Editing Keith Windschuttle (section)

==''The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, Van Diemen's Land 1803–1847''==
In his ''The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One'', the first book of a projected multi-volume examination of frontier encounters between white colonisers and Aboriginal people,<ref>Keith Windschuttle, ''The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803–1847'', Macleay Press, 2002.</ref> Windschuttle criticised the last three decades of historical scholarship which had challenged the traditional view of Aboriginal passivity in the face of [[Colonization|European colonisation]].<ref>Gregory D. B. Smithers, "Reassuring 'White Australia': A Review of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One", in ''Journal of Social History, '' Vol. 37, No. 2 (Winter, 2003), pp. 493–505, p.493.</ref> His critique specifically challenged 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 [[Wiktionary:massacre|massacres]] in what is known as the "[[Black War]]" against the [[Aboriginal Tasmanians|Aboriginal people of Tasmania]]. He referred to historians he defined as making up this "orthodox school" as being "vain" and "self-indulgent" for imposing their politics onto their scholarship,<ref>Keith Windschuttle, ''The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803–1847'', p. 402.</ref> and "arrogant, patronizing and lazy" for portraying the Tasmanian Aboriginal people's behaviour and motivations in terms of European cultural concepts rather than taking the time to understand the cultural concepts of a hunter-gatherer society.<ref>Keith Windschuttle, ''The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803–1847'', p. 406.</ref> Windschuttle's "orthodox school" comprises a large number of historians and archaeologists, dead or living, such as [[Henry Reynolds (historian)|Henry Reynolds]], [[Lyndall Ryan]], Lloyd Robson, [[John Mulvaney]], [[Rhys Jones (archaeologist)|Rhys Jones]], [[Brian Plomley]], and Sharon Morgan, whom he regarded as responsible for a politicised reading of the past,<ref name=Macintyre2003>{{cite journal|last1=Macintyre|first1=Stuart|title=Reviewing the History Wars|journal=Labour History|date=2003|issue=85|pages=213–215|doi=10.2307/27515939|jstor=27515939|quote=It works by a loose reading of the work of those historians and a close reading of their treatment of massacres.}}</ref> and for inflating the number of Aboriginal deaths.<ref>Gregory D. B. Smithers, "Reassuring 'White Australia': A Review of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History", p. 495.</ref> Reviewing their work, he highlit multiple examples of what he alleged were misrepresented sources,<ref>e.g. a colonial government report being cited as evidence of a massacre by a vigilante group when the report refers only to the movement of troops in response to Aboriginal attacks: Keith Windschuttle, ''The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803–1847'' Macleay Press, 2002, p. 142.</ref> inaccurate reportage<ref>An Anglican minister's diary reported as recording 100 Aboriginal and 20 white deaths, was found to record 4 for the former, and 2 for the latter. Checking a source for Brian Plomley's reference to "more killed", Windschuttle found that the original actually had "m'''a'''re killed". — Geoffrey Blainey, [http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/nativefiction-1774 "Native Fiction"], ''The New Criterion'', Vol. 21, 2003, p. 79.</ref> or the citation of sources that do not exist.<ref>The Hobart Town Courier for 1826 is twice cited by one historian as providing the evidence for killings, but was not printed that year. — Geoffrey Blainey, [http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/nativefiction-1774 "Native Fiction"], ''The New Criterion'', Vol. 21, 2003, p. 79.</ref> His work on sources constitutes, according one critic, his most damaging contribution to the subject, though [[Stuart Macintyre]] argued that Windschuttle "misreads those whom he castigates".<ref name=Macintyre2003/>

Windschuttle challenged the idea that mass killings were commonplace, arguing that the colonial settlers of Australia did not commit widespread [[List of massacres of indigenous Australians|massacres]] against [[Indigenous Australians]]; he drastically reduced the figures for the Tasmanian Aboriginal death toll, and wrote that Aboriginal people referred to by both Reynolds and Ryan as resistance figures, included "black [[bushranger]]s" and others engaged in acts normally regarded as "criminality"; arguing that the evidence clearly shows that attacks by Aboriginal people 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.<ref name=Macintyre2003/><ref>Windschuttle, ''The Fabrication of Aboriginal History,'' pp. 65–77, 95–103.</ref><ref name="Gregory D. B. Smithers p. 497">Gregory D. B. Smithers, "Reassuring 'White Australia'," p. 497.</ref> Vicki Grieves argues that Windschuttle regards Aboriginal men who traded their women's services as [[pimp]]s, although Windschuttle did not use the term.<ref name=Grieves2003>{{cite journal|last1=Grieves|first1=Vicki|title=Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History: A View from the Other Side|journal=Labour History|date=2003|issue=85|pages=194–199|doi=10.2307/27515935|jstor=27515935|quote=The term 'left-wing' is synonymous with idealistic, subjective and over-theorised. Windschuttle positions himself as the opposite: a realistic, objective, logical empiricist, who rejects rhetoric.}}</ref> Adducing the work of a source who Stuart Macintyre claimed was 'a particularly tendentious American anthropologist',<ref>His source is Robert B. Edgerton, ''Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony,'' Free Press, New York, 1992 pp. 47ff.</ref> he argued 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.<ref name=Macintyre2003/> Windschuttle agreed 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.<ref>Windschuttle, ''The Fabrication of Aboriginal History,'' pp. 372–375.</ref> He was highly critical of recent historical scholarship, arguing that much of it ignored the scholar's basic duties to be objective and true to the evidence, and he advanced a sympathetic analysis of settler opinion, arguing that historians such as [[Henry Reynolds (historian)|Henry Reynolds]] had misrepresented the contents of records of settler opinion to conceal the fact that the majority of settlers were consistently in favour of the protection of Aboriginal people.<ref>Windschuttle, ''The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, '', pp. 308–314.</ref> He also criticised Aboriginal [[Land law|land right politics]],<ref>Gregory D. B. Smithers, "Reassuring 'White Australia'," p. 494, 497.</ref> 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.<ref name="samuelgriffith.org.au">[http://samuelgriffith.org.au/docs/vol15/v15chap11.pdf Chapter 11]samuelgriffith.org.au {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120315163331/http://samuelgriffith.org.au/docs/vol15/v15chap11.pdf |date=15 March 2012 }}</ref> His own examination of archives, contemporary newspapers, diaries and official accounts yields a provisory figure<ref>K. Windschuttle, "This figure is not absolute or final".</ref> of approximately 120 deaths of Tasmanian Aboriginal people "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,<ref>Gregory D. B. Smithers, "Reassuring 'White Australia'," p. 494.</ref> and thus far less than the number of whites (187) reported as killed during the "Black War" of 1824 to 1828 by Aboriginal people.<ref name="ReferenceA">{{cite web |url=http://www.sydneyline.com/Manne%20debate%20Quadrant.htm |title=The Sydney Line |access-date=7 February 2013 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130426232658/http://www.sydneyline.com/Manne%20debate%20Quadrant.htm |archive-date=26 April 2013 }}</ref><ref name="Windschuttle, pp387-397">Windschuttle, ''The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, '' pp. 387–397.</ref> Windschuttle argued that the principles of the [[Age of Enlightenment|Enlightenment]], fused with the 19th-century [[Evangelicalism|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,<ref>Gregory D. B. Smithers, "Reassuring 'White Australia'," p. 496.</ref> that together made the claimed genocide culturally impossible. Gregory D. B. Smithers argues that Windschuttle interpreted settler violence as self-defence.<ref name="Gregory D. B. Smithers p. 497"/><ref name="Windschuttle, pp387-397"/>

Windschuttle argued that encroaching [[pastoralism]] did not cause starvation through the loss of native hunting grounds as some historians had proposed, as their numbers were being drastically reduced by introduced disease,<ref>Geoffrey Blainey, [http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/nativefiction-1774 "Native Fiction"], ''The New Criterion'', April 2003.</ref> and large parts of Tasmania were not then, or now, occupied by white settlers.<ref>Windschuttle, ''The Fabrication of Aboriginal History,'' pp. 87–95.</ref> 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.<ref name=Macintyre2003/> 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 Aboriginal people 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.<ref>James Bonwick, [https://archive.org/stream/dailylifeandori02bonwgoog#page/n9/mode/2up ''Daily Life and Origins of the Tasmanians''], Sampson, Low, Son and Marston, London, 1870, p. 84-85.</ref> It has been speculated that early contacts with passing ships, exploratory expeditions or sealers before colonization may have caused outbreaks of epidemic disease.<ref>Josephine Flood, ''The Original Australians: Story of the Aboriginal People'', Allen & Unwin, 2006, pp. 66–67.</ref> 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.<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Pardoe|first1=Colin|title=Isolation and Evolution in Tasmania|journal=Current Anthropology|date=February 1991|volume=32|issue=1|pages=1–27|doi=10.1086/203909|s2cid=146785882}}</ref> He argued that the evidence showed 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 Aboriginal people from the Tasmanian mainland to [[Flinders Island]] was the Colonial Administration's measure to ensure peace for hard-pressed settlers while attempting, unsuccessfully to prevent the extinction of the full-blooded Tasmanian Aboriginal people. 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.

===Specific issues===

====Treatment of women====
Windschuttle referred to accounts by the French [[zoologist]] [[François Péron]],<ref name=Flannery>[[Tim Flannery|Flannery, T. F.]] (1994) ''The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People,'' Chatswood: New South Wales {{ISBN|0-8021-3943-4}}</ref><ref>Edward Duyker, ''François Péron: an Impetuous Life: Naturalist and Voyager,'' Miegunyah Press, 2006, describes him as the expedition's assistant zoologist.</ref> by [[George Augustus Robinson]] in his journals, and by the early Australian writer [[James Bonwick]], of the violence and cruelty with which many Tasmanian Aboriginal men were observed to treat women. He notes that the "murder of women because of insult, jealousy and infidelity, was common" and that a woman who refused a particular suitor would often be abducted and raped. He argues that this contributed to the willingness of some Aboriginal women to associate themselves with sealers and settlers rather than their own people, so reducing the full-blooded Aboriginal population's ability to reproduce itself. He cited a number of accounts including one published in 1820 by a British officer who had spoken with Aboriginal women living with Bass Strait sealers. The officer reported that Aboriginal women made it known that their (Aboriginal) husbands treat them with "considerable harshness and tyranny" and that they sometimes run away and "attach themselves to the English sailors", finding "their situation greatly improved by attaching themselves to the sealing gangs".<ref>Windschuttle, ''The Fabrication of Aboriginal History,'' pp. 379–382.</ref> Windschuttle held that the willingness of some Tasmanian Aboriginal women to engage in prostitution with convicts, sealers and settlers and the Tasmanian Aboriginal men who "actively colluded" in the trade in their women aided in the transmission of sexually transmitted and other introduced diseases to the indigenous population. Windschuttle argues that introduced disease was the primary cause of the destruction of the full-blooded Tasmanian Aboriginal people, not merely by directly causing deaths but also through widespread infertility resulting from introduced sexually transmitted disease.<ref>Windschuttle, ''The Fabrication of Aboriginal History,'' pp. 372–375, 383–386.</ref>

[[James Boyce (author)|James Boyce]], a Tasmanian historian, dismisses Windschuttle's argument as "uninformed slander" based on a failure to read the only documentary sources that matter, the journals of French and British explorers recording the first contacts with Tasmanian Aboriginal people before the colonial period. Examining Windschuttle's use of sources for the view women were treated like slaves and drudges, he says Windschuttle relied on a selective reading of just two of many sources in an early work by [[Henry Ling Roth|Ling Roth]], "written at the height of [[Social Darwinism|Social Darwinist]] orthodoxy" (1899). However, Ling Roth did not "write" these sources; he simply translated the diaries of the first contacts by the French explorers. One is from Péron, who noted scars on women, and interpreted them as signs of domestic violence, which however he had never witnessed. Other early observers took this [[Scarification|scarring as an indigenous cultural practice]]. [[James Cook]] had noticed Aboriginal men's and women's bodies were both incised with scars in the same manner. Péron was less sympathetic than other first observers on the [[Baudin expedition to Australia]]. Boyce argues that their observations, including those of the captain [[Nicolas Baudin]], do not support Windschuttle's claims. Even Péron records an encounter at [[Cygnet, Tasmania|Port Cygnet]] with an group of Aboriginal men and women, who shared a meal of [[abalone]] with the French explorers and, according to Péron, provided "the most striking example we had ever had of attention and reasoning among savage people". Péron would have disagreed, Boyce believes, with Windschuttle's claim that "(t)raditional Aboriginal society placed no constraints on the women's sexual behaviour with men", for he was repeatedly rebuffed when he tried to make physical contact with Aboriginal women. Baudin believed that no one on his ship had managed to have sexual relations with the women on [[Bruny Island]]. The behaviour adduced by Windschuttle from the other, late report by J. E. Calder (in 1829) is, for Boyce, "self-evidently a product of the extensive disruption of traditional life that had occurred by then". He concludes: "Only someone who is totally blind to the impact of changing power relations, of declining choices, of the profound impact of cultural disintegration and recurring violence and abuse, let alone the simple imperatives of survival, could cite the unfolding tragedy at Bruny Island in this period as evidence for the sexual mores and domestic relations of pre-invasion Aboriginal society".<ref>Boyce, in Robert Manne (ed.) ''Whitewash,'' pp. 65–66.</ref>

Shayne Breen argues that Windschuttle's claim was a calculated guess. The picture is however complex. Evidence exists for some use of women as trading commodities. Some women were abducted by sealers, while others were traded by Aboriginal men in attempts to establish reciprocal relations with the sealers.<ref>Shayne Breen, "Tasmanian Aborigines", in James Jupp (ed.) ''The Australian People: an Encyclopedia of the Nation, its People and their Origins,'' Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 110–113.</ref> Shayne concludes that: "There is some evidence that Aboriginal men, especially along the northern and south eastern coastlines, used women as trading commodities. Some of this trading was culturally sanctioned, some of it was not. Sometimes women willingly participated, sometimes they did not. But no credible documentary evidence is available for widespread selling of women into prostitution. There is, however, strong evidence that the abduction of women by colonists was practised across the island for much of the period to 1820. Indeed, the 1830 Aborigines Committee found that the abduction of women was a major cause of attacks against colonists by Aborigines".<ref>Shayne Breen, [http://evatt.org.au/papers/criminals-and-pimps.html "Criminals and Pimps: Keith Windschuttle and Tasmanian Aborigines"], [[Evatt Foundation]], 27 August 2003.</ref>

In reply to Boyce, Windschuttle argued that Boyce could not have read the whole book, or even properly checked the index, which cited "this very evidence", i.e. the journals of early French and British explorers. With respect to Boyce's claims that Windschuttle was "unaware" of or "ignored" various sources, Windschuttle responded that Boyce's claims, based on what was, and was not, in ''Fabrication''{{'}}s bibliography, misinterpret the purpose of a bibliography. It listed only the sources referred to in the text and in his footnotes, and was not intended as an exhaustive list of every book or document that he had read regarding colonial Tasmania.<ref name="ReferenceA"/> Windschuttle argued that "were Boyce more familiar with the ethnographic literature", he would know the most telling evidence about the treatment of women comes not from explorers but the Aboriginal people themselves; from the recorded words of Aboriginal men, such as Woorrady, Montpeliatter, Mannalargenna and Nappelarteyer, and those of Aboriginal women such as Tencotemainner, [[Truganini]] and Walyer. Windschuttle did not claim that women had been sold "into prostitution"<ref>Bass Strait sealers acquired Aboriginal women, and much more rarely Aboriginal men, for their skill in hunting seals, sea-birds and other foods, Flood, Josephine: The Original Australians: Story of the Aboriginal People, Allen & Unwin, 2006, pp 58–60, 76</ref> but that they were, as Breen admits, traded as commodities. Breen, Windschuttle replied, admits such trading and regards this as an admission of the "cruelty of pre-contact indigenous culture". For Windschuttle, Breen and others could say things that sicken no one, because they contextualise it within a model of British invasion and Aboriginal resistance, whereas he was taken to task for being "pitiless" for making what he argued was the same point, "within a historical model of aboriginal accommodation to a comparatively nonviolent British settlement".<ref>Keith Windschuttle, "No Slander in Exposing Cultural Brutality", ''The Australian'', 29 December 2003.</ref>

====Attachment to land====
In reply to his critics, Windschuttle argued that Henry Reynolds "wilfully misinterprets" what he wrote, since his argument about Aboriginal concepts of land was based not on their words but on their deeds. "It is not primarily an argument about Aboriginal language but about Aboriginal behaviour. I demonstrated the Tasmanian Aborigines did not act as if they demanded the exclusive usage of land. They had no concept of trespass".<ref name="samuelgriffith.org.au"/><ref name="ReferenceA"/>

Windschuttle argued that no word list records an Aboriginal term corresponding to the English word "land" in the sense that Europeans use it, "as a two-dimensional space marked out with definite boundaries, which can be owned by individuals or groups, which can be inherited, which is preserved for the exclusive use of its owner, and which carries sanctions against trespassers", but stated that "they certainly did identify themselves with and regularly hunted and foraged on particular territories, known as their "country", which I openly acknowledge. They had obvious attachments to these territories. But they did not confine themselves to these regions nor did they deter other Aborigines from entering their own territory". "Members of the Big River tribe, for instance, annually visited Cape Grim in the north-west, Port Sorell on the north coast, Oyster Bay on the east coast, and Pittwater and Storm Bay in the south-east; that is, they regularly traversed most of the island". "The strongest evidence for this thesis is actually the history of white colonization and the timing of the conflict that did occur between blacks and whites. Most observers at the time agreed there was very little violence in Tasmania for the first twenty years after the British arrived. And the historians, except Lyndall Ryan, agree there were minimal hostilities before 1824. If the Aborigines had really felt the land was exclusively theirs, they would not have waited more than twenty years after the colonists arrived to do something about it".<ref name="samuelgriffith.org.au"/>

He contrasted this to the fiercely territorial Polynesian tribes of New Zealand, [[Tahiti]] and [[Tonga]] who fought off the British immediately. "The fact that the Tasmanian Aborigines did not respond in the same way is not to say they didn't love their country or were thereby deficient as human beings. They simply had a different culture".

The [[University of New England (Australia)|University of New England]]'s Russell McDougall, in turn, has recently{{when|date=September 2011}} argued that Windschuttle's use of [[Henry Ling Roth]]'s word-lists to deny an indigenous Tasmanian concept of "land" constitutes "a wrong-headed attempt to undermine the legitimacy of Aboriginal land claims", especially since Roth's lists made no claim to capture a linguistic totality, and Roth himself cited earlier testimonials to the fact that, though [[Nomadism|nomadic]], the "Tasmanians confined themselves within the boundaries of specific territories". It was, McDougall argues, the pressing presence of colonisers that forced them to trespass and make war upon each other.<ref>Russell McDougall, "Henry Ling Roth in Tasmania", in Peter Hulme, Russell McDougall (eds.) ''Writing, Travel, and Empire: in the Margins of Anthropology,'' I. B. Tauris, 2007, pp. 43–68, p.61.</ref>