Keith Windschuttle and writers of revisionist Aboriginal historiography. Firstly, it will show how Windschuttle’s background was a crucial factor in sparking the debate. It will also show how his philosophy informs his writing, before discussing how Aboriginal historiography became politicised. The post will then consider the motivations ascribed to revisionist writers, the debate over whether the treatment of Aboriginals amounted to genocide, and how race became the central plank of the history wars. The post will conclude with some of the outcomes of these “wars” and will place the debate in an international context.

Keith Windschuttle has long been interested in the measure of truth, having a background in journalism. He started out as a copy boy on Sydney’s Daily Telegraph and was a journalist for many years before turning to academia. These journalism skills would serve him in good stead in the history wars that held the media in thrall in the early 2000s. Windschuttle’s sensational claims of revisionist fabrication were good copy and made him a media darling. Politically, Windschuttle called himself a “Vietnam leftist” before the murderous tendencies of Pol Pot and Louis Althusser turned him into an “ultra-conservative”. In his 1984 book The Media, Windschuttle claimed to reject the interpretations of both the political right and left, but he was noticeably more dogmatic in his opposition to the “elitist perspective of literary critics and the theoretical blindfolds that have stultified debate on the left”. Windschuttle’s media skills and strong right-wing political outlook would have a great bearing on his views of the revisionist historians.

Furthermore, Windschuttle was a firm believer that history writing should serve the nation. In his book The White Australia Policy, he proposed that the policy was not racist or a cause for national shame as revisionist historians claimed. Instead, he called it a natural response to the influence of Scottish enlightenment figures such as David Hume, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson on Australian political thinking at the start of the twentieth century. Reviewing the book in The Age, historian Marilyn Lake (herself a victim of Windschuttle’s contempt in the book) said he set up “false dichotomies” to prove his point. Lake also pointed out how dependent he was on the scholarship of the historians he was criticising. These tactics were similar to the ones he used in the debate over Aboriginal historiography.

This debate is a relatively recent phenomenon. Traditionally, Australian historians paid little attention to Aboriginal resistance to white settlement. Reynolds’ The Other Side of the Frontier (1981) was one of the first attempts to categorise the Aboriginal response. Before then, the question of how many Indigenous people were killed in the frontier conflict was rarely posed and never properly answered. His figure of 20,000 Aboriginal deaths was based on evidence he found “voluminous, various and incontrovertible”. Lyndall Ryan documented how Tasmanian Aboriginals were dispossessed and murdered by secret search-and-destroy mission beyond the scrutiny of governments or the press. Knightley, drawing on the work of Reynolds, Ryan and others, wrote how early settlers cleared Aboriginals from their land “as casually as kangaroos”. Such claims were anathema to those who saw history’s role in defending national honour. Windschuttle attacked the evidence of Aboriginal massacre as “flimsy” and “highly suspect”. He accused the revisionists of serious errors of fact and interpretation in describing Australian attitudes to race. Crucially, he claimed their scholarly consensus was merely a “shared ideological position” and a mythology designed to create a sense of black victimhood and white guilt. As Ron Brunton wrote in the Courier-Mail, Aboriginal death counts had become propaganda weapons in a battle fought by people less interested in discovering the truth about the past than in promoting a contemporary agenda.

One important aspect of that contemporary agenda was ascribing ulterior motives to historiographers. Windschuttle raised the stakes when he called the work of Reynolds and others a “fabrication” with its connotation of deliberately tampering with evidence to fake a conclusion. He claimed revisionists had inflated accounts of violence against Aboriginals to delegitimise the Australian state. One of those he accused of fabrication, Lyndall Ryan, said Windschuttle’s so-called “forensic” approach was an inappropriate tool for understanding the frontier as it wasn’t a battlefield where the rules of war were carefully followed. Reynolds said Windschuttle’s ambition was to bring back the discredited concept of terra nullius. With political accusations flying on both sides, neither side seemed to have a monopoly on truth.

Another key issue was whether or not the treatment of Aboriginals amounted to genocide. According to conservative British writer Theodore Dalrymple, Australia’s intelligentsia actually wanted there to be a genocide and reacted to Windschuttle’s thesis “like a child who has had a toy snatched from its hand”. While it seems absurd to suggest historians actually “wanted” genocide, some had alleged genocide had occurred. Reynolds quoted the Bringing Them Home report of 1997 saying Australian Governments continued to embody genocidal practices until the 1970s and 1980s with their preference for non-indigenous foster and adoptive parents for Aboriginal children. Reynolds also pointed out the difference between the way white Australia honours its war dead and the “forgetfulness” with which it deals with the Aboriginal conflict. This was revisionism about Australian sacred cows that was guaranteed to be politicised.

In the wake of Reynolds’ bold pronouncements and Windschuttle’s reaction, race became the central issue of Australia’s history wars. The stark differences in interpretation were between those who saw a cheerful and triumphal story of a pioneered Australia won by sweat and the fruits of industry, and those who said the country was invaded and the prize of a bloody war. Geoffrey Blainey characterised the two approaches as “Three Cheers” and “Black Armband”. Up to the 1980s, this divergence was not a problem as the Aboriginals tended to be written out of Australian history. However, with the 1980s Labor Government extension of land rights, encouragement of self-determination, and its inquiries into deaths in custody and the Stolen Generation, the bipartisan consensus on Aboriginal history broke down. The Howard era exacerbated the differences with the Prime Minister believing in “practical reconciliation” while ruling out an apology to the “Stolen Generation”. Howard was an active player in the history wars and openly sympathetic to the views of Blainey and Windschuttle. His 1998 “10-point plan” aimed to water down the Wik High Court judgement and he sacked the National Museum of Australia director in 2003 for being “too sympathetic to the so-called black armband view of Australian history”. These responses showed that truth wasn’t just the only casualty of the history wars.

But if there were casualties, there were winners too. Windschuttle received his political reward when the Howard administration appointed him to become an ABC board member in 2006. Labor communications spokesman Stephen Conroy protested the decision calling Windschuttle “extreme right wing”. Defending the appointment, Prime Minister Howard described Windschuttle as “a beacon of free and sceptical thought against fashionable leftists". But the “fashionable leftists” did not let up in their criticism. Windschuttle’s approach of confining history to written documentary evidence was derided as being incapable of dealing with ambiguity or discontinuity, and as being unable to encompass the bleaker moments of the past. Evans described Windschuttle’s work as “historiography as fatwa” launched against “an unclean orthodoxy”. Ryan called the wars a lamentable distraction from “History’s noble proper work and no credit to Australia’s intellectual standing”. Though the history wars have diminished in importance somewhat with Howard’s federal election defeat in 2007, the wars’ academic adherents continue to be intensely political and partisan. The fatwa has not yet been lifted.

But the history wars were not a uniquely Australian experience. Other nations have seen political debates born of clashes between established orthodoxy and revisionist research. Elizabeth Malcolm wrote how new Irish historiography has challenged readings of the republican struggle against colonialism as well as other established saws of Irish culture and identity. Meanwhile, South Korean historians demonstrated last year against their Chinese counterparts over their attempts to consider tombs belonging to the Koguryo Kingdom as artefacts of Chinese culture rather than Korean. And it was the storm of criticism that greeted the Smithsonian Institution’s 1994 decision to include the Enola Gay in an exhibition to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, which provided the template for Australia’s history wars. In both countries, revisionists were put on the defensive by accusations of class guilt and the use of political correctness. It was nothing less than a cultural clash between “the obligations of the historian and the demands of patriotism”. Worldwide, revisionists were straddling uncomfortable boundaries between the need to serve truth and politics.

In summary, Windschuttle’s views on the revisionists such as Reynolds (pictured) were informed by his journalist background and his political transformation from far left to far right. For him, history wasn’t merely a matter of presenting the facts but of nation building. When revisionist historiographers presented new claims about the massacres of Aboriginals and the possibility of genocide, Windschuttle was compelled to attack these claims head on. The personal nature of these attacks put the race debate at the centre of an intensely politicised history war. The government of the day rewarded Windschuttle for his efforts though his critics continued to question his methods and contest his findings. Despite all the heated politics, the fact remains that no-one knows the full truth of what happened when White Australians met Aboriginals on the frontier. Nevertheless, it is an important question that must continue to be posed.

Windschuttle and the Cultural studies debate

On Saturday June 17, the Australian re-printed an extraordinary attack from 1995 on the journalism degree course offered by most Australian universities. Extraordinary, given the likelihood that many if not most of the journalists in this country have this degree.

The article was written by one of Australia’s most controversial cultural historians, Keith Windschuttle. The name Windschuttle is almost onomatopoeic, he is a shit-stirrer and a terror to left-wing academia. Windschuttle is doing well for himself. He was appointed to the ABC board. He is quite at home in the ideological realm of Ron Brunton and Janet Albrechtsen. Around the same time, the ABC elected staff member Quentin Dempster’s board role was also axed. Within weeks, the stacked board had quashed an ABC books pet project “Jonestown”, the journalist Chris Masters’ in depth account of the goings on and off of Alan Jones, Australia’s most powerful demagogue. Jones’s lawyers got wind of salacious details about Jones’s homosexuality appearing in the book. The newly Windschuttled board got scared and pulled the pin. The book will do well somewhere sucking in the oxygen of unbuyable publicity (Jones is powerful, but the market is more powerful still). Masters’ lawyers couldn’t have done a better job.

But back to Windschuttle’s article. The Australian thought the 1995 article was so important that they led it in by another article on the front page. That lead article entitled “Attack on uni media courses” immediately piqued my attention. For something should be disclaimed here, Woolly Days is doing a university media course. The front page article believes graduates from university media courses over the past 20 years have been taught anything but good journalism. Windschuttle sees the problem as the fact that the course is ‘swamped’ with cultural studies.

In the 1995 article he says that media studies is prestigious and as difficult to get into as law. Therefore there has been a high calibre of enrolments in the last ten years. Journalism typically takes up a third to half of the Communications degree. The rest is made up of elements of communication theory, PR and cultural studies. Windschuttle articulates the three ‘characteristics of journalism’ which are; reporting the truth, be ethical, and be committed to good writing. Then he says meanings should be clear and grammar precise. Actually that’s a fourth characteristic but Windschuttle sees it as a subset of the good writing.

The problem is that he sees that media theory in this country undermines those characteristics. This he feels, leads to ‘intellectual schizophrenia’ among students and staff alike. He sees the problem as British Cultural Studies. Windschuttle says that journalists are taught to use short, sharp active sentences but cultural studies encourages the passive voice and ‘long and turgid expressions’….possibly like this one! The problem is that Cultural Studies has adopted verbiage which is incomprehensible to outsiders. Therefore most users tend to see it as a hoop they must jump through in order to get a qualification.

He does have a point. Woolly Days is doing “Introduction to Cultural Studies” this term and the verbiage is there alright, presented as ‘your toolbox’. But the connotation is that the words are tools. They are something to help with. They shouldn’t be in contravention of the three characteristics even if they themselves discuss abstract matters. It behoves the writer to make themselves understood regardless of subject matter. That is basic communication. The cultural ‘tools’ are useful. The important point of the studies is to use the tools to discuss the society.

Windschuttle also attacks the university lecturer mentality that creates this paradigm. The theorists control the program and none of them have ever spent a day in a newsroom. As a response to the reprinted article, Quentin Dempster (who now describes himself as an ‘ABC board member in exile’) thought it was a debate worth having. He also challenged Windschuttle to provide more specific examples of journalism he thought was debased in this way.

Windschuttle concluded by arguing that practicioners should fight back and compete with the theorists head on. They should write their own textbooks and develop their own theories. Now that is a great debate, unfortunately undermined at the very end by him saying this is all biologist Richard Dawkins’ fault. He says it’s a “post-Dawkins university system”, apparently. He doesn’t explain what he memes.

The White Australia Policy

The White Australia Policy was an Australia commonwealth law between 1901 and 1973. Though it has been off the books now for over thirty years it still has the ability to generate controversy. Keith Windschuttle, the leading player on the right in the Australian history wars debate, wrote what was a brilliant history called “The White Australia Policy” in 2004.

The problem is that this subject is so politicised, it is sometimes very difficult to see the history "would" from the history "truth". Windschuttle impressively presents his information with an avalanche of footnotes and a forest of references in a document that is never less than excellent scholarship.

But the Age critic Marilyn Lake gives the book an awful caning in her review. She says the book is a deeply political work, "combative in tone, often contemptuous of other people's work, passionate and polemical in argument”.

And she should know, being one of the victims of Windschuttle’s contempt in the book. Marilyn Lake is a historiographer at Melbourne’s La Trobe University and is the biographer of civil rights activist Faith Bandler. Bandler wrote a book called Wacvie in 1977 purporting to be the story of her father Wacvie Mussingkon, a Kanaka who was kidnapped into working on a Queensland sugar plantation. Bandler’s tale is about a form of slavery that existed in Australia in the late 19th century. The process was called by a poetic name ‘blackbirding’. In 1883 Wacvie was taken from his home of Ambrym, a volcanic island off the coast of what was then known as the New Hebrides and is now called Vanuatu. Enter into the story another historian Peter Corris. He complicates matters by describing Bandler’s story of her father’s kidnap as a fabrication. Wacvie may be about her father, but Bandler’s work was fiction. By 1880, the Ambrym trade with Queensland was legal and the islanders were making a lot of money from indentured labour. Corris’s exposure hurt Bandler. Bandler complained to Lake that she thought she was being patronised. Lake justifies Wacvie as a work of history because ‘stories about the past do not all speak the same language or follow the same rules’. But Keith Windschuttle’s sees it as ‘inventing facts to mislead her readers’.

As well as dispelling myths about blackbirders, Windschuttle is also applying a very different attribution to the White Australia Policy itself. The six Australian colonies that came together in 1901 are traditionally have said to have instigated the policy out of fear of invasion and the concern for the purity of the white race. The White Australia Policy of that year was the federal government’s first substantial legislation. Richard White described how 19th century Australians saw themselves as similar to the South African ‘uitlanders’, the white English who tried to bring order to the decaying Boer regime. They were the King’s men alright but brought a new zealous outback version of imperialism. Great Britain itself could not condone this action, they had a multi-racial empire to maintain. But the country they created as a dump for prisoners was now trying its damnest to be British in a part of the world where they were in a severe minority. Where Windschuttle disagrees with accepted wisdom on the policy is in understanding its cultural causes.

Charles Pearson’s "National Life and Character" was a hugely influential book in 1893. His book was a forecast to a time when the whites would be overrun by other races. It gave rise to the fear of the Yellow Peril. It gave Theodore Roosevelt the excuse to go on his wars of American expansion. Pearson was British but emigrated to Australia in 1871. He was a close friend and major influence on Alfred Deakin, Australia’s second prime minister and most influential post-commonwealth politician. Darwin’s name was dragged into the argument as a spurious re-reading of his theories led to Social Darwinism. Darwin’s scientific views were twisted into a social context by the Prussian academic Heinrich Von Treitschke. Though Von Treitschke was fervently anti-British some of his ideas on race translated well across the North Sea and thence to its white colonies.

Windschuttle rejects the notion that Social Darwinism, so admired by Hitler, was the cause of the Policy. Instead, he ascribes the major influence to the Scottish Enlightenment. Scotland was governed from Westminster since the Act of Union of 1707 and the Scots spent much of the 18th century wondering whether the country would “become prosperous like England, or would it descend into dependent pauperism like Ireland?” The enlightenment lasted roughly 50 years from about 1740. Scotland produced a stellar list of intellectuals in this era. It was led by David Hume, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson. The Scottish view was based on observation of their own highlanders and it proposed that human society had developed in four stages: hunting, pastoral, agricultural and commercial. Each society was somewhere along this scale. The Scottish highlanders were believed not to have progressed beyond the pastoral stage.

Windschuttle argues persuasively that enlightenment views on civil society were what dominated Australian political thinking at the start of the 20th century. The reason it was accepted was that it was a racial theory that found acceptance with the established churches. Unlike Darwinism or its twisted sister Social Darwinism, it posed no conflicts to Christianity and aroused no opposition from the clergy.

All three Australian parties accepted the Policy although many individual politicians spoke against it. The labour groups were most in favour as it ensured that trade unions would not be undercut by imported scab workers. There was also a strong and genuine racist element who supported it. Edmund Barton, the first Australian Prime Minister made a speech during the Policy debate which oozed white supremacy.

But on the whole, Windschuttle is probably correct. The policy was more about realpolitik and cultural views not racist ones. That meant that when the time came to remove it, it was done gradually but without violent opposition at each step. The kind of violence that would undoubtably have occurred if it were racially motivated. All that remains now is a political consensus about the past.