Editing Keith Windschuttle (section)

==Critical reception==
The appearance of the first volume provoked a lively polemical correspondence in the pages of ''[[The Australian]]'', with its "agenda-setting capacity".<ref>R. Manne (ed.)''Whitewash. On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History'', Introduction p.10.</ref> It was positively reviewed by [[Geoffrey Blainey]], who called it "one of the most important and devastating (books) written on Australian history in recent decades", although Blainey notes that not every side-argument in the book convinced him and that his "view is that the original Tasmanians were not as backward, mentally and culturally, as Windschuttle sometimes depicts them". On Windschuttle's analysis of the "fabrications", Blainey wrote: "While reading the long recital of these failings, I felt an initial sympathy towards the Australian and overseas historians who were under such intense scrutiny. But many of their errors, made on crucial matters, beggared belief. Moreover their exaggeration, gullibility, and what this book calls "fabrication" went on and on. Admittedly, if sometimes the historians' errors had chanced to favour the Aborigines, and sometimes they had happened to favour British settlers, a reader might sympathetically conclude that there was no bias amongst the historians but simply an infectious dose of inaccuracy. Most of the inaccuracies, however, are used to bolster the case for the deliberate destruction of the Aborigines."<ref>Geoffrey Blainey, [http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/nativefiction-1774 "Native Fiction"], ''The New Criterion'', April 2003: "his book will ultimately be recognised as one of the most important and devastating written on Australian history in recent decades".</ref> [[Claudio Veliz]] greeted it as "one of the most important books of our time".<ref>Manne, "Windschuttle's Whitewash", in Peter Craven (ed.), ''The Best Australian Essays,'' Black, Inc., 2003, pp. 65–77, p.66.</ref> [[Peter Coleman]], while speaking of its "painstaking and devastating scholarship", regretted the absence from Windschuttle's work of any "sense of tragedy".<ref>Robert Manne, in R. Manne (ed.) ''Whitewash. On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History'', Introduction, Black, Inc., 2003, pp. 9–10.</ref>

Within a year Windschuttle's claims and research had produced a volume of [[rebuttal]], namely ''Whitewash. On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History'', an anthology edited and introduced by [[Robert Manne]], professor of politics at [[La Trobe University]], with contributions by Australian academics from a range of disciplines. Manne, who called Windschuttle's publication "one of the most implausible, ignorant and pitiless books about Australian history written for many years",<ref>Manne, [https://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article/windschuttle-s-whitewash "Windschuttle's Whitewash"], in Craven, p. 66</ref>  summed up the case against Windschuttle's book, noting that its assessment of Aboriginal deaths is based on Plomley, even though Plomley denied that any estimate regarding such deaths could be made from the documentary record. Manne  added further observations, to the effect: that "a scrupulous conservative scholar", [[H. A. Willis]], using exactly the same sources as Windschuttle, instead came up with a figure of 188 violent deaths and another 145 rumoured deaths; that Windschuttle's method excludes deaths of Aborigines who were wounded, and later died; that all surviving Aborigines transported by Robinson to Flinders' Island bore marks of violence and gunshot wounds "perpetrated on them by depraved whites"; that Windschuttle cannot deny that between 1803 and 1834 almost all Tasmanian Aborigines died, and the only evidence for disease as a factor before 1829 rests on a single conversation recorded by James Bonwick, and that Aboriginal women who lived with sealers did not, however, die off from contact with bearers of foreign disease; that Windschuttle likened Aboriginal attacks on British settlers to "modern-day [[Substance dependence|junkie]]s raiding [[Filling station|service station]]s for money", whereas both colonial records and modern historians speak of them as highly "patriotic", attached to their lands, and engaged in a veritable war to defend it from settlement; that by Windschuttle's own figures, the violent death rate of Aborigines in Tasmania in the 1820s must have been 360 times the murder rate in contemporary New York; that Windschuttle shows scarce familiarity with period books, citing only 3 of the 30 books published on Van Diemen's land for the period 1803–1834, and with one of them confuses the date of [[Bruni d'Entrecasteaux|the first visit]] by the French with the publication date of the volume that recounted their expedition; that it is nonsensical to argue that a people who had wandered over an island and survived for 34,000 years had no attachment to their land; that Windschuttle finds no native words in 19th century wordlists for "land" to attest to such an attachment, when modern wordlists show 23 entries under "country".<ref>Robert Manne, "Windschuttle's Whitewash", in Peter Craven (ed.), ''The Best Australian Essays'', Black, Inc., 2003, pp. 65–77.</ref><ref>Also see Robert Manne, [http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2010/january/1354144036/robert-manne/comment "Keith Windschuttle,"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130624224603/http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2010/january/1354144036/robert-manne/comment |date=24 June 2013 }} ''The Monthly'', January 2010; Keith Windschuttle, [http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2010/5/mind-your-language-robert "Mind Your Language, Robert,"] ''Quadrant'', May 2010; Windschuttle, [http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/history-wars/2010/04/robert-manne-s-bad-language "Robert Manne's Bad Language,"] ''Quadrant'', April 2010.</ref> In turn, this provoked [[Melbourne]] writer and [[Objectivist movement|Objectivist]] John Dawson,<ref>John Dawson, [https://capitalismmagazine.com/2003/01/historian-keith-windschuttle-bringing-objectivity-back-to-the-queen-of-the-humanities/ "Historian Keith Windschuttle: Bringing Objectivity Back to the 'Queen of the Humanities',"] ''Capitalism Magazine'', 25 January 2003.</ref> to undertake a counter-rebuttal, ''Washout: On the academic response to The Fabrication of Aboriginal History'' in which he argues that ''Whitewash'' leaves Windschuttle's claims and research unrefuted.<ref>John Izzard, [http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2010/11/keeping-track-of-the-fabrications "Keeping Track of the Fabrications,"] ''Quadrant'', Vol. LIV, No. 11, 2010.</ref>

In their reviews, Australian specialists in both Aboriginal and indigenous peoples' history were generally far less impressed than those who praised the book, which included Geoffrey Blainey, Claudio Veliz and Peter Coleman.
*[[Henry Reynolds (historian)|Henry Reynolds]] interprets his book as an attempt to revive the concept of [[terra nullius]], and regards it as "without doubt, the most biased and cantankerous historical work to appear since the publication of [[George William Rusden|G. W. Rusden]]'s three-volume History of Australia in the 1880s".<ref>Henry Reynolds, [https://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/08/22/1061529333638.html "Killing off the Case for Terra Nullius,"] ''The Age'', 23 August 2003.</ref>
*The historian of [[genocide]], [[Ben Kiernan]], who classifies the fate of Aborigines as an example of the practice, situates Windschuttle's polemical history within a new campaign, led by ''[[Quadrant (magazine)|Quadrant]]'', but taken up by a "chorus of right-wing columnists" within the Australian mass media with a record of antagonism to both Aborigines and their "leftist" supporters.<ref>[[Ben Kiernan]], "Cover-up and Denial of Genocide: Australia, the USA, East Timor, and the Aborigines", in ''Critical Asian Studies'', Routledge, 34:2 (2002), pp. 163–192, p.182.</ref>
*[[Stephen Garton]], professor of history, [[Provost (education)|provost]] and [[deputy vice-chancellor]] at [[University of Sydney|Sydney University]], argued that "the flaw in Windschuttle's argument is his belief that history can only be based on the evidence that survives. Evidence is always partial and only takes on a meaning if placed in an appropriate context. In other words historians always construct larger worlds from the fragments that survive".<ref>Stephen Garton, "On the Defensive: Poststructuralism and Australian Cultural History", in Hsu-Ming Teo, Richard White (eds.), ''Cultural History in Australia,'' UNSW Press, 2003, pp. 52–67, p.61, p.62.</ref>
*The [[University of Aberdeen]]'s Gregory D. B. Smithers, an Australian comparativist working on native histories, argues that Windschuttle's political agenda shows a "discomfort with the way the 'orthodox school', by inflating Aboriginal deaths, impugns Australian identity and its [[White Australia Policy|virtuous Anglo-Saxon origins]]". Windschuttle's book plays to "the white wing [[populism]] of white Australians, who feel their racially privileged position is under attack". By reaction, Smithers argues, Windschuttle highlit "the nation's virtues", privileging the opinions of settlers and colonial officials, "while rejecting Aboriginal oral histories". Smithers argues that Windschuttle ignored documentary evidence that contradicts his own ideology, and failed to perceive that the island reserves created for indigenous Tasmanians were "racialised spaces" for a people regarded as a form of "social pollution"". He argues that the book is "a therapeutic history for white (Anglo-Saxon) Australians that distorts and distracts" and that in denying the reliability of historical evidence of racialised groups, Windschuttle employed a tactic used by historians to discredit historical accounts that do not fit with their [[Presentism (historical analysis)|presentist]] morality.<ref>Gregory D. B. Smithers, [https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Reassuring+%22White+Australia%22%3A+a+Review+of+The+Fabrication+of...-a0111897843  "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, pp.495–6, 500, 503 n.33.</ref>
*For Stuart Macintyre, Windschuttle's book was not "so much counter-history as an exercise in incomprehension". He finds Windschuttle's method of calculating Aboriginal losses flimsy, and the figures he allocated to each incident "no more reliable than those, which he dismissed as guesswork, of mainstream frontier historians". He concludes that the first volume is "a shocking book, shocking in its allegation of fabrication and also in its refusal of the interpretive framework that earlier historians employed, and that its author "fails to register the tragedy of what was a fatal encounter". When challenged on his lack of compassion, Windschuttle is reported as replying: "You can't really be serious about feeling sympathy for someone who died 200 years ago". For Macintyre, "It is the absence of any sense of this tragedy, the complete lack of compassion for its victims, that is surely the most disturbing quality of Windschuttle's rewriting of Aboriginal history".<ref name=Macintyre2003/>
*For [[University of Sydney]] historian Vicki Grieves, Windschuttle's approach reads as though indigenous people "were not the intentional targets of the colonisers but accidental targets, mostly through their inability to be realistic, objective, logical and moral, and thus the "seeds of their own destruction" lay within their own "psyche and culture". Even were one to concede Windschuttle's guesstimate for the pre-white population of Tasmania, by his own figures, the death-rate for his plausible deaths still works out as higher in percentage terms than the mortality risk of the Australian population during World War I, when 60,000 soldiers died.<!-- The WWI analogy is taken from Mark Finnane. -->{{citation needed|date=January 2020}} Windschuttle showed, she argues, a predilection for old colonial explanations, and [[Survival of the fittest|Darwinist]] values, as though nothing had happened in between. Regarding native treatment of women, who in his account were viciously brutalised, Windschuttle appealed to the reader's moral outrage at the way a 14-year-old native girl was traded. In doing so, he ignored the fact that the age of consent in Britain at that time was 12, and whites themselves on the frontier exchanged wives or traded them for tobacco and rum.<ref name=Grieves2003/>
*James Boyce, in an extended review, notes that Windschuttle ignored native views for the period after 1832, precisely the date when almost all of what is known of Aboriginal perspectives began to be recorded. Examining Windschuttle's use of sources, he finds his selection of material narrow, and his reading of their contents "selective".<ref>James Boyce, "Fantasy Island", in R. Manne (ed.) ''Whitewash: on Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History, '' pp. 17–78, esp. p. 74, n. 107:, p. 77., n.179.</ref>
*Bain Attwood of the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies at [[Monash University]] dismisses him as a "tabloid historian".<ref>Bain Attwood, [http://archive.eniar.org/news/kimberley.html "Old news from a Tabloid Historian"], ''The Australian'', 6 January 2003, p.13.</ref> However, Attwood concedes that "Boyce is unable to demonstrate" that the documents he says Windschuttle ignored "would have provided factual killings of Aborigines",<ref>Bain Attwood, ''Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History'', Allen & Unwin, 2005, p. 251.</ref> and that {{Double single}}revisionist' critics have demonstrated that the academic historians lacked documentation for most of the killings represented in their accounts".<ref>Bain, ''Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History'', p. 162.</ref>
*Shayne Breen, lecturer in Aboriginal history at the [[University of Tasmania]], reads the book as "systematic character assassination", replete with "unsupportable generalizations", and nurtured by a "delusion" that only Windschuttle could find the historical truth. For Breen, "In making "the most primitive ever" claim, Windschuttle is not practising forensic scholarship. He is renovating a colonial ideology that decreed that Tasmanian Aborigines were the [[Transitional fossil#Missing links|missing link]] between apes and man. This idea formed a central plank of what is known to scholars as scientific racism".<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>