Keith Windschuttle - The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, Van Diemen's Land 1803 - 1847

1847

In his The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, the first book of a projected multi-volume examination of frontier encounters between white colonizers and Aborigines, Windschuttle criticizes the last 3 decades of historical scholarship which had challenged the traditional view of Aboriginal passivity in the face of European colonisation. His critique specifically challenges the prevailing consensus created by what he called the "orthodox school" of Australian frontier history concerning the violence between indigenous Australians and settlers, by examining the evidence for reported massacres in what is known as the Black War against the Aborigines of Tasmania. He refers to historians he defines as making up this "orthodox school" as being "vain" and "self-indulgent" for imposing their politics onto their scholarship, and "arrogant, patronizing and lazy" for portraying the Tasmanian Aborigines' behavior and motivations in terms of European cultural concepts rather than taking the time to understand the cultural concepts of a hunter-gatherer society. Windschuttle's "orthodox school" comprises a large number of historians and archaeologists, deceased or living, such as Henry Reynolds, Lyndall Ryan, Lloyd Robson, John Mulvaney, Rhys Jones, Brian Plomley, and Sharon Morgan, whom he regards as responsible for a politicized reading of the past, and for inflating the number of Aboriginal deaths. Reviewing their work, he highlights multiple examples of misrepresented sources, inaccurate reportage or the citation of sources that do not exist. His work on sources constitutes, according one critic, his most damaging contribution to the subject, though Stuart Macintyre argues that Windschuttle "misreads those whom he castigates".

Windschuttle challenges the idea that mass killings were commonplace, arguing that the colonial settlers of Australia did not commit widespread massacres against Indigenous Australians; he drastically reduces the figures for the Tasmanian Aboriginal death toll, and writes that Aborigines referred to by both Reynolds and Ryan as resistance figures, included "black bushrangers" and others engaged in acts normally regarded as "criminality"; arguing that the evidence clearly shows that attacks by Aborigines on settlers were almost invariably directed at acquiring goods, such as flour, sugar, tea and tobacco, and that claims by orthodox historians that this was a form of guerrilla warfare against British settlement aren't supported by credible evidence. Vicki Grieves argues that Windschuttle regards Aboriginal men who traded their women's services as pimps, although Windschuttle does not use the term. Adducing the work of a source who Stuart Macintyre claims is 'a particularly tendentious American anthropologist', he argues that the Tasmanian Aboriginal society was primitive, dysfunctional and on the verge of collapse, because their putative maltreatment of women impaired their ability to reproduce in a number of critical ways. Windschuttle agrees with earlier historical analysis, such as that of Geoffrey Blainey, that introduced disease was the primary cause of the demise of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. He is highly critical of recent historical scholarship arguing that much of it ignores the scholar's basic duties to be objective and true to the evidence, and he advances a sympathetic analysis of settler opinion, arguing that historians such as Henry Reynolds had misrepresented the contents of records of settler opinion to conceal the fact that the majority of settlers were consistently in favor of the protection of the Aborigines. He also criticises Aboriginal land right politics, arguing that it has resulted in many Aboriginal people being effectively confined to remote settlements far from viable employment opportunities and from the benefits of a modern society. His own examination of archives, contemporary newspapers, diaries and official accounts yields a provisory figure of approximately 120 deaths of Tasmanian Aborigines "for which there is a plausible record of some kind" as having been killed by settlers, as opposed to earlier figures ranging as high as 700, and thus far less than the number of whites (187) reported as killed during the Black War of 1824 to 1828 by Aborigines. Windschuttle argues that the principles of the Enlightenment, fused with the 19th century evangelical revival within the Church of England and Britain's rule of law had a profound effect on colonial policy and behaviour, which was humane and just, that together made the claimed genocide culturally impossible. Gregory D.B. Smithers argues that Windschuttle interpreted settler violence as self-defence.

Windschuttle argues that encroaching pastoralism did not cause starvation through the loss of native hunting grounds as some historians have proposed, as their numbers were being drastically reduced by introduced disease, and large parts of Tasmania were not then, or now, occupied by white settlers. Windschuttle's estimate of the size of the Tasmanian Aboriginal population at the time of settlement is that it may have been as low as 2,000. Estimates made of the combined population of the Aboriginal people of Tasmania, before European arrival in Tasmania, are generally in the range of 3,000 to 8,000 people. Genetic studies have suggested much higher figures which is supported by oral traditions that Aborigines were "more numerous than the white people were aware of" but that their population had been decimated by a sudden outbreak of disease prior to 1803. It has been speculated that early contacts with passing ships, exploratory expeditions or sealers before colonization may have caused outbreaks of epidemic disease. The low rate of genetic drift found in a recent genetic study argues that the highest previous estimate of pre-colonial Aboriginal population (8, 000) is likely too low and that a significantly higher population cannot be ruled out. He argues that the evidence shows that what the orthodox historians construed as "resistance" by Tasmanian Aboriginal people, were acts of theft and violence motivated by their desire for "exotic" consumer goods like flour, tea, sugar and blankets. The indigenous culture, in his view, "had no sanctions against the murder of anyone outside their immediate clan", therefore they had no cultural sanctions preventing the killing of settler outsiders to obtain desired goods or in revenge. The forced removal of Tasmania's Aborigines from the Tasmanian mainland to Flinders Island was the Colonial Administration's measure to ensuring peace for hard-pressed settlers while attempting, unsuccessfully, to prevent the extinction of the full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigines. The rapid decline in the Aboriginal population after the British colonisation was the product of the interaction of a number of factors including introduced diseases causing death and infertility, continued internecine warfare, deaths through conflict with settlers and the loss of a significant number of women of childbearing age from the full-blooded aboriginal gene pool to white sealers and settlers through abduction, "trade" and by voluntary association.