Editing Keith Windschuttle (section)

====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>