Earlier this year Keith Windschuttle debated historian Patricia Grimshaw in front of a capacity crowd at the Trades Hall in Melbourne. Among the audience were Gary Foley, Wayne Atkinson, Robbie Thorpe and Kevin Buzzacott. All four Aboriginal activists have led campaigns for land justice, their tactics ranging from Atkinson’s advancement of the Yorta Yorta native title claim through the courts, to Buzzacott’s confrontations with mining interests on Arabunna country.
In what we consider the most revealing work of Windschuttle, the September 2000 Quadrant article entitled ‘The Break-up of Australia’, which preceded the ‘Myths of Frontier Massacres in Australian History’ series, he insists that the ‘notion of either the state or the nation, let alone the ideas of autonomy, sovereignty or self-determination’ are alien to Aboriginal society. Derived from European political traditions, he argues, these ‘ideas’ were taken up by white radicals in the 1960s, from whom Aboriginal agitators, such as Foley, learnt about and adopted them. Aboriginal people have indeed made strategic use of white technologies and tools to advance their claims, from Victorian letter-writing conventions in the nineteenth century to guns, petitions and legal challenges. However, a continuity of concern is evident from the earliest of colonial encounters — the struggle to retain control over, maintain relationships with, and care for, country.
While Windschuttle’s understanding of the complex political and social organisation of pre-contact indigenous nations across Australia, let alone his fanciful interpretation of the 1960s–70s land rights movement, is profoundly wanting, he can have had no doubt that night at Trades Hall that he was in enemy territory. The liberal-left-leaning academy, red-faced and infuriated in the crowded council chambers, constitute Windschuttle’s most obvious enemy. In claiming that settler violence on the Australian pastoral frontier has been exaggerated and at times deliberately fabricated by a generation of Australian historians, Windschuttle has somehow been allowed to undermine thirty years of courageous, rigorous, and committed academic scholarship. Moreover, Windschuttle’s work, which we concur with James Boyce will come to be understood as ‘very bad academic history’, has inspired two edited volumes of responses, and numerous archival-research-based articles. We do not develop our own assessment of the character of Australian settlement here; in our opinion, Windschuttle’s determined denial of colonial violence does not withstand investigation and needs no further attention paid to it. Instead, we find it a much more salient point that the Windschuttle debate has silenced Aboriginal respondents, denied Aboriginal political traditions and grossly misrepresented Aboriginal aspirations in the present. We are concerned in this article primarily with Aboriginal voices — both the absence of Aboriginal intellectual perspectives within this debate and Windschuttle’s treatment of Aboriginal oral history.
Windschuttle has all too successfully exempted his own work from the charge of political bias — and indeed political conspiracy — that he levels at the academy. Robert Manne, Henry Reynolds, Bain Attwood and others have all pointed out that this kind of history-making is directed by powerful, conservative political agendas (and, as Manne argues, is supported in particular by sympathetic airings in the right-wing Murdoch press). However, we cannot afford to uncouple Windschuttle’s version of the past from his anxieties about Aboriginal Australia in the present. This is not an important historical debate. This is a political debate in which Windschuttle equips the Right with a version of the national past that denies Aboriginal rights to land in the post-Mabo present.
In short, Windschuttle seeks to reinstate Western historical, moral and economic traditions as superior to Aboriginal traditions. He implicitly accepts the racialised hierarchy of linear development of land use and societal structure constructed by Enlightenment philosophers, in which the interests of colonial capitalism legitimately override pre-contact Aboriginal models of land use. He goes as far as to revive the doctrine of terra nullius — that Australia was a land without sovereign inhabitants — in asserting that ‘the Aborigines were hunter-gatherers’ with no conception of land ‘ownership’. Laughably, Windschuttle represents the synchrony of invasion of Australia with British abolitionism, and the Enlightenment and evangelical Christian world-view of settlers, as a kind of ideological prophylactic against colonial violence and racism.
What concerns us is the extent to which this reactionary argument has been legitimised and allowed to circulate within a receptive Australian public sphere. As Manne has noted, Windschuttle’s profile is dependent on media attention. Although at times his coverage has made him appear slightly ridiculous (he appeared in Good Weekend attended by a black and a white Scottie dog), it has also helped him position himself as ‘ordinary’ and embattled. This results in a deliberately constructed dualism, in which university-generated knowledge is opposed to everyday knowledge. As Ghassan Hage has imputed in the (conjectural) preface to White Nation, this opposition is central to Australian anti-intellectual culture; it makes hard-won knowledge appear to work against the ‘real people’, against the interests of the masses and antagonistic to middle Australia. Windschuttle, for example, is claiming to have uncovered the hidden agendas of academics such as Reynolds, and of Aboriginal radical thought: the Balkan-style ‘break-up of Australia’ and the creation of a separate Aboriginal state. Intent on explaining the genesis of this ‘separatist’ agenda, he argues that its origins are to be found in the desire of self-interested nineteenth-century missionaries to keep themselves in work in remote and secluded communities, who were denied Aboriginal peoples’ true wishes — assimilation into the Australian mainstream.
Windschuttle himself admitted to the Good Weekend that he feared being ignored and marginalised which, given the scaremongering as noted above, he should be. Instead the media has pandered to his views and then sought rebuttals from the historians he has attacked. The media thrives on this conflict situation — as noted, it is compatible with anti-intellectual public culture in Australia, and by extension fuels anti-Aboriginal populism. Windschuttle is cast as a truth-talking loose cannon, rejected by and railing against the elites of academia. His eccentric and dogmatic public persona only adds to his allegedly renegade status. Furthermore, this strategy has the effect of masking an attack on Aboriginal people. Thus, publicly, Windschuttle targets ‘elite intellectuals’, but dehumanisation of Aboriginal people, particularly the ‘extinct’ Tasmanians, reveals Aboriginal people and their contemporary interests to be his ultimate enemies.
Manne’s In Denial: the Stolen Generations and the Right offers the best analysis yet of the rise of anti-Aboriginal intellectual commentators in the Howard era. In the context of the Windschuttle debate, Bain Attwood understands Windschuttle’s work to ‘mirror the Howard Government’s attempt to marginalise critical histories and restore a monumental history of the Australian nation’. Attwood also notes that The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, in the opinion of many a seriously flawed historical work, was selling like hotcakes and had proved to be a major media event. He leaves it for us to conclude that in Howard’s Australia the public has been conditioned to want to consume the kind of historical story that Windschuttle offers them. The ‘mirror’ then, is a misleading descriptor; the relationship between the political climate and Windschuttle’s work is not that they reflect each other but that they need each other.
Let’s look more closely at the non-indigenous historians drawn into this public duel. White historians have seemed unperturbed by the whiteness of this debate. Whitewash, a substantial scholarly collection, contains just two contributions by Indigenous writers. Greg Lehman’s ‘Telling Us True’ explores what ‘history’ means to Aboriginal communities, and asks ‘what kinds of histories do Aboriginal people want?’ The unobvious, important and multiple answers to this question do not seem to have complicated the arguments of the non-indigenous contributors to Whitewash. The second is a three page ‘statement’ from Miriwoong/Gija woman Peggy Patrick. We see this inclusion as especially tokenistic, not just because of how grossly under-represented Aboriginal voices are in this work, but also because, while it provides a crucial rebuttal to Windschuttle over the 7:30 Report incident, it sits outside of the intellectual framework of Whitewash.
Non-Aboriginal academics evidently seem comfortable participating in a debate in which notable Aboriginal academics are either not invited to, or have declined to engage. We read them as Hage’s ‘good white nationalists’, pro-tolerance multiculturalists who hog the public sphere, own the terms of public debate and ultimately resist relinquishing power to Aboriginal and other non-white interests. Furthermore, they have invariably responded on Windschuttle’s terms, namely within a positivist historical framework. Attwood, for instance, has gone to lengths to emphasise that ‘historians work with [Aboriginal] oral histories in a sceptical fashion, aware that they sometimes suffer from serious omissions, inaccuracies and distortions’. Few have been gutsy enough to argue in defence of feminist and later post-colonial critical theory’s positive impact on empirical historical scholarship. Theoretical insights since the 1960s have challenged the privileging of both Western historical methods and subjects. The capacity of history to represent a past, or event, that exists independently of its representations, or account, is no longer assumed. Instead histories are understood as discursive, partial constructions of the past, as much shaped by the present of their writing or telling.
Windschuttle would have us believe that the epistemological critique of the limitations of empiricism necessarily results in a nihilistic relativism, in which ‘the legends, myths and prejudices of any culture become legitimate’ (read: even those as under-developed as Aboriginal Australia).
Recognising the limits to Western historiography alerts us to the insights offered by Aboriginal knowledge systems and oral histories. Deborah Bird Rose argues that we can still strive for a productive ‘correspondence between event and account’, while also recognising that this kind of history making, or commitment to truth seeking, does not ‘exhaust the task of history’. Aboriginal oral histories are, of course, themselves legitimate, valuable sources of historical information about the events of the past. In the case of frontier history, Aboriginal memories of the ‘killing times’ have proved crucial to filling in the gaps, or deliberately constructed silences, in the documentary record. However, Aboriginal oral traditions that may prove disruptive to the accepted correspondence between event and account are also valuable, allowing us to access another set of meanings attributed to those events. We concur with Rose that the ‘truthfulness ... of [some Aboriginal oral histories] is directed towards understanding and recounting the meaning of what happened, as well as the relationships between present and past’. We cannot afford to discount Aboriginal oral histories that may coalesce or telescope specific details, because they reveal understandings about the moral process of colonisation which are otherwise unavailable to non-Aboriginal people.
This kind of argument, however, has become tangential to the Windschuttle debate, which has obscured more complex and nuanced views of Australian history that have developed since the 1960s, in which both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal resistance to the workings of the colonial process have been key. These practices of history have encouraged practitioners to read archives for their silences as much as for their explicit stories; and have sought to validate Aboriginal knowledges and modes of analysis.
The notion of reading the archives for their silences embraces the practice of ‘reading between the lines’, and in some of the best work informs this practice with assumptions of Aboriginal humanity and cultural integrity. It also asks why certain texts have not survived to form part of the public record. ANU-based historian Tom Griffiths, describing his experiences as a Field Officer for the State Library of Victoria, recalls witnessing the deliberate destruction of family records, speculating that ‘a fascinating graph might be sketched of the cycles of preservation and destruction and their relationships to the fashions and politics of scholarship’. Let’s not kid ourselves: the debate over Australian history is inextricably linked to the politics of colonial–Aboriginal power relations now.
The retroactive obsession with a positivist body count sourced in the written record thus obscures a new genre of history writing which features agreements, instances of cooperation and solidarity and intimate interactions between Aboriginal people and colonisers. As Griffiths has said, the struggle over the frontier body count has returned understandings of Australia’s history to a violently black and white version of events. Once the culpability of white colonial practices for the Aboriginal death rate was generally acknowledged, history writing could begin to produce a more variegated picture.
For example, scholars at the universities of Melbourne and New South Wales are leading a project to document and analyse the multitude of ‘agreements, treaties and negotiated settlements with Indigenous people in settler states’. This work aims to ‘advance the process of treaty making in Australia’ by providing both a historical and contemporary context for the Australian Aboriginal treaty push of the post-Reconciliation era. This exciting work, which provides for the potential to build on instances of white recognition of Aboriginal rights to land, gives us an insight into how Aboriginal intellectuals have contributed in parallel with this debate. Many have appeared to remain silent — but instead they have fostered public conversations on their own terms. The recent Indigenous History series, organised as part of Melbourne City Council’s Melbourne Conversations, included Joy Murphy-Wandin’s explanation about Wurundjeri protocols of welcome and expectations of reciprocity and respect; Tony Birch’s interpretation of William Buckley as the first asylum-seeker in Australia, the humane response of Koori people contrasting with current federal policy; Gary Murray speaking about repatriation of ancestral remains and John Harding about reclamation of Aboriginal culture; Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s critique of the ongoing Western-centricism of historical discussion in Australia among many contributions by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal speakers. To us, this inspired a sense of how rich and diverse public culture in Australia could be, if these were the ideas that were allowed to flourish, and around which responses could be shaped.
Clare Land and Eve Vincent have both completed honours theses in History at the University of Melbourne, on the Victorian Aborigines Protection Act 1886, and Indigenous oral histories of British atomic tests in the South Australian desert, respectively.
