Editing Keith Windschuttle (section)

===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>