Martin Rundqvist of Aardvarcheology has collected a great carnival of archeological sites in local communities. I was going to write a piece about the Aboriginal middens around here but didn’t get to it in time. Anyways, it’s worth a visit but while I was there my interest was piqued by Martin’s recommendation of a book and I wanted to respond.

The book is Keith Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Vol. 1 which Martin describes as, “Level-headed, clearly written, unromantic, painstaking with its sources, humanistic in its values.”

Now I’m going to disagree with Martin here, but I’ll give him a pass because (i) he lives in Sweden and is therefore a long way from Australia and would not have easy access to the resources to know what’s wrong with Windschuttle’s work, and (ii) Windschuttle is a compellingly clear and articulate writer and conveys his arguments with a great deal of forcefulness, and (iii) whatever the limitations of Windschuttle’s arguments, he has been instrumental in forcing Australian historians to a higher level of scholarship.

I first came across Keith Windschuttle thanks to Simon Brown, who lent me a copy of The Killing of History. Windschuttle took on a great many of the myths of modern history. One such example is the story that Captain Cook was murdered by the Hawaiians because he was seen as the incarnation of the god Lono. The story goes that Cook arrived in Hawaii in a whirlwind of coincidences surrounding the date of his arrival and his physical appearance that made the locals think he was the avatar of Lono and was therefore sacrificed as per tradition. Windschuttle showed with great patience why this theory is almost certainly wrong and rather than being respectful of Hawaiians, portrays them as tradition-bound idiots. What really happened was that a skirmish broke out between the Hawaiians and Cook’s landing party when Cook was trying to take Chief Kalei’opu’u hostage on the Resolution and had underestimated the size of party he would need. There really is no need to invoke mistaken divinity other than to make the story more exciting to readers or to bow to Culturism.

But what really made Windschuttle’s book a must-read was his evisceration of many Australian historians, especially those who claimed that the British colonial forces engaged in policies to eradicate the local Aborigines. Windschuttle took claim after claim, went to the primary sources, and showed that time and time again the historians had failed to support their version of events with evidence. Many of the references provided showed no relationship to the stories being told, and very often the historians had relied on word-of-mouth handed down over four or more generations in preference to established historical records. Given the political landscape of Australia at the time, Windschuttle had written a bombshell.

Now, I believe that Windschuttle performed a great service to Australian history in this regard. There is no doubt that a large number of Australian historians were sloppy in their research and pushing political barrows rather than dispassionately assessing the evidence. As a great believer in the importance of evidence over ideology, and as a writer who believes in the moral power of clear communication and who therefore resists any attempt to call something genocide unless it really is an active campaign to eradicate an ethnic or cultural group, I was supportive Windschuttle’s key arguments. But, but…

There are two great flaws in Windschuttle’s approach. Neither flaw will give much satisfaction to Windschuttle’s enemies, who devoted themselves to digging up minor errors in his own footnotes as if that absolved their own glaring deficiencies. The first is that Windschuttle was not content with pointing out the errors and unsupported theses in Aboriginal history. Behind Windschuttle’s cry for better historical analysis was a second agenda, a political rejection of the so-called “black armband” school of history that posed every act of the British colonists as imperial aggression. But in rejecting that, Windschuttle seemed to this reader at least to be defending the basis of colonialism. There’s nothing so overt as Windschuttle expressly applauding the philosophy behind colonialism, but his insistence on only attacking one side of the story leaves me with the unshakeable suspicion that he simply isn’t motivated to critique, say, Geoffrey Blainey or other historians who see the Australian colonisation story as a saga of adventure and overcoming hardship — which it was if you were European, but hardly if you were Aboriginal.

And this leads to Windschuttle’s greatest flaw. Time and again, Windschuttle turned his attention to individual cases of massacres and found that historians had relied on an interview with the great-great-granddaughter of one of the survivors while ignoring available court transcripts and police reports. Windschuttle is quite correct to bring up the discrepancy between formal documentary evidence and generations-old oral history. But Windschuttle’s mistake is that he repeatedly concludes that massacre X never happened or involved only a handful of fatalities instead of dozens. The problem with this approach is that it automatically favours the colonial authorities. Australian Aborigines were pre-literate before Europeans arrived, so all they had was oral history. And Windschuttle never seems to question whether the written records could possibly be inaccurate. There are, of course, many reasons why court records and police reports and colonists’ witness statements could be inaccurate, from simple observer error to mindful manipulation.

I agree with Windschuttle that there was no overt genocidal policy towards Aborigines. In Tasmania (then Van Diemen’s Land), Governor Arthur had express orders to prevent violence towards Aborigines by colonists and he made those orders very clear to his troops and to the colonists. One could argue that the governor was perhaps not as vigilant as he could have been in enforcing his orders, but that is still a long way from genocide. In the colony of New South Wales, Governor Philip actually restrained his troops from retaliating after he was speared in the shoulder by Aborigines.

Even if there was no overt genocide in Australia, the fact remains that under imperial orders to get along with the local Aborigines, any act of violence perpetrated against them was very likely to be downplayed by the colonists, the colonial soldiers, and the governor. If twenty Aborigines were shot dead in a forest on the Tasmanian plateau, who was going to question the report that arrived in the Imperial Office in London months after the fact that said only two were killed and the Aborigines attacked first?

So, sure, I agree with Windschuttle that contemporaneous records that didn’t match the agenda of some historians have been ignored in favour of less reliable forms of evidence, but I strongly disagree with his absolutist approach to the hierarchy of evidence. After all, if one was to blindly elevate court transcripts over oral history, then one should conclude that Stalin’s show trials were the work of the best legal system in human history — almost all of the accused confessed openly in court and nobody appealed. I for one can’t understand why Australians should accept as gospel the written statements of officials who had every incentive to downsize massacres and murders, nor do I see why Aborigines should feel any better towards colonialist Pollyannas than the survivors of the Soviet purges should feel towards Walter Duranty. To be fair, Duranty was despicable liar who betrayed his country’s interests, his profession’s ethics, and humanity in general, and that puts him in a very, very deep circle of hell. I do not mean to equate Windschuttle and Duranty, but to illustrate the effect of Windschuttle’s strategy on the people who are most affected by it. While Windschuttle would no doubt concur that, genocide or not, Aborigines have had a rough deal, I don’t think he understands that his persistent dismissal — not just sensible academic caution but outright dismissal — of oral history is bound to cause a great deal of pointless hurt to an already marginalised people.