Given the fundamental challenge posed by revisionist histories to conventional ways of ‘seeing’ Australia, it is not surprising that these histories should themselves be scrutinised and contested. From the mid-1980s dissident voices arose, claiming that such histories were based on exaggeration and even falsification. Keith Windschuttle, a journalist and former history teacher and academic, has become the foremost spokesperson for this view. His main thesis is that the actual numbers of killings were small, because the Christian faith of the settlers and the British rule of law meant that large scale killings of Aborigines was improbable. As evidence for his argument, Windschuttle focused on official records, because he claimed that unless killings were reported and documented, they could not be considered admissible evidence. However, Windschuttle went further than this, attacking the motives and methodologies of historians themselves.
In 2000, the conservative magazine Quadrant published three articles by Windschuttle which developed three key themes. First, Windschuttle claimed that massacre stories had been invented, that in effect frontier violence had been grossly exaggerated. In ‘The myths of frontier massacres in Australian history, Part I: The invention of massacre stories’, Windschuttle analysed four accounts of massacres widely recounted in contemporary history texts, and argued that only one of them (the Coniston station killings in 1928) resulted in a significant number of ‘innocent’ Aboriginal loss of life. The rest, he argued, were not massacres, but ‘lawful’ and ‘morally justifiable’ military missions, or ‘manufactured atrocity stories’, concocted by 19th Century ‘obsessive inventors’ of such tales.
He developed this latter point further in ‘The myths of frontier massacres, Part III: Massacre stories and the policy of separatism’. This is to support a second theme that 19th century missionaries, anthropologists etc., whose accounts were used as evidence by revisionist historians, deliberately fabricated evidence in order to uphold the political idea of separatism, an ideal, according to Windschuttle, which has been continued by prominent radical revisionist historians. These themes are highlighted in …
Windschuttle’s third key theme was developed in ‘The myths of frontier massacres, Part II: The fabrication of the Aboriginal death toll’. This theme is that as well as massacres, the overall estimates of Aboriginal deaths from frontier violence has been deliberately and grossly exaggerated. In particular, Windschuttle contested Reynolds’s estimate of 20 000 Aboriginal deaths from frontier violence, claiming that it was nothing more than ‘unsubstantiated guesswork’, based on flawed evidence. From Windschuttle’s perspective, only a ‘forensic’ or ‘legal’ approach which relies on evidence contained in official records, is valid.
According to Windschuttle, revisionist histories have become so powerful, so dominant in historical and political discourse, that no-one before him has dared the question their credibility or factuality. Later, in The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One (2002), which focused on contesting revisionist accounts of Tasmanian Aboriginal history, Windschuttle further developed his argument that revisionist historians were united in their constructions of Aboriginal history, and that this history is now accepted as ‘the truth’. Windschuttle accused revisionist historians of deliberate falsification because of self-interest, claiming that they falsified accounts in order to further both their radical political frameworks and ideologies, and their own academic needs and interests. Further, he continued his critique of the methodological approach of revisionist historians, singling out Lyndall Ryan’s The Aboriginal Tasmanians as an example of a ‘careless’ or ‘sloppy’ approach to historiography. Many of the key points developed by Windschuttle in The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One include: that the extinction of Tasmanian Aborigines was primarily due to disease caused by isolation and cultural ‘suicide’, that Tasmanian Aborigines were extremely primitive and had no conception of territory or land ownership, and that revisionist historians politicise history but he, Windschuttle, is free of any political motives; which considering his … to prime minister John Howard and his left-wing ideologies, is quite sceptical.
In turn, revisionist historians denounced by Windschuttle have vigorously fought back, contesting his methodology, approaches and conclusions. For example, Attwood argues that Windschuttle’s claim that revisionist historians present a united front is flawed, since these historians robustly debate and critique each other in lectures, conferences and other academic ventures, something that Windschuttle’s is seemingly ‘unaware’ of (Attwood 2003, p.177)
Further contestations appeared in Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2003), a collection of essays edited by Robert Manne designed to provide an informed discussion and refutation of Windschuttle’s claims. In its introduction, Robert Manne pointed out some flaws with Windschuttle’s reliance on official documents as evidence. He notes that
For Windschuttle, it appeared clear that a death which was unreported and thus undocumented was a death which had not occurred. (By the use of a methodology equivalent to Windschuttle’s it would be possible to prove that virtually no sexual abuse of children occurred in Western societies before the 1970s.) Windschuttle apparently could not imagine the kind of rough frontier society where settlers killed Aborigines who threatened their livestock or their lives; where such deaths went officially unidentified; and where government officials tacitly agreed, in regard to settler violence, to turn a blind eye. He also appears to know next to nothing of the fifty-year history of killings carried out by the Queensland native Police. (Manne 2003, pp.6-7)
‘Dispersal of the facts’ is one of many articles that appeared in newspapers about this issue. Written by Tony Koch, it uses a report written in 1889 by police sub-inspector Frederick Urquhart to contest Windschuttle’s claims that officials and administrators acted ethically and legally when dealing with Aborigines.
Similarly, James Boyce’s chapter ‘Fantasy Island’ in Whitewash challenges Windschuttle’s claims of careful and scholarly research, suggesting instead that Windschuttle omitted to include several crucial primary texts and unofficial documents which undermine his central arguments. To exemplify this criticism further, ‘Who is the fabricator’ is Lyndall Ryan’s response in Whitewash to Windschuttle’s criticism of her use of footnotes in The Aboriginal Tasmanians. Ryan suggests in this that Windschuttle is unfamiliar with the processes of writing history, and is highly selective in what he uses as evidence. In essence, Windschuttle is accused of deliberately ignoring key sources in order to bolster his claims, and therefore is seen as guilty of sloppy work himself.