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News: Social history
Windschuttle's fabrication of Aboriginal history27 August 2003Robert Manne, Shayne Breen & Naomi Parry look for the truth. Whitewash: IntroductionBy Robert ManneIn 1968, the anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner delivered what turned out to be perhaps the most consequential lecture ever broadcast on the ABC. Stanner called his lecture 'The Great Australian Silence'. The point he was making has often been misunderstood. Stanner did not mean that scholars and others had failed to show an interest in traditional Aboriginal society. As he understood better than most, anthropology was probably the most distinguished and developed of the social science disciplines in Australia. What Stanner meant was that both scholars and citizens had, thus far, failed to integrate the story of the Aboriginal dispossession and its aftermath into their understanding of the course of Australian history, reducing the whole tragic and complex story to what one historian had called 'a melancholy footnote' and another a mere 'codicil'. According to Stanner, this silence was no accident. Inattention on such a scale cannot possibly be explained by absent-mindedness. It is a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape. What may well have begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned under habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale. We have been able for so long to disremember the aborigines that we are now hard put to keep them in mind even when we most want to do so. Stanner, who possessed sensitive cultural antennae, was aware that at the time he wrote this lecture the cult of forgetfulness was coming to an end. I hardly think that what I have called 'the great Australian silence' will survive the research that is now in course. Our university and research institutes are full of young people who are working actively to end it. The Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies and the Social Science Research Council of Australia have both promoted studies which will bring the historical and contemporary dimensions together and will assuredly persuade scholars to renovate their categories of understanding. The silence of which Stanner spoke was, in fact, broken by the three-volume study sponsored by the Social Science Research Council and authored by Charles Rowley - The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, Outcasts in White Society and The Remote Aborigines, published in 1970. Rowley's trilogy represents one of the great scholarly and moral achievements of Australia's intellectual history. With its publication and absorption into the nation's bloodstream, Australia became a significantly different country. Henry Reynolds was one of the young historians inspired by Stanner's lecture.
Criminals & pimpsBy Shayne BreenRecent comment on Keith Windschuttle's The Fabrication of Aboriginal History concentrates on the book's claims that both Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan deliberately fabricated stories of frontier conflict, thereby greatly exaggerating the Aboriginal death toll. The purpose of this fabrication, according to Windschuttle, was to support a subversive political agenda of Aboriginal separatism and the generation of white self hate. Although bordering on the irrational, these are very serious charges. They are at the core of Windschuttle's book, and it is important they are rigorously scrutinised in both the press and scholarly journals. Frontier killing, however, is not the only important issue raised by Windschuttle's work. The other key issue, perhaps the key issue, is Windschuttle's shameless and unsavoury denigration of the character of Tasmanian Aboriginal society and culture. Both his book and several papers published prior to the book's release are littered with claims about the character of Tasmanian Aboriginal society that are not supported with evidence, or which demonstrate either a broad ignorance or a deliberate misunderstanding of the scholarly work in Tasmanian Aboriginal studies. It is important to name this denigration and reject it. It underpins the book's arguments about frontier conflict, it is a major literary device in Windschuttle's work, and it has the potential to inflame racist attitudes to present day Aborigines across Australia. And it needs to be pointed out that while Windschuttle habitually bleats that he is unfairly castigated by those historian's whose reputations he seeks to destroy, his own work relies largely on systematic character assassination. His present targets are Lyndall Ryan, Henry Reynolds, and Tasmanian Aborigines in the past and present. Windschuttle's arguments about the capacities and character of Tasmanian Aborigines are largely based on his view that they were the most primitive society known to man. Windschuttle & MusquitoBy Naomi ParryKeith Windschuttle has presented The Fabrication of Aboriginal History as 'the most exhaustive study that's ever been done'. Yet within its pages are many examples of errors and misrepresentations that cast doubt on his management of colonial source material. One conspicuous blunder is in his treatment of the Risdon Cove massacre of May 1804. The shooting was certainly mass murder - even Windschuttle concedes three Aborigines were killed. An eyewitness, Edward White, informed the 1830s Aborigines Committee that 'a great many' Aborigines were killed, and the attack was unprovoked. Windschuttle discredits White, saying the man was working at a creek below the settlement and could not have seen the shootings. Either Windschuttle did not read White's statement properly or he misleads his readers, for White's account continues: 'the soldiers came down from their own camp to the creek to attack the Natives'. White also claimed that Surgeon Mountgarret packed bones in barrels and sent them to Port Jackson, which Windschuttle disputes, saying that White, a convict, could not have had any direct knowledge of the behaviour of a member of the colonial elite. This is laughable. Risdon Cove was a tiny outpost that relied on convict labourers who were perfectly placed to observe the activities of their masters. There is no reason to doubt White's recollection or to pour scorn on those who tell the story today. This article challenges Windschuttle's self image as a purveyor of 'truth' by forensically examining another of his misrepresentations - that the Black War of 1824-31 is a misnomer. Windschuttle claims it was not a war but a 'crime spree' begun by Musquito, the Sydney Aborigine who joined ranks with the Oyster Bay people of Tasmania. Windschuttle's depiction of Musquito reveals the shallowness of his research. The notion that Musquito led the Tasmanians into aggression, and consequent denial of their agency in the conflict, dates from Governor Arthur's time. In replicating this narrative Windschuttle obscures significant information to present Musquito as a criminal antagonist, because he sees the Tasmanian people as primitive degenerates who were incapable of political organisation, and who were not fighting for their land, but engaging in 'senseless violence'. This essay will present the known details of Musquito's life in a more complex light. While Musquito was a skilled fighter, his involvement in Tasmanian hostilities lasted only seven months, and only a few of the attacks that occurred within that period can possibly be associated with Musquito.
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