History wars
Encyclopedia
The history wars in Australia
are an ongoing public debate over the interpretation of the history of the British colonisation of Australia and development of contemporary Australian society (particularly with regard to the impact on Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders
). It has resemblances to debates in other countries.
The Australian debate often concerns the extent to which the history of European colonisation post-1788 and government administration since Federation in 1901 may be characterised as having been:
The History Wars also relates to broader themes concerning national identity
, as well as methodological questions
concerning the value and reliability of written records (of the authorities and settlers) and the oral tradition
(of the Indigenous Australians), along with the ideological biases of those who interpret them.
, an Australian anthropologist
, coined the term the "Great Australian Silence" in a Boyer Lecture
entitled "After the Dreaming", where he argued that the writing of Australian history
was incomplete. He asserted that Australian national history as documented up to that point had largely been presented in a positive light, but that Indigenous Australians
had been virtually ignored. He saw this as a structural and deliberate process to omit "several hundred thousand Aborigines who lived and died between 1788 and 1938… (who were but) … negative facts of history and … were in no way consequential for the modern period". A new strand of Australian historiography
subsequently emerged which gave much greater attention to the negative experiences of Indigenous Australians during the British settlement of Australia
. In the 1970s and 1980s, historians such as Manning Clark
and Henry Reynolds
published work which they saw as correcting a selective historiography that had misrepresented or ignored Indigenous Australian history. The historian Geoffrey Blainey
argued in the literary and political journal Quadrant
in 1993 that the telling of Australian history had moved from an unduly positive rendition (the "Three Cheers View") to an unduly negative view (The "'black armband'") and Australian commentators and politicians have continued to debate this subject.
Interpretations of Aboriginal history became part of the wider political debate sometimes called the 'culture wars' during the tenure of the Coalition
government from 1996–2007, with the Prime Minister of Australia
John Howard
publicly championing the views of some of those associated with Quadrant. This debate extended into a controversy over the way history was presented in the National Museum of Australia
and in high school
history curricula. It also migrated into the general Australian media, with regular opinion pieces being published in major broadsheet
s such as The Australian
, The Sydney Morning Herald
and The Age
. Marcia Langton
has referred to much of this wider debate as 'war porn' and an 'intellectual dead end'
Two major participants in the "wars" have been Prime Ministers Keating and Howard. According to the analysis for the Australian Parliamentary Library of Dr Mark McKenna, Paul Keating
(1991–1996) was believed by John Howard
(1996–2007) to portray Australia pre-Whitlam
in an unduly negative light; while Keating sought to distance the modern Labor
movement from its historical support for the Monarchy and the White Australia Policy
by arguing that it was the Conservative Australian Parties who had been barriers to national progress and excessively loyal to the British Empire. He accused Britain of having abandoned Australia during World War II
. Keating was a staunch advocate of a symbolic apology to indigenous people for the misdeeds of past governments, and outlined his view of the origins and potential solutions to contemporary Aboriginal disadvantage in his Redfern Park Speech
(drafted with the assistance of historian Don Watson
). In 1999, following the release of the 1998 Bringing Them Home
Report, Howard passed a Parliamentary Motion of Reconciliation
describing treatment of Aborigines as the "most blemished chapter" in Australian history, but he did not make a Parliamentary apology. Howard argued that an apology was inappropriate as it would imply "intergeneration guilt" and said that "practical" measures were a better response to contemporary Aboriginal disadvantage. Keating has argued for the eradication of remaining symbols linked to British origins: including deference for ANZAC Day
, the Australian Flag and the Monarchy in Australia
, while Howard was a supporter of these institutions. Unlike fellow Labor leaders and contemporaries, Bob Hawke
and Kim Beazley
, Keating never traveled to Gallipoli
for ANZAC Day ceremonies. In 2008 he described those who gathered there as "misguided".
In 2006, John Howard said in a speech to mark the 50th anniversary of Quadrant that "Political Correctness" was dead in Australia but: "we should not underestimate the degree to which the soft-left still holds sway, even dominance, especially in Australia's universities"; and in 2006, Sydney Morning Herald Political Editor Peter Hartcher
reported that Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd
was entering the philosophical debate by arguing in response that "John Howard, is guilty of perpetrating 'a fraud' in his so-called culture wars... designed not to make real change but to mask the damage inflicted by the Government's economic policies".
The defeat of the Howard government in the Australian Federal election of 2007, and its replacement by the Rudd Labor government
has altered the dynamic of the debate. Rudd made an official apology to the Stolen Generation
with bi-partisan support. Like Keating, Rudd supports an Australian Republic, but in contrast to Keating, Rudd has declared support for the Australian flag and supports the commemoration of ANZAC Day
and expressed admiration for Liberal Party founder Robert Menzies
.
Since the change of government, and the passage, with support from all parties, of a Parliamentary apology to indigenous Australians, Professor of Australian Studies Richard Nile has argued: "the culture and history wars are over and with them should also go the adversarial nature of intellectual debate", a view contested by others, including commentator Janet Albrechtsen
.
was a phrase first used by Australia
n historian
Geoffrey Blainey
in his 1993 Sir John Latham Memorial Lecture to describe views of history which, he believed, posited that "much of [pre-multicultural] Australian history had been a disgrace" and which focused mainly on the treatment of minority groups (especially Aborigines). This he contrasted with the 'Three Cheers' view, according to which: "nearly everything that came after [the convict era] was believed to be pretty good". Blainey argued that both such accounts of Australian history were inaccurate: "The Black Armband view of history might well represent the swing of the pendulum from a position that had been too favourable, too self congratulatory, to an opposite extreme that is even more unreal and decidedly jaundiced.".
The lecture was subsequently published in the political and literary journal, Quadrant
, which at the time was edited by Robert Manne
and is now edited by Keith Windschuttle
, two of the leading "history warriors", albeit on opposing sides of the debate. The phrase then began to be used by some commentators pejorative
ly to describe historians viewed as writing excessively critical Australian history
'while wearing a black armband
' of "mourning and grieving, or shame
". New interpretations of Australia's history since 1788 were contested for focussing almost exclusively on official and unofficial imperialism
, exploitation
, ill treatment, colonial
dispossession
and cultural
genocide
and ignoring positive aspects of Australia's history. Manning Clark
was named by Blainey in his 1993 speech as having "done much to spread the gloomy view and also the compassionate view with his powerful prose and Old Testament phrases."
The Howard Government
's responses to the question of how to recount Australian history were initially formulated in the context of Paul Keating
's characterisation of the subject. John Howard
argued in a 1996 Sir Robert Menzies Lecture
that the "balance sheet of Australian history" had come to be misrepresented:
In 2009, Howard's successor Kevin Rudd
also called for moving away from a black-arm view:
Stephen Muecke
, currently Professor of Writing at the University of New South Wales
, contributed to the debate by arguing that black armband events bring people together in common remembrance and cited Anzac Day
as an example; while Aboriginal lawyer Noel Pearson
argued that whilst there was much that is worth preserving in the cultural heritage of non-Aboriginal Australia, "To say that ordinary Australians who are part of the national community today do not have any connection with the shameful aspects of our past is at odds with our exhortations that they have connections to the prideful bits"
The notion of the 'white blindfold' view of history
entered the debate as a pejorative counter-response to the notion of the "blackarmband school".
In his book Why Weren't We Told? in 1999, Henry Reynolds
referred to Stanner's "Great Australian Silence", and to "a 'mental block' which prevented Australians from coming to terms with the past". He argued that the silence about Australia's history of frontier violence
in much of the twentieth century stands in stark contrast with the openness with which violence was admitted and discussed in the nineteenth. Reynolds quotes many excerpts from the press, including an article written in the Townsville Herald in Queensland
as late as 1907, by a "pioneer" who described his part in a massacre. Reynolds commented that violence against Aboriginals, far from being hushed up or denied, was openly talked about.
The nature of the debate began to change in 1999 with the publication of a book 'Massacre Myth' by journalist, Rod Moran, who examined the 1926 Forrest River massacre
in Western Australia
. Moran concluded that the massacre was a myth inspired by the false claims of a missionary (possibly as a result of mental health issues). The principal historian of the Forrest River massacre, Neville Green, describes the massacre as probable but not able to be proven in court. Keith Windschuttle
, an Australian historian, said that reviewing Moran's book inspired his own examination of the wider historical record. Windschuttle argues that much of Australian Aboriginal history, particularly as written since the late 1970s, was based on the use of questionable or unreliable evidence and on deliberate misrepresentation and fabrication of historical evidence. He based his conclusions on his examination of the evidence cited in previous historical accounts and reported incidences of non-existent documents being cited, misquoting and misleadingly selective quoting from documents and of documents being cited as evidence that certain events took place when his examination concluded that they do not support those claims. Windschuttle reported his conclusions in a number of articles published in Quadrant and in 2002, he published a book, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume 1, Van Diemen’s Land 1803 - 1847, which focussed on Tasmanian colonial history.
Historian Geoffrey Blainey argued in a 2003 book review of Fabrication, that the number of instances when the source documents do not support the claims made and the fact that the divergences overwhelmingly tend to support claims of violent conflict and massacres indicates that this is not a matter of mere error but bias.
The debate had therefore changed from an argument over whether there was an excessive focus on negative aspects of Australian history to one over to what extent, if at all, Australian Aboriginal history had been based on questionable evidence or had been falsified or fabricated and whether this had exaggerated the extent of violence against Aborigines. Particular historians and histories that are challenged include Lyndall Ryan
and Henry Reynolds and the histories of massacres, particularly in Tasmania
but also elsewhere in Australia. Windschuttle's naming of historians whom he accused of misrepresentation and fabrication of the historical evidence, created considerable controversy and produced a range of responses including condemnation of as well as support for his work.
, Lemkin himself and most comparative scholars of genocide and many general historians, such as Robert Hughes
, Ward Churchill
, Leo Kuper
and Jared Diamond
, basing their analysis on previously published histories, present the extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines as a text book example of a genocide. The Australian historian of genocide, Ben Kiernan
, in his recent history of the concept and practice, Blood and soil: a world history of genocide and extermination from Sparta to Darfur, (2007) treats the Australian evidence over the first century of colonization as an example of genocide.
Among scholars specializing in Australian history much recent debate has focused on whether indeed what happened to groups of Aborigine
s, and especially the Tasmanian Aborigines
during the European colonisation of Australia can be classified as genocide. According to Mark Levene, most Australian experts are now "considerably more circumspect". In the specific instance of the Tasmanian Aborigines Henry Reynolds
, who takes events in other regions of colonial Australia as marked by "genocidal moments", argues that the records show that British administrative policy in Tasmania was explicitly concerned to avoid extermination, however practices the events on the ground that lead to the virtual extinction worked out. Tony Barta, John Docker and Anne Curthoys however emphasize Lemkin's linkage between colonization and genocide. Barta, an Australian expert in German history, argued from Lemkin that, "there is no dispute that the basic fact of Australian history is the appropriation of the continent by an invading people and the dispossession, with ruthless destructiveness, of another". Docker argues that, "(w)e ignore Lemkin's wide-ranging definition of genocide, inherently linked with colonialism, at our peril". Curthoys argues that the separation between international and local Australian approaches has been deleterious. While calling for "a more robust exchange between genocide and Tasmanian historical scholarship", her own view is that the Tasmanian instance constitutes a "case for genocide, though not of state planning, mass killing, or extinction".
Much of the debate on whether European colonisation of Australia resulted in genocide, centres on whether "the term 'genocide' only applies to cases of deliberate mass killings of Aborigines by European settlers, or ... might also apply to instances in which many Aboriginal people were killed by the reckless or unintended actions and omissions of settlers". Historians such as Tony Barta argue that for the victim group it matters little if they were wiped out as part of a planned attack. If a group is decimated as a result of smallpox
introduced to Australia by British settlers, or introduced European farming methods causing a group of Aborigines to starve to death, the result is in his opinion genocide.
Henry Reynolds
points out that European colonists and their descendants frequently use expressions that included "extermination", "extinction", and "extirpation" when discussing the treatment of Aborigines during the colonial period, and as in his opinion genocide "can take many forms, not all of them violent" this is an indicator of genocide.
The political scientist Kenneth Minogue and other historians such as Keith Windschuttle
disagree and think that no genocide took place. Minogue does not try to define genocide but argues that its use is an extreme manifestation of the guilt felt by modern Australian society about the past misconduct of their society to Aborigines. In his opinion its use reflects the process by which Australian society is trying to come to terms with its past wrongs and in doing this Australians are stretching the meaning of genocide to fit within this internal debate.
First Fleet Smallpox
While there had been inconclusive speculation as early as 1789 as to the source of smallpox
amongst the Australian Aborigines on the Australian mainland, more recently Professor Noel Butlin, an economic historian, in 1983 speculated: "it is possible and, in 1789, likely, that infection of the Aborigines was a deliberate extermination act". Historians David Day and Henry Reynolds repeated Butlin’s claims and in 2001 Reynolds wrote "one possibility is that the epidemic was deliberately or accidentally let loose by someone in the settlement at Sydney Cove. Not surprisingly this is a highly contentious proposition. If true, it would clearly fall within the ambit of the Genocide Convention".
Australian virologist Frank Fenner, an authority on smallpox and principal author of the 1988 World Health Organisation report, Smallpox and its Eradication, felt that it is not possible for live smallpox to have survived the long voyage out from England or the next fifteen months before the first cases were seen amongst Aborigines near the settlement but did not address the literature relevant to the variolous material in bottles brought from England. This material was carried by First Fleet surgeons for inoculation purposes and it has been shown conclusively by Christopher Warren (2007) that this material, though degraded, could still infect highly susceptible people with smallpox. Smallpox spread by the inhalation of airborne droplets of virus in situations of personal contact or by contact with blankets that an infected person had recently used.
Medical scientists Sir Edward Stirling and Sir John Cleland published a number of books and articles between 1911 and 1966 suggesting that smallpox arrived in Northern Australia from an Asian source.
In her 2002 book, historian Judy Campbell reviewed reports of disease amongst Aboriginal people from 1780–1880, particularly the smallpox epidemics of 1789-90, 1830s, and 1860s. She argues that the evidence, including that contained in these reports shows that, while many diseases such as tuberculosis were introduced by British colonists, this was not so for smallpox and that the speculations of British responsibility made by other historians were based on tenuous evidence, largely on the mere coincidence that the 1789-90 epidemic was first observed afflicting the Aborigines not long after the establishment of the first British settlement. Campbell argues instead that the north-south route of transmission of the 1860s epidemics (which is generally agreed), also applied in the earlier ones. The hypothesis that the introduction of smallpox to Australia in the far north, via long-standing trading contacts between Aboriginal people and Makassar fishermen from what is now Indonesia. has been challenged by historian Craig Mear in relation to the Sydney epidemic of 1789-90.
In the April 2008 edition of The Monthly
, David Day
wrote further on the topic of genocide. He wrote that Lemkin considered genocide to encompass more than mass killings but also acts like "driv[ing] the original inhabitants off the land... confin[ing] them in reserves, where policies of deliberate neglect may be used to reduce their numbers... Tak[ing] indigenous children to absorb them within their own midst... assimilation to detach the people from their culture, language and religion, and often their names."
report into the Stolen Generation
, which documented the removal of Aboriginal children from their families by Australian State and Federal government agencies and church
missions, the nature and extent of the removals have been disputed within Australia, with some commentators questioning the findings contained in the report and asserting that the Stolen Generation has been exaggerated. Sir Ronald Wilson
, former President of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission and a Commissioner on the Inquiry, has stated that none of the more than 500 witnesses who appeared before the Inquiry were cross-examined. This has been the basis of criticism by the Coalition
Government and by the anthropologist Ron Brunton
in a booklet published by the Institute of Public Affairs
that was criticised in turn by the lawyer Hal Wootten. An Australian Federal Government submission has questioned the conduct of the Commission which produced the report, arguing that the Commission failed to critically appraise or test the claims on which it based the report and failed to distinguish between those separated from their families "with and without consent, and with and without good reason". Not only has the number of children removed from their parents been questioned, but also the intent and effects of the government policy.
Some critics, such as Andrew Bolt
, have questioned the very existence of the Stolen Generation. Bolt stated that it is a "preposterous and obscene" myth and that there was actually no policy in any state or territory at any time for the systematic removal of "half-caste" Aboriginal children. Robert Manne
responded that Bolt did not address the documentary evidence demonstrating the existence of the Stolen Generations and that this is a clear case of historical
denialism
. Bolt then challenged Manne to produce ten cases in which the evidence justified the claim that children were "stolen" as opposed to having been removed for reasons such as neglect, abuse, abandonment, etc. He argued that Manne did not respond and that this was an indication of unreliability of the claim that there was policy of systematic removal. In reply, Manne stated that he supplied a documented list of 250 names Bolt stated that prior to a debate, Manne provided him with a list of 12 names that he was able to show during the debate was “a list of people abandoned, saved from abuse or voluntarily given up by their parents”; and that during the actual debate, Manne produced a list of 250 names without any details or documentation as to their circumstances. Bolt also stated that he was subsequently able to identify and ascertain the history of some of those on the list and was unable to find a case where there was evidence to justify the term ‘stolen’. He stated that one of the names on the list of allegedly stolen children was 13 year old Dolly, taken into the care of the State after being "found seven months pregnant and penniless, working for nothing on a station".
The Bolt/Manne debate is a fair sample of the adversarial debating style in the area. There is focus on individual examples as evidence for or against the existence of a policy, and little or no analysis of other documentary evidence such as legislative databases showing how the legal basis for removal varied over time and between jurisdictions, or testimony from those who were called on to implement the policies, which was also recorded in the Bringing Them Home
report. A recent review of legal cases claims it is difficult for Stolen Generation
claimants to challenge what was written about their situation at the time of removal.
The report
also identified instances of official misrepresentation and deception, such as when caring and able parents were incorrectly described by Aboriginal Protection Officers as not being able to properly provide for their children, or when parents were told by government officials that their children had died, even though this was not the case.
The new Australian Government elected in 2007 issued an Apology similar to those that State Governments had issued at or about the time of the [Bringing Them Home] report ten years earlier. On 13 February 2008, Kevin Rudd
, Prime Minister of Australia
moved a formal apology in the House of Representatives
, which was moved concurrently by the Leader of the Government in the Senate
. It passed unanimously in the House of Representatives on 13 March 2008. In the Senate the Australian Greens
moved an amendment seeking to add compensation to the apology, against which all other parties voted, after which the motion was passed unanimously.
used to identify the number of Aborigines deliberately killed during European colonisation, especially focusing on the Black War
in Tasmania. He argues that there is credible evidence for the violent deaths of only 118 Tasmanian Aborigines, as having been directly killed by the British, although there were undoubtedly an unquantifiable number of other deaths for which no evidence exists. He argues that the Tasmanian Aboriginal population was devastated by a lethal cocktail of introduced diseases to which they had little or no resistance due to their isolation from the mainland and the rest of humanity for thousands of years. The deaths and infertility caused by these introduced diseases, combined with the deaths from what violent conflict there was, rapidly decimated the relatively small Aboriginal population. Windschuttle also examined the nature of those violent episodes that did occur and concluded that there is no credible evidence of warfare over territory. Windschuttle argues that the primary source of conflict between the British and the Aborigines was raids by Aborigines, often involving violent attacks on settlers, to acquire goods (such as blankets, metal implements and 'exotic' foods) from the British. With this and with a detailed examination of footnotes in and evidence cited by the earlier historical works, he criticises the claims by historians such as Henry Reynolds
and Professor Lyndall Ryan
that there was a campaign of guerrilla warfare against British settlement. Particular historians and histories that are challenged include Henry Reynolds and the histories of massacres, particularly in Tasmania
(such as in the Cape Grim massacre
) but also elsewhere in Australia. Windschuttle's claims are based upon the argument that the 'orthodox' view of Australian history were founded on hearsay or the misleading use of evidence by historians.
Windschuttle argues that, in order to advance the ‘deliberate genocide’ argument, Reynolds has misused source documentation, including that from British colonist sources, by quoting out of context. In particular, he accuses Reynolds of selectively quoting from responses to an 1830 survey in Tasmania in that Reynolds quoted only from those responses that could be construed as advocating "extermination", "extinction", and "extirpation" and failed to mention other responses to the survey, which indicated that a majority of respondents rejected genocide, were sympathetic to the plight of the Aborigines, feared that conflict arising from Aboriginal attacks upon settlers would result in the extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines and advocated the adoption of courses of action to prevent this happening.
Windschuttle's claims and research have been disputed by some historians, in Whitewash. On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History, an anthology including contributions from Henry Reynolds
and Professor Lyndall Ryan
, edited and introduced by Robert Manne
, professor of politics at La Trobe University
. This anthology, has itself been the subject of examination by Melbourne
businessman, freelance writer and Objectivist
John Dawson, in Washout: On the academic response to The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, which argues that "Whitewash" leaves Windschuttle's claims and research unrefuted.
In "Contra Windschuttle", an article published in the conservative publication Quadrant
, S.G. Foster examined some of the evidence that Windschuttle presented on one issue, Stanner's notion of the "Great Australian Silence". In Foster’s opinion, the evidence produced by Windschuttle did not prove his case that the "Great Australian Silence" was largely a myth. Windschuttle argues that, in the years prior to Stanner’s 1968 Boyer lecture, Australian historians had not been silent on the Aborigines although, in most cases, the historians’ “discussions were not to Stanner’s taste” and the Aborigines “might not have been treated in the way Reynolds and his colleagues would have liked”. Foster argues that Windschuttle is “merciless with those who get their facts wrong” and that the fact that Windschuttle has also made a mistake means that he did not meet the criteria that he used to assess 'orthodox historians' he was arguing against and whom he accused of deliberately and extensively misrepresenting, misquoting, exaggerating and fabricating evidence relating to the level and nature of violent conflict between Aborigines and white settlers.
At the time of the publication of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One it was announced that a second volume, to be published in 2003, would cover claims of frontier violence in New South Wales and Queensland, and a third, in 2004, would cover Western Australia.
On 9 February 2008, however, it was announced that the second volume, anticipated to be published later in 2008, would be entitled The Fabrication of Australian History, Volume 2: The "Stolen Generations" and would address the issue of the removal of Aboriginal children (the "stolen generations") from their families in the 20th century.
The new volume was released in January 2010, now listed as Volume 3, with a statement that Volumes 2 and 4 would appear later. Announcing the publication, Windschuttle claimed that the film Rabbit-Proof Fence
had misrepresented the child removal at the centre of the story. These claims were subsequently rejected by the makers of the film.
published The History Wars, written with Anna Clark. This was a study of the background of, and arguments surrounding, recent developments in Australian historiography, and concluded that the History Wars had done damage to the nature of objective Australian history. At the launch of his book, historian Stuart Macintyre
emphasised the political dimension of these arguments and said the Australian debate took its cue from the Enola Gay
controversy in the United States
. The book was launched by former Prime Minister Paul Keating
, who took the opportunity to criticise conservative views of Australian history, and those who hold them (such as the then Prime Minister John Howard
), saying that they suffered from "a failure of imagination", and said that The History Wars "rolls out the canvas of this debate." Macintyre's critics, such as Greg Melluish (History Lecturer at the University of Wollongong
), responded to the book by declaring that Macintyre was a partisan history warrior himself, and that "its primary arguments are derived from the pro-Communist polemics of the Cold War
." Keith Windschuttle said that Macintyre attempted to "caricature the history debate." In a foreword to the book, former Chief Justice of Australia
Sir Anthony Mason said that the book was "a fascinating study of the recent endeavours to rewrite or reinterpret the history of European settlement in Australia."
, historian Keith Windshuttle argued that the then-new National Museum of Australia
(NMA) was marred by "political correctness"
and did not present a balanced view of the nation's history. In 2003 the Howard Government
commissioned a review of the NMA. A potentially controversial issue was in assessing how well the NMA met the criterion that displays should: "Cover darker historical episodes, and with a gravity that opens the possibility of collective self-accounting. The role here is in helping the nation to examine fully its own past, and the dynamic of its history—with truthfulness, sobriety and balance. This extends into covering present-day controversial issues." While the report concluded that there was no systemic bias, it recommended that there be more recognition in the exhibits of European achievements.
The report drew the ire of some historians in Australia, who claimed that it was a deliberate attempt on the part of the Government to politicise the museum and move it more towards a position which Geoffrey Blainey
called the 'three cheers' view of Australian history
, rather than the 'black armband' view. In 2006 columnist Miranda Devine
described some of the Braille
messages encoded on the external structure of the NMA, including "sorry" and "forgive us our genocide" and how they had been covered over by aluminium discs in 2001, and stated that under the new Director "what he calls the 'black T-shirt' view of Australian culture
" is being replaced by "systematically reworking the collections, with attention to 'scrupulous historical accuracy'".
An example of the current approach at the NMA is the Bells Falls Gorge Interactive display, which presents Windshuttles's view of an alleged massacre alongside other views and contemporary documents and displays of weapons relating to colonial conflict around Bathurst in 1824 and invites visitors to make up their own minds.
" originating in the United States. William D. Rubinstein, writing for the conservative British think tank
the Social Affairs Unit
, refers to the history wars as "the Culture War down under". Participants in the debate including Keith Windschuttle
and Robert Manne
are frequently described as "culture warriors" for their respective points of view.
Articles
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
are an ongoing public debate over the interpretation of the history of the British colonisation of Australia and development of contemporary Australian society (particularly with regard to the impact on Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders
Torres Strait Islanders
Torres Strait Islanders are the indigenous people of the Torres Strait Islands, part of Queensland, Australia. They are culturally and genetically linked to Melanesian peoples and those of Papua New Guinea....
). It has resemblances to debates in other countries.
The Australian debate often concerns the extent to which the history of European colonisation post-1788 and government administration since Federation in 1901 may be characterised as having been:
- marked by generally low levels of conflict between 'Colonists' and Indigenous peoples, and by generally humane intent by government authorities; with damage to indigenous people often attributable to unintended factors (such as the spread of new diseases) rather than to malicious policy;
- marred by both official and unofficial imperialismImperialismImperialism, as defined by Dictionary of Human Geography, is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationships, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." The imperialism of the last 500 years,...
, exploitationExploitationThis article discusses the term exploitation in the meaning of using something in an unjust or cruel manner.- As unjust benefit :In political economy, economics, and sociology, exploitation involves a persistent social relationship in which certain persons are being mistreated or unfairly used for...
, ill treatment, colonialColonialismColonialism is the establishment, maintenance, acquisition and expansion of colonies in one territory by people from another territory. It is a process whereby the metropole claims sovereignty over the colony and the social structure, government, and economics of the colony are changed by...
dispossession, violent conflict and cultural genocideCultural genocideCultural genocide is a term that lawyer Raphael Lemkin proposed in 1933 as a component to genocide. The term was considered in the 1948 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples juxtaposed next to the term ethnocide, but it was removed in the final document, replaced with...
by 'invaders'; or - somewhere in between.
The History Wars also relates to broader themes concerning national identity
National identity
National identity is the person's identity and sense of belonging to one state or to one nation, a feeling one shares with a group of people, regardless of one's citizenship status....
, as well as methodological questions
Historiography
Historiography refers either to the study of the history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic...
concerning the value and reliability of written records (of the authorities and settlers) and the oral tradition
Oral tradition
Oral tradition and oral lore is cultural material and traditions transmitted orally from one generation to another. The messages or testimony are verbally transmitted in speech or song and may take the form, for example, of folktales, sayings, ballads, songs, or chants...
(of the Indigenous Australians), along with the ideological biases of those who interpret them.
Outline
In 1968 Professor W. E. H. "Bill" StannerBill Stanner
W.E.H. Stanner was an Australian anthropologist who worked extensively with Indigenous Australians. Stanner had a varied career that also included journalism in the 1930s, military service in World War II, and political advice on colonial policy in Africa and the South Pacific in the post-war...
, an Australian anthropologist
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
, coined the term the "Great Australian Silence" in a Boyer Lecture
Boyer Lectures
The Boyer Lectures began in 1959 as the ABC Lectures. They were renamed in 1961 after Richard Boyer , the ABC board chairman who had first suggested the lectures...
entitled "After the Dreaming", where he argued that the writing of Australian history
History of Australia
The History of Australia refers to the history of the area and people of Commonwealth of Australia and its preceding Indigenous and colonial societies. Aboriginal Australians are believed to have first arrived on the Australian mainland by boat from the Indonesian archipelago between 40,000 to...
was incomplete. He asserted that Australian national history as documented up to that point had largely been presented in a positive light, but that Indigenous Australians
Indigenous Australians
Indigenous Australians are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands. The Aboriginal Indigenous Australians migrated from the Indian continent around 75,000 to 100,000 years ago....
had been virtually ignored. He saw this as a structural and deliberate process to omit "several hundred thousand Aborigines who lived and died between 1788 and 1938… (who were but) … negative facts of history and … were in no way consequential for the modern period". A new strand of Australian historiography
Historiography
Historiography refers either to the study of the history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic...
subsequently emerged which gave much greater attention to the negative experiences of Indigenous Australians during the British settlement of Australia
History of Australia (1788-1850)
The history of Australia from 1788–1850 covers the early colonies period of Australia's history, from the arrival of the First Fleet of British ships at Sydney to establish the penal colony of New South Wales in 1788 to the European exploration of the continent and establishment of other colonies...
. In the 1970s and 1980s, historians such as Manning Clark
Manning Clark
Charles Manning Hope Clark, AC , an Australian historian, was the author of the best-known general history of Australia, his six-volume A History of Australia, published between 1962 and 1987...
and Henry Reynolds
Henry Reynolds (historian)
Henry Reynolds is an eminent Australian historian whose primary work has focused on the frontier conflict between European settlement of Australia and indigenous Australians.-Education and career:...
published work which they saw as correcting a selective historiography that had misrepresented or ignored Indigenous Australian history. The historian Geoffrey Blainey
Geoffrey Blainey
Geoffrey Norman Blainey AC , is a prominent Australian historian.Blainey was born in Melbourne and raised in a series of Victorian country towns before attending Wesley College and the University of Melbourne. While at university he was editor of Farrago, the newspaper of the University of...
argued in the literary and political journal Quadrant
Quadrant (magazine)
Quadrant is an Australian literary and cultural journal. The magazine takes a conservative position on political and social issues, describing itself as sceptical of 'unthinking Leftism, or political correctness, and its "smelly little orthodoxies"'. Quadrant reviews literature, as well as...
in 1993 that the telling of Australian history had moved from an unduly positive rendition (the "Three Cheers View") to an unduly negative view (The "'black armband'") and Australian commentators and politicians have continued to debate this subject.
Interpretations of Aboriginal history became part of the wider political debate sometimes called the 'culture wars' during the tenure of the Coalition
Coalition (Australia)
The Coalition in Australian politics refers to a group of centre-right parties that has existed in the form of a coalition agreement since 1922...
government from 1996–2007, with the Prime Minister of Australia
Prime Minister of Australia
The Prime Minister of the Commonwealth of Australia is the highest minister of the Crown, leader of the Cabinet and Head of Her Majesty's Australian Government, holding office on commission from the Governor-General of Australia. The office of Prime Minister is, in practice, the most powerful...
John Howard
John Howard
John Winston Howard AC, SSI, was the 25th Prime Minister of Australia, from 11 March 1996 to 3 December 2007. He was the second-longest serving Australian Prime Minister after Sir Robert Menzies....
publicly championing the views of some of those associated with Quadrant. This debate extended into a controversy over the way history was presented in the National Museum of Australia
National Museum of Australia
The National Museum of Australia was formally established by the National Museum of Australia Act 1980. The National Museum preserves and interprets Australia's social history, exploring the key issues, people and events that have shaped the nation....
and in high school
High school
High school is a term used in parts of the English speaking world to describe institutions which provide all or part of secondary education. The term is often incorporated into the name of such institutions....
history curricula. It also migrated into the general Australian media, with regular opinion pieces being published in major broadsheet
Broadsheet
Broadsheet is the largest of the various newspaper formats and is characterized by long vertical pages . The term derives from types of popular prints usually just of a single sheet, sold on the streets and containing various types of material, from ballads to political satire. The first broadsheet...
s such as The Australian
The Australian
The Australian is a broadsheet newspaper published in Australia from Monday to Saturday each week since 14 July 1964. The editor in chief is Chris Mitchell, the editor is Clive Mathieson and the 'editor-at-large' is Paul Kelly....
, The Sydney Morning Herald
The Sydney Morning Herald
The Sydney Morning Herald is a daily broadsheet newspaper published by Fairfax Media in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1831 as the Sydney Herald, the SMH is the oldest continuously published newspaper in Australia. The newspaper is published six days a week. The newspaper's Sunday counterpart, The...
and The Age
The Age
The Age is a daily broadsheet newspaper, which has been published in Melbourne, Australia since 1854. Owned and published by Fairfax Media, The Age primarily serves Victoria, but is also available for purchase in Tasmania, the Australian Capital Territory and border regions of South Australia and...
. Marcia Langton
Marcia Langton
Marcia Lynne Langton is one of Australia's leading Aboriginal scholars. She holds the Foundation Chair in Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia...
has referred to much of this wider debate as 'war porn' and an 'intellectual dead end'
Two major participants in the "wars" have been Prime Ministers Keating and Howard. According to the analysis for the Australian Parliamentary Library of Dr Mark McKenna, Paul Keating
Paul Keating
Paul John Keating was the 24th Prime Minister of Australia, serving from 1991 to 1996. Keating was elected as the federal Labor member for Blaxland in 1969 and came to prominence as the reformist treasurer of the Hawke Labor government, which came to power at the 1983 election...
(1991–1996) was believed by John Howard
John Howard
John Winston Howard AC, SSI, was the 25th Prime Minister of Australia, from 11 March 1996 to 3 December 2007. He was the second-longest serving Australian Prime Minister after Sir Robert Menzies....
(1996–2007) to portray Australia pre-Whitlam
Gough Whitlam
Edward Gough Whitlam, AC, QC , known as Gough Whitlam , served as the 21st Prime Minister of Australia. Whitlam led the Australian Labor Party to power at the 1972 election and retained government at the 1974 election, before being dismissed by Governor-General Sir John Kerr at the climax of the...
in an unduly negative light; while Keating sought to distance the modern Labor
Australian Labor Party
The Australian Labor Party is an Australian political party. It has been the governing party of the Commonwealth of Australia since the 2007 federal election. Julia Gillard is the party's federal parliamentary leader and Prime Minister of Australia...
movement from its historical support for the Monarchy and the White Australia Policy
White Australia policy
The White Australia policy comprises various historical policies that intentionally restricted "non-white" immigration to Australia. From origins at Federation in 1901, the polices were progressively dismantled between 1949-1973....
by arguing that it was the Conservative Australian Parties who had been barriers to national progress and excessively loyal to the British Empire. He accused Britain of having abandoned Australia during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. Keating was a staunch advocate of a symbolic apology to indigenous people for the misdeeds of past governments, and outlined his view of the origins and potential solutions to contemporary Aboriginal disadvantage in his Redfern Park Speech
Redfern Park Speech
The Redfern Park Speech was made on 10 December 1992 by the Prime Minister of Australia, Paul Keating at Redfern Park in Redfern, New South Wales...
(drafted with the assistance of historian Don Watson
Don Watson
Don Watson is an Australian author and public speaker.-Biography:Watson grew up on a farm in Gippsland, took his undergraduate degree at La Trobe University and a Ph.D at Monash University and was for ten years an academic historian. He wrote three books on Australian history before turning his...
). In 1999, following the release of the 1998 Bringing Them Home
Bringing Them Home
Bringing Them Home is the title of the Australian "Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families"...
Report, Howard passed a Parliamentary Motion of Reconciliation
Motion of Reconciliation
The Motion of Reconciliation was a motion to the Australian Parliament introduced on 26 August 1999. Drafted by Prime Minister John Howard in consulation with Aboriginal Senator Aden Ridgeway , it dedicated the Parliament to the "cause of reconciliation" and recognised historic maltreatment of...
describing treatment of Aborigines as the "most blemished chapter" in Australian history, but he did not make a Parliamentary apology. Howard argued that an apology was inappropriate as it would imply "intergeneration guilt" and said that "practical" measures were a better response to contemporary Aboriginal disadvantage. Keating has argued for the eradication of remaining symbols linked to British origins: including deference for ANZAC Day
ANZAC Day
Anzac Day is a national day of remembrance in Australia and New Zealand, commemorated by both countries on 25 April every year to honour the members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps who fought at Gallipoli in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. It now more broadly commemorates all...
, the Australian Flag and the Monarchy in Australia
Monarchy in Australia
The Monarchy of Australia is a form of government in which a hereditary monarch is the sovereign of Australia. The monarchy is a constitutional one modelled on the Westminster style of parliamentary government, incorporating features unique to the Constitution of Australia.The present monarch is...
, while Howard was a supporter of these institutions. Unlike fellow Labor leaders and contemporaries, Bob Hawke
Bob Hawke
Robert James Lee "Bob" Hawke AC GCL was the 23rd Prime Minister of Australia from March 1983 to December 1991 and therefore longest serving Australian Labor Party Prime Minister....
and Kim Beazley
Kim Beazley
In the October 1998 election, Labor polled a majority of the two-party vote and received the largest swing to a first-term opposition since 1934. However, due to the uneven nature of the swing, Labor came up eight seats short of making Beazley Prime Minister....
, Keating never traveled to Gallipoli
Gallipoli
The Gallipoli peninsula is located in Turkish Thrace , the European part of Turkey, with the Aegean Sea to the west and the Dardanelles straits to the east. Gallipoli derives its name from the Greek "Καλλίπολις" , meaning "Beautiful City"...
for ANZAC Day ceremonies. In 2008 he described those who gathered there as "misguided".
In 2006, John Howard said in a speech to mark the 50th anniversary of Quadrant that "Political Correctness" was dead in Australia but: "we should not underestimate the degree to which the soft-left still holds sway, even dominance, especially in Australia's universities"; and in 2006, Sydney Morning Herald Political Editor Peter Hartcher
Peter Hartcher
Peter Hartcher is an Australian journalist and the Political and International Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. He is also a visiting fellow at the Lowy Institute, a Sydney-based foreign policy think tank.-Career:...
reported that Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd
Kevin Rudd
Kevin Michael Rudd is an Australian politician who was the 26th Prime Minister of Australia from 2007 to 2010. He has been Minister for Foreign Affairs since 2010...
was entering the philosophical debate by arguing in response that "John Howard, is guilty of perpetrating 'a fraud' in his so-called culture wars... designed not to make real change but to mask the damage inflicted by the Government's economic policies".
The defeat of the Howard government in the Australian Federal election of 2007, and its replacement by the Rudd Labor government
Rudd Government
The Rudd Government refers to the federal Executive Government of Australia of the Australian Labor Party from 2007 to 2010, led by Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister. The Rudd Government commenced on 3 December 2007, when Rudd was sworn in along with his ministry...
has altered the dynamic of the debate. Rudd made an official apology to the Stolen Generation
Stolen Generation
The Stolen Generations were the children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by the Australian Federal and State government agencies and church missions, under acts of their respective parliaments...
with bi-partisan support. Like Keating, Rudd supports an Australian Republic, but in contrast to Keating, Rudd has declared support for the Australian flag and supports the commemoration of ANZAC Day
ANZAC Day
Anzac Day is a national day of remembrance in Australia and New Zealand, commemorated by both countries on 25 April every year to honour the members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps who fought at Gallipoli in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. It now more broadly commemorates all...
and expressed admiration for Liberal Party founder Robert Menzies
Robert Menzies
Sir Robert Gordon Menzies, , Australian politician, was the 12th and longest-serving Prime Minister of Australia....
.
Since the change of government, and the passage, with support from all parties, of a Parliamentary apology to indigenous Australians, Professor of Australian Studies Richard Nile has argued: "the culture and history wars are over and with them should also go the adversarial nature of intellectual debate", a view contested by others, including commentator Janet Albrechtsen
Janet Albrechtsen
Janet Kim Albrechtsen is a conservative Australian opinion columnist with the News Limited-owned newspaper, The Australian. From 2005 through 2010, she was a member of the Board of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Australia's state-owned national broadcaster.-Early life and...
.
Black armband debate
The black armband debate concerns whether or not accounts of Australian history gravitate towards an overly negative or an overly positive point of view. The black armband view of historyHistory of Australia
The History of Australia refers to the history of the area and people of Commonwealth of Australia and its preceding Indigenous and colonial societies. Aboriginal Australians are believed to have first arrived on the Australian mainland by boat from the Indonesian archipelago between 40,000 to...
was a phrase first used by Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
n historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
Geoffrey Blainey
Geoffrey Blainey
Geoffrey Norman Blainey AC , is a prominent Australian historian.Blainey was born in Melbourne and raised in a series of Victorian country towns before attending Wesley College and the University of Melbourne. While at university he was editor of Farrago, the newspaper of the University of...
in his 1993 Sir John Latham Memorial Lecture to describe views of history which, he believed, posited that "much of [pre-multicultural] Australian history had been a disgrace" and which focused mainly on the treatment of minority groups (especially Aborigines). This he contrasted with the 'Three Cheers' view, according to which: "nearly everything that came after [the convict era] was believed to be pretty good". Blainey argued that both such accounts of Australian history were inaccurate: "The Black Armband view of history might well represent the swing of the pendulum from a position that had been too favourable, too self congratulatory, to an opposite extreme that is even more unreal and decidedly jaundiced.".
The lecture was subsequently published in the political and literary journal, Quadrant
Quadrant (magazine)
Quadrant is an Australian literary and cultural journal. The magazine takes a conservative position on political and social issues, describing itself as sceptical of 'unthinking Leftism, or political correctness, and its "smelly little orthodoxies"'. Quadrant reviews literature, as well as...
, which at the time was edited by Robert Manne
Robert Manne
Robert Manne is a professor of politics at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.Born in Melbourne, Manne's earliest political consciousness was formed by the fact that his parents were Jewish refugees from Europe and his grandparents were victims of the Holocaust...
and is now edited by Keith Windschuttle
Keith Windschuttle
Keith Windschuttle is an Australian writer, historian, and ABC board member, who has authored several books from the 1970s onwards. These include Unemployment, , which analysed the economic causes and social consequences of unemployment in Australia and advocated a socialist response; The Media: a...
, two of the leading "history warriors", albeit on opposing sides of the debate. The phrase then began to be used by some commentators pejorative
Pejorative
Pejoratives , including name slurs, are words or grammatical forms that connote negativity and express contempt or distaste. A term can be regarded as pejorative in some social groups but not in others, e.g., hacker is a term used for computer criminals as well as quick and clever computer experts...
ly to describe historians viewed as writing excessively critical Australian history
History of Australia
The History of Australia refers to the history of the area and people of Commonwealth of Australia and its preceding Indigenous and colonial societies. Aboriginal Australians are believed to have first arrived on the Australian mainland by boat from the Indonesian archipelago between 40,000 to...
'while wearing a black armband
Armband
An armband is a piece of material worn around the arm over the sleeve of other clothing if present. they may be worn for pure ornamentation to mark the wearer as belonging to group, having a certain rank or role, or being in a particular state or condition...
' of "mourning and grieving, or shame
Shame
Shame is, variously, an affect, emotion, cognition, state, or condition. The roots of the word shame are thought to derive from an older word meaning to cover; as such, covering oneself, literally or figuratively, is a natural expression of shame....
". New interpretations of Australia's history since 1788 were contested for focussing almost exclusively on official and unofficial imperialism
Imperialism
Imperialism, as defined by Dictionary of Human Geography, is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationships, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." The imperialism of the last 500 years,...
, exploitation
Exploitation
This article discusses the term exploitation in the meaning of using something in an unjust or cruel manner.- As unjust benefit :In political economy, economics, and sociology, exploitation involves a persistent social relationship in which certain persons are being mistreated or unfairly used for...
, ill treatment, colonial
Colonialism
Colonialism is the establishment, maintenance, acquisition and expansion of colonies in one territory by people from another territory. It is a process whereby the metropole claims sovereignty over the colony and the social structure, government, and economics of the colony are changed by...
dispossession
Ownership
Ownership is the state or fact of exclusive rights and control over property, which may be an object, land/real estate or intellectual property. Ownership involves multiple rights, collectively referred to as title, which may be separated and held by different parties. The concept of ownership has...
and cultural
Cultural genocide
Cultural genocide is a term that lawyer Raphael Lemkin proposed in 1933 as a component to genocide. The term was considered in the 1948 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples juxtaposed next to the term ethnocide, but it was removed in the final document, replaced with...
genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
and ignoring positive aspects of Australia's history. Manning Clark
Manning Clark
Charles Manning Hope Clark, AC , an Australian historian, was the author of the best-known general history of Australia, his six-volume A History of Australia, published between 1962 and 1987...
was named by Blainey in his 1993 speech as having "done much to spread the gloomy view and also the compassionate view with his powerful prose and Old Testament phrases."
The Howard Government
Howard Government
The Howard Government refers to the federal Executive Government of Australia led by Prime Minister John Howard. It was made up of members of the Liberal–National Coalition, which won a majority of seats in the Australian House of Representatives at four successive elections. The Howard Government...
's responses to the question of how to recount Australian history were initially formulated in the context of Paul Keating
Paul Keating
Paul John Keating was the 24th Prime Minister of Australia, serving from 1991 to 1996. Keating was elected as the federal Labor member for Blaxland in 1969 and came to prominence as the reformist treasurer of the Hawke Labor government, which came to power at the 1983 election...
's characterisation of the subject. John Howard
John Howard
John Winston Howard AC, SSI, was the 25th Prime Minister of Australia, from 11 March 1996 to 3 December 2007. He was the second-longest serving Australian Prime Minister after Sir Robert Menzies....
argued in a 1996 Sir Robert Menzies Lecture
Sir Robert Menzies Lecture
The Sir Robert Menzies Lecture is an annual lecture delivered in Melbourne, Australia, by a prominent politician, academic or other noteworthy individual, about various aspects of modern liberalism...
that the "balance sheet of Australian history" had come to be misrepresented:
In 2009, Howard's successor Kevin Rudd
Kevin Rudd
Kevin Michael Rudd is an Australian politician who was the 26th Prime Minister of Australia from 2007 to 2010. He has been Minister for Foreign Affairs since 2010...
also called for moving away from a black-arm view:
Stephen Muecke
Stephen Muecke
Stephen Muecke BA , Mes.L , PhD FAHA is Professor of Writing at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He studied linguistics and semiotics, completing his PhD on storytelling techniques among Aboriginal people in Broome, Western Australia.- Publications :Muecke's PhD research resulted in...
, currently Professor of Writing at the University of New South Wales
University of New South Wales
The University of New South Wales , is a research-focused university based in Kensington, a suburb in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia...
, contributed to the debate by arguing that black armband events bring people together in common remembrance and cited Anzac Day
ANZAC Day
Anzac Day is a national day of remembrance in Australia and New Zealand, commemorated by both countries on 25 April every year to honour the members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps who fought at Gallipoli in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. It now more broadly commemorates all...
as an example; while Aboriginal lawyer Noel Pearson
Noel Pearson
Noel Pearson is an Aboriginal Australian lawyer, academic, land rights activist and founder of the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership, an organisation promoting the economic and social development of Cape York....
argued that whilst there was much that is worth preserving in the cultural heritage of non-Aboriginal Australia, "To say that ordinary Australians who are part of the national community today do not have any connection with the shameful aspects of our past is at odds with our exhortations that they have connections to the prideful bits"
The notion of the 'white blindfold' view of history
History of Australia
The History of Australia refers to the history of the area and people of Commonwealth of Australia and its preceding Indigenous and colonial societies. Aboriginal Australians are believed to have first arrived on the Australian mainland by boat from the Indonesian archipelago between 40,000 to...
entered the debate as a pejorative counter-response to the notion of the "blackarmband school".
In his book Why Weren't We Told? in 1999, Henry Reynolds
Henry Reynolds (historian)
Henry Reynolds is an eminent Australian historian whose primary work has focused on the frontier conflict between European settlement of Australia and indigenous Australians.-Education and career:...
referred to Stanner's "Great Australian Silence", and to "a 'mental block' which prevented Australians from coming to terms with the past". He argued that the silence about Australia's history of frontier violence
Australian frontier wars
The Australian frontier wars were a series of conflicts fought between Indigenous Australians and European settlers. The first fighting took place in May 1788 and the last clashes occurred in the early 1930s. Indigenous fatalities from the fighting have been estimated as at least 20,000 and...
in much of the twentieth century stands in stark contrast with the openness with which violence was admitted and discussed in the nineteenth. Reynolds quotes many excerpts from the press, including an article written in the Townsville Herald in Queensland
Queensland
Queensland is a state of Australia, occupying the north-eastern section of the mainland continent. It is bordered by the Northern Territory, South Australia and New South Wales to the west, south-west and south respectively. To the east, Queensland is bordered by the Coral Sea and Pacific Ocean...
as late as 1907, by a "pioneer" who described his part in a massacre. Reynolds commented that violence against Aboriginals, far from being hushed up or denied, was openly talked about.
The nature of the debate began to change in 1999 with the publication of a book 'Massacre Myth' by journalist, Rod Moran, who examined the 1926 Forrest River massacre
Forrest River massacre
The Forrest River massacre, or Oombulgurri massacre, was a massacre of Indigenous Australian people by a law enforcement party in the wake of the killing of a pastoralist, which took place in the Kimberley region of Western Australia in 1926. The massacre was investigated by a Royal Commission in...
in Western Australia
Western Australia
Western Australia is a state of Australia, occupying the entire western third of the Australian continent. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the north and west, the Great Australian Bight and Indian Ocean to the south, the Northern Territory to the north-east and South Australia to the south-east...
. Moran concluded that the massacre was a myth inspired by the false claims of a missionary (possibly as a result of mental health issues). The principal historian of the Forrest River massacre, Neville Green, describes the massacre as probable but not able to be proven in court. Keith Windschuttle
Keith Windschuttle
Keith Windschuttle is an Australian writer, historian, and ABC board member, who has authored several books from the 1970s onwards. These include Unemployment, , which analysed the economic causes and social consequences of unemployment in Australia and advocated a socialist response; The Media: a...
, an Australian historian, said that reviewing Moran's book inspired his own examination of the wider historical record. Windschuttle argues that much of Australian Aboriginal history, particularly as written since the late 1970s, was based on the use of questionable or unreliable evidence and on deliberate misrepresentation and fabrication of historical evidence. He based his conclusions on his examination of the evidence cited in previous historical accounts and reported incidences of non-existent documents being cited, misquoting and misleadingly selective quoting from documents and of documents being cited as evidence that certain events took place when his examination concluded that they do not support those claims. Windschuttle reported his conclusions in a number of articles published in Quadrant and in 2002, he published a book, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume 1, Van Diemen’s Land 1803 - 1847, which focussed on Tasmanian colonial history.
Historian Geoffrey Blainey argued in a 2003 book review of Fabrication, that the number of instances when the source documents do not support the claims made and the fact that the divergences overwhelmingly tend to support claims of violent conflict and massacres indicates that this is not a matter of mere error but bias.
The debate had therefore changed from an argument over whether there was an excessive focus on negative aspects of Australian history to one over to what extent, if at all, Australian Aboriginal history had been based on questionable evidence or had been falsified or fabricated and whether this had exaggerated the extent of violence against Aborigines. Particular historians and histories that are challenged include Lyndall Ryan
Lyndall Ryan
Lyndall Ryan is an Australian academic. She has held positions in Australian Studies and Women's Studies at Griffith University and Flinders University and is currently Foundation Professor of Australian Studies and Head of School of Humanities at the University of Newcastle...
and Henry Reynolds and the histories of massacres, particularly in Tasmania
Tasmania
Tasmania is an Australian island and state. It is south of the continent, separated by Bass Strait. The state includes the island of Tasmania—the 26th largest island in the world—and the surrounding islands. The state has a population of 507,626 , of whom almost half reside in the greater Hobart...
but also elsewhere in Australia. Windschuttle's naming of historians whom he accused of misrepresentation and fabrication of the historical evidence, created considerable controversy and produced a range of responses including condemnation of as well as support for his work.
Genocide debate
After the introduction of the word genocide in the 1940s by Raphael LemkinRaphael Lemkin
Raphael Lemkin was a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent. He is best known for his work against genocide, a word he coined in 1943 from the root words genos and -cide...
, Lemkin himself and most comparative scholars of genocide and many general historians, such as Robert Hughes
Robert Hughes (critic)
Robert Studley Forrest Hughes, AO is an Australian-born art critic, writer and television documentary maker who has resided in New York since 1970.-Early life:...
, Ward Churchill
Ward Churchill
Ward LeRoy Churchill is an author and political activist. He was a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder from 1990 to 2007. The primary focus of his work is on the historical treatment of political dissenters and Native Americans by the United States government...
, Leo Kuper
Leo Kuper
Leo Kuper was a writer and philosopher. He was born to a Lithuanian Jewish family in South Africa. He trained as a lawyer before becoming a sociologist specialising in the study of genocide....
and Jared Diamond
Jared Diamond
Jared Mason Diamond is an American scientist and author whose work draws from a variety of fields. He is currently Professor of Geography and Physiology at UCLA...
, basing their analysis on previously published histories, present the extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines as a text book example of a genocide. The Australian historian of genocide, Ben Kiernan
Ben Kiernan
Benedict F. Kiernan is the Whitney Griswold Professor of History, Professor of International and Area Studies and Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University. He is a prolific writer on the Cambodian genocide...
, in his recent history of the concept and practice, Blood and soil: a world history of genocide and extermination from Sparta to Darfur, (2007) treats the Australian evidence over the first century of colonization as an example of genocide.
Among scholars specializing in Australian history much recent debate has focused on whether indeed what happened to groups of Aborigine
Indigenous Australians
Indigenous Australians are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands. The Aboriginal Indigenous Australians migrated from the Indian continent around 75,000 to 100,000 years ago....
s, and especially the Tasmanian Aborigines
Tasmanian Aborigines
The Tasmanian Aborigines were the indigenous people of the island state of Tasmania, Australia. Before British colonisation in 1803, there were an estimated 3,000–15,000 Parlevar. A number of historians point to introduced disease as the major cause of the destruction of the full-blooded...
during the European colonisation of Australia can be classified as genocide. According to Mark Levene, most Australian experts are now "considerably more circumspect". In the specific instance of the Tasmanian Aborigines Henry Reynolds
Henry Reynolds (historian)
Henry Reynolds is an eminent Australian historian whose primary work has focused on the frontier conflict between European settlement of Australia and indigenous Australians.-Education and career:...
, who takes events in other regions of colonial Australia as marked by "genocidal moments", argues that the records show that British administrative policy in Tasmania was explicitly concerned to avoid extermination, however practices the events on the ground that lead to the virtual extinction worked out. Tony Barta, John Docker and Anne Curthoys however emphasize Lemkin's linkage between colonization and genocide. Barta, an Australian expert in German history, argued from Lemkin that, "there is no dispute that the basic fact of Australian history is the appropriation of the continent by an invading people and the dispossession, with ruthless destructiveness, of another". Docker argues that, "(w)e ignore Lemkin's wide-ranging definition of genocide, inherently linked with colonialism, at our peril". Curthoys argues that the separation between international and local Australian approaches has been deleterious. While calling for "a more robust exchange between genocide and Tasmanian historical scholarship", her own view is that the Tasmanian instance constitutes a "case for genocide, though not of state planning, mass killing, or extinction".
Much of the debate on whether European colonisation of Australia resulted in genocide, centres on whether "the term 'genocide' only applies to cases of deliberate mass killings of Aborigines by European settlers, or ... might also apply to instances in which many Aboriginal people were killed by the reckless or unintended actions and omissions of settlers". Historians such as Tony Barta argue that for the victim group it matters little if they were wiped out as part of a planned attack. If a group is decimated as a result of smallpox
Smallpox
Smallpox was an infectious disease unique to humans, caused by either of two virus variants, Variola major and Variola minor. The disease is also known by the Latin names Variola or Variola vera, which is a derivative of the Latin varius, meaning "spotted", or varus, meaning "pimple"...
introduced to Australia by British settlers, or introduced European farming methods causing a group of Aborigines to starve to death, the result is in his opinion genocide.
Henry Reynolds
Henry Reynolds (historian)
Henry Reynolds is an eminent Australian historian whose primary work has focused on the frontier conflict between European settlement of Australia and indigenous Australians.-Education and career:...
points out that European colonists and their descendants frequently use expressions that included "extermination", "extinction", and "extirpation" when discussing the treatment of Aborigines during the colonial period, and as in his opinion genocide "can take many forms, not all of them violent" this is an indicator of genocide.
The political scientist Kenneth Minogue and other historians such as Keith Windschuttle
Keith Windschuttle
Keith Windschuttle is an Australian writer, historian, and ABC board member, who has authored several books from the 1970s onwards. These include Unemployment, , which analysed the economic causes and social consequences of unemployment in Australia and advocated a socialist response; The Media: a...
disagree and think that no genocide took place. Minogue does not try to define genocide but argues that its use is an extreme manifestation of the guilt felt by modern Australian society about the past misconduct of their society to Aborigines. In his opinion its use reflects the process by which Australian society is trying to come to terms with its past wrongs and in doing this Australians are stretching the meaning of genocide to fit within this internal debate.
First Fleet Smallpox
While there had been inconclusive speculation as early as 1789 as to the source of smallpox
Smallpox
Smallpox was an infectious disease unique to humans, caused by either of two virus variants, Variola major and Variola minor. The disease is also known by the Latin names Variola or Variola vera, which is a derivative of the Latin varius, meaning "spotted", or varus, meaning "pimple"...
amongst the Australian Aborigines on the Australian mainland, more recently Professor Noel Butlin, an economic historian, in 1983 speculated: "it is possible and, in 1789, likely, that infection of the Aborigines was a deliberate extermination act". Historians David Day and Henry Reynolds repeated Butlin’s claims and in 2001 Reynolds wrote "one possibility is that the epidemic was deliberately or accidentally let loose by someone in the settlement at Sydney Cove. Not surprisingly this is a highly contentious proposition. If true, it would clearly fall within the ambit of the Genocide Convention".
Australian virologist Frank Fenner, an authority on smallpox and principal author of the 1988 World Health Organisation report, Smallpox and its Eradication, felt that it is not possible for live smallpox to have survived the long voyage out from England or the next fifteen months before the first cases were seen amongst Aborigines near the settlement but did not address the literature relevant to the variolous material in bottles brought from England. This material was carried by First Fleet surgeons for inoculation purposes and it has been shown conclusively by Christopher Warren (2007) that this material, though degraded, could still infect highly susceptible people with smallpox. Smallpox spread by the inhalation of airborne droplets of virus in situations of personal contact or by contact with blankets that an infected person had recently used.
Medical scientists Sir Edward Stirling and Sir John Cleland published a number of books and articles between 1911 and 1966 suggesting that smallpox arrived in Northern Australia from an Asian source.
In her 2002 book, historian Judy Campbell reviewed reports of disease amongst Aboriginal people from 1780–1880, particularly the smallpox epidemics of 1789-90, 1830s, and 1860s. She argues that the evidence, including that contained in these reports shows that, while many diseases such as tuberculosis were introduced by British colonists, this was not so for smallpox and that the speculations of British responsibility made by other historians were based on tenuous evidence, largely on the mere coincidence that the 1789-90 epidemic was first observed afflicting the Aborigines not long after the establishment of the first British settlement. Campbell argues instead that the north-south route of transmission of the 1860s epidemics (which is generally agreed), also applied in the earlier ones. The hypothesis that the introduction of smallpox to Australia in the far north, via long-standing trading contacts between Aboriginal people and Makassar fishermen from what is now Indonesia. has been challenged by historian Craig Mear in relation to the Sydney epidemic of 1789-90.
In the April 2008 edition of The Monthly
The Monthly
The Monthly is an Australian national magazine of politics, society and the arts, which is published eleven times per year on a monthly basis except the December/January issue. Founded in 2005, it is published by Melbourne property developer Morry Schwartz...
, David Day
David Day (historian)
David Day is an Australian historian.David Day graduated with first-class Honours in History and Political Science from the University of Melbourne and was awarded a PhD from the University of Cambridge...
wrote further on the topic of genocide. He wrote that Lemkin considered genocide to encompass more than mass killings but also acts like "driv[ing] the original inhabitants off the land... confin[ing] them in reserves, where policies of deliberate neglect may be used to reduce their numbers... Tak[ing] indigenous children to absorb them within their own midst... assimilation to detach the people from their culture, language and religion, and often their names."
Stolen Generations debate
Despite the lengthy and detailed findings set out in the 1997 Bringing Them HomeBringing Them Home
Bringing Them Home is the title of the Australian "Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families"...
report into the Stolen Generation
Stolen Generation
The Stolen Generations were the children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by the Australian Federal and State government agencies and church missions, under acts of their respective parliaments...
, which documented the removal of Aboriginal children from their families by Australian State and Federal government agencies and church
Christian Church
The Christian Church is the assembly or association of followers of Jesus Christ. The Greek term ἐκκλησία that in its appearances in the New Testament is usually translated as "church" basically means "assembly"...
missions, the nature and extent of the removals have been disputed within Australia, with some commentators questioning the findings contained in the report and asserting that the Stolen Generation has been exaggerated. Sir Ronald Wilson
Ronald Wilson
Sir Ronald Darling Wilson, AC, KBE, CMG, QC was a distinguished Australian lawyer, judge and social activist serving on the High Court of Australia between 1979 and 1989 and as the President of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission between 1990 and 1997.Wilson is probably best known as...
, former President of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission and a Commissioner on the Inquiry, has stated that none of the more than 500 witnesses who appeared before the Inquiry were cross-examined. This has been the basis of criticism by the Coalition
Coalition (Australia)
The Coalition in Australian politics refers to a group of centre-right parties that has existed in the form of a coalition agreement since 1922...
Government and by the anthropologist Ron Brunton
Ron Brunton
Dr Ron Brunton is an Australian anthropologist. He is currently the Director of Encompass Research Pty Ltd and was a Director of the Board of the public broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for a five year term from 1 May 2003....
in a booklet published by the Institute of Public Affairs
Institute of Public Affairs
The Institute of Public Affairs is a public policy think tank based in Melbourne, Australia. It advocates free market economic policies such as privatisation and deregulation of state-owned enterprises, trade liberalisation and deregulated workplaces, climate change skepticism , and the...
that was criticised in turn by the lawyer Hal Wootten. An Australian Federal Government submission has questioned the conduct of the Commission which produced the report, arguing that the Commission failed to critically appraise or test the claims on which it based the report and failed to distinguish between those separated from their families "with and without consent, and with and without good reason". Not only has the number of children removed from their parents been questioned, but also the intent and effects of the government policy.
Some critics, such as Andrew Bolt
Andrew Bolt
Andrew Bolt is an Australian newspaper columnist, radio commentator, blogger and television host. Bolt is a columnist and associate editor of the Melbourne-based Herald Sun. He has appeared on the Nine Network, Melbourne Talk Radio, ABC Television, Network Ten and local radio...
, have questioned the very existence of the Stolen Generation. Bolt stated that it is a "preposterous and obscene" myth and that there was actually no policy in any state or territory at any time for the systematic removal of "half-caste" Aboriginal children. Robert Manne
Robert Manne
Robert Manne is a professor of politics at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.Born in Melbourne, Manne's earliest political consciousness was formed by the fact that his parents were Jewish refugees from Europe and his grandparents were victims of the Holocaust...
responded that Bolt did not address the documentary evidence demonstrating the existence of the Stolen Generations and that this is a clear case of historical
Historical revisionism (negationism)
Historical revisionism is either the legitimate scholastic re-examination of existing knowledge about a historical event, or the illegitimate distortion of the historical record such that certain events appear in a more or less favourable light. For the former, i.e. the academic pursuit, see...
denialism
Denialism
Denialism is choosing to deny reality as a way to avoid an uncomfortable truth: "[it] is the refusal to accept an empirically verifiable reality...
. Bolt then challenged Manne to produce ten cases in which the evidence justified the claim that children were "stolen" as opposed to having been removed for reasons such as neglect, abuse, abandonment, etc. He argued that Manne did not respond and that this was an indication of unreliability of the claim that there was policy of systematic removal. In reply, Manne stated that he supplied a documented list of 250 names Bolt stated that prior to a debate, Manne provided him with a list of 12 names that he was able to show during the debate was “a list of people abandoned, saved from abuse or voluntarily given up by their parents”; and that during the actual debate, Manne produced a list of 250 names without any details or documentation as to their circumstances. Bolt also stated that he was subsequently able to identify and ascertain the history of some of those on the list and was unable to find a case where there was evidence to justify the term ‘stolen’. He stated that one of the names on the list of allegedly stolen children was 13 year old Dolly, taken into the care of the State after being "found seven months pregnant and penniless, working for nothing on a station".
The Bolt/Manne debate is a fair sample of the adversarial debating style in the area. There is focus on individual examples as evidence for or against the existence of a policy, and little or no analysis of other documentary evidence such as legislative databases showing how the legal basis for removal varied over time and between jurisdictions, or testimony from those who were called on to implement the policies, which was also recorded in the Bringing Them Home
Bringing Them Home
Bringing Them Home is the title of the Australian "Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families"...
report. A recent review of legal cases claims it is difficult for Stolen Generation
Stolen Generation
The Stolen Generations were the children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by the Australian Federal and State government agencies and church missions, under acts of their respective parliaments...
claimants to challenge what was written about their situation at the time of removal.
The report
Bringing Them Home
Bringing Them Home is the title of the Australian "Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families"...
also identified instances of official misrepresentation and deception, such as when caring and able parents were incorrectly described by Aboriginal Protection Officers as not being able to properly provide for their children, or when parents were told by government officials that their children had died, even though this was not the case.
The new Australian Government elected in 2007 issued an Apology similar to those that State Governments had issued at or about the time of the [Bringing Them Home] report ten years earlier. On 13 February 2008, Kevin Rudd
Kevin Rudd
Kevin Michael Rudd is an Australian politician who was the 26th Prime Minister of Australia from 2007 to 2010. He has been Minister for Foreign Affairs since 2010...
, Prime Minister of Australia
Prime Minister of Australia
The Prime Minister of the Commonwealth of Australia is the highest minister of the Crown, leader of the Cabinet and Head of Her Majesty's Australian Government, holding office on commission from the Governor-General of Australia. The office of Prime Minister is, in practice, the most powerful...
moved a formal apology in the House of Representatives
Australian House of Representatives
The House of Representatives is one of the two houses of the Parliament of Australia; it is the lower house; the upper house is the Senate. Members of Parliament serve for terms of approximately three years....
, which was moved concurrently by the Leader of the Government in the Senate
Australian Senate
The Senate is the upper house of the bicameral Parliament of Australia, the lower house being the House of Representatives. Senators are popularly elected under a system of proportional representation. Senators are elected for a term that is usually six years; after a double dissolution, however,...
. It passed unanimously in the House of Representatives on 13 March 2008. In the Senate the Australian Greens
Australian Greens
The Australian Greens, commonly known as The Greens, is an Australian green political party.The party was formed in 1992; however, its origins can be traced to the early environmental movement in Australia and the formation of the United Tasmania Group , the first Green party in the world, which...
moved an amendment seeking to add compensation to the apology, against which all other parties voted, after which the motion was passed unanimously.
Windschuttle's The Fabrication of Aboriginal History
In 2002, historian Keith Windschuttle, in his book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847, questions the historical evidenceHistoriography
Historiography refers either to the study of the history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic...
used to identify the number of Aborigines deliberately killed during European colonisation, especially focusing on the Black War
Black War
The Black War is a term used to describe a period of conflict between British colonists and Tasmanian Aborigines in the early nineteenth century...
in Tasmania. He argues that there is credible evidence for the violent deaths of only 118 Tasmanian Aborigines, as having been directly killed by the British, although there were undoubtedly an unquantifiable number of other deaths for which no evidence exists. He argues that the Tasmanian Aboriginal population was devastated by a lethal cocktail of introduced diseases to which they had little or no resistance due to their isolation from the mainland and the rest of humanity for thousands of years. The deaths and infertility caused by these introduced diseases, combined with the deaths from what violent conflict there was, rapidly decimated the relatively small Aboriginal population. Windschuttle also examined the nature of those violent episodes that did occur and concluded that there is no credible evidence of warfare over territory. Windschuttle argues that the primary source of conflict between the British and the Aborigines was raids by Aborigines, often involving violent attacks on settlers, to acquire goods (such as blankets, metal implements and 'exotic' foods) from the British. With this and with a detailed examination of footnotes in and evidence cited by the earlier historical works, he criticises the claims by historians such as Henry Reynolds
Henry Reynolds (historian)
Henry Reynolds is an eminent Australian historian whose primary work has focused on the frontier conflict between European settlement of Australia and indigenous Australians.-Education and career:...
and Professor Lyndall Ryan
Lyndall Ryan
Lyndall Ryan is an Australian academic. She has held positions in Australian Studies and Women's Studies at Griffith University and Flinders University and is currently Foundation Professor of Australian Studies and Head of School of Humanities at the University of Newcastle...
that there was a campaign of guerrilla warfare against British settlement. Particular historians and histories that are challenged include Henry Reynolds and the histories of massacres, particularly in Tasmania
Tasmania
Tasmania is an Australian island and state. It is south of the continent, separated by Bass Strait. The state includes the island of Tasmania—the 26th largest island in the world—and the surrounding islands. The state has a population of 507,626 , of whom almost half reside in the greater Hobart...
(such as in the Cape Grim massacre
Cape Grim massacre
The Cape Grim massacre occurred 10 February 1828 in the North west of Van Diemen's Land, now known as Tasmania, when four shepherds with muskets are alleged to have ambushed over 30 Tasmanian Aborigines from the Pennemukeer band from Cape Grim, killing 30 and throwing their bodies over a 60 metre...
) but also elsewhere in Australia. Windschuttle's claims are based upon the argument that the 'orthodox' view of Australian history were founded on hearsay or the misleading use of evidence by historians.
Windschuttle argues that, in order to advance the ‘deliberate genocide’ argument, Reynolds has misused source documentation, including that from British colonist sources, by quoting out of context. In particular, he accuses Reynolds of selectively quoting from responses to an 1830 survey in Tasmania in that Reynolds quoted only from those responses that could be construed as advocating "extermination", "extinction", and "extirpation" and failed to mention other responses to the survey, which indicated that a majority of respondents rejected genocide, were sympathetic to the plight of the Aborigines, feared that conflict arising from Aboriginal attacks upon settlers would result in the extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines and advocated the adoption of courses of action to prevent this happening.
Windschuttle's claims and research have been disputed by some historians, in Whitewash. On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History, an anthology including contributions from Henry Reynolds
Henry Reynolds (historian)
Henry Reynolds is an eminent Australian historian whose primary work has focused on the frontier conflict between European settlement of Australia and indigenous Australians.-Education and career:...
and Professor Lyndall Ryan
Lyndall Ryan
Lyndall Ryan is an Australian academic. She has held positions in Australian Studies and Women's Studies at Griffith University and Flinders University and is currently Foundation Professor of Australian Studies and Head of School of Humanities at the University of Newcastle...
, edited and introduced by Robert Manne
Robert Manne
Robert Manne is a professor of politics at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.Born in Melbourne, Manne's earliest political consciousness was formed by the fact that his parents were Jewish refugees from Europe and his grandparents were victims of the Holocaust...
, professor of politics at La Trobe University
La Trobe University
La Trobe University is a multi-campus university in Victoria, Australia. It was established in 1964 by an Act of Parliament to become the third oldest university in the state of Victoria. The main campus of La Trobe is located in the Melbourne suburb of Bundoora; two other major campuses are...
. This anthology, has itself been the subject of examination by Melbourne
Melbourne
Melbourne is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia. The Melbourne City Centre is the hub of the greater metropolitan area and the Census statistical division—of which "Melbourne" is the common name. As of June 2009, the greater...
businessman, freelance writer and Objectivist
Objectivist movement
The Objectivist movement is a movement to study and advance the philosophy of Objectivism. It was founded by novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand. The movement began informally in the 1950s and consisted of students who were brought together by their mutual interest in Rand’s novel, The Fountainhead...
John Dawson, in Washout: On the academic response to The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, which argues that "Whitewash" leaves Windschuttle's claims and research unrefuted.
In "Contra Windschuttle", an article published in the conservative publication Quadrant
Quadrant (magazine)
Quadrant is an Australian literary and cultural journal. The magazine takes a conservative position on political and social issues, describing itself as sceptical of 'unthinking Leftism, or political correctness, and its "smelly little orthodoxies"'. Quadrant reviews literature, as well as...
, S.G. Foster examined some of the evidence that Windschuttle presented on one issue, Stanner's notion of the "Great Australian Silence". In Foster’s opinion, the evidence produced by Windschuttle did not prove his case that the "Great Australian Silence" was largely a myth. Windschuttle argues that, in the years prior to Stanner’s 1968 Boyer lecture, Australian historians had not been silent on the Aborigines although, in most cases, the historians’ “discussions were not to Stanner’s taste” and the Aborigines “might not have been treated in the way Reynolds and his colleagues would have liked”. Foster argues that Windschuttle is “merciless with those who get their facts wrong” and that the fact that Windschuttle has also made a mistake means that he did not meet the criteria that he used to assess 'orthodox historians' he was arguing against and whom he accused of deliberately and extensively misrepresenting, misquoting, exaggerating and fabricating evidence relating to the level and nature of violent conflict between Aborigines and white settlers.
At the time of the publication of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One it was announced that a second volume, to be published in 2003, would cover claims of frontier violence in New South Wales and Queensland, and a third, in 2004, would cover Western Australia.
On 9 February 2008, however, it was announced that the second volume, anticipated to be published later in 2008, would be entitled The Fabrication of Australian History, Volume 2: The "Stolen Generations" and would address the issue of the removal of Aboriginal children (the "stolen generations") from their families in the 20th century.
The new volume was released in January 2010, now listed as Volume 3, with a statement that Volumes 2 and 4 would appear later. Announcing the publication, Windschuttle claimed that the film Rabbit-Proof Fence
Rabbit-Proof Fence (film)
Rabbit-Proof Fence is a 2002 Australian drama film directed by Phillip Noyce based on the book Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington Garimara...
had misrepresented the child removal at the centre of the story. These claims were subsequently rejected by the makers of the film.
Stuart Macintyre's The History Wars
In 2003 Australian historian Stuart MacintyreStuart Macintyre
Stuart Forbes Macintyre , Australian historian, academic and public intellectual, is a former Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. He has been voted one of Australia's most influential public intellectuals...
published The History Wars, written with Anna Clark. This was a study of the background of, and arguments surrounding, recent developments in Australian historiography, and concluded that the History Wars had done damage to the nature of objective Australian history. At the launch of his book, historian Stuart Macintyre
Stuart Macintyre
Stuart Forbes Macintyre , Australian historian, academic and public intellectual, is a former Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. He has been voted one of Australia's most influential public intellectuals...
emphasised the political dimension of these arguments and said the Australian debate took its cue from the Enola Gay
Enola Gay
Enola Gay is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, named after Enola Gay Tibbets, mother of the pilot, then-Colonel Paul Tibbets. On August 6, 1945, during the final stages of World War II, it became the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb as a weapon of war...
controversy in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. The book was launched by former Prime Minister Paul Keating
Paul Keating
Paul John Keating was the 24th Prime Minister of Australia, serving from 1991 to 1996. Keating was elected as the federal Labor member for Blaxland in 1969 and came to prominence as the reformist treasurer of the Hawke Labor government, which came to power at the 1983 election...
, who took the opportunity to criticise conservative views of Australian history, and those who hold them (such as the then Prime Minister John Howard
John Howard
John Winston Howard AC, SSI, was the 25th Prime Minister of Australia, from 11 March 1996 to 3 December 2007. He was the second-longest serving Australian Prime Minister after Sir Robert Menzies....
), saying that they suffered from "a failure of imagination", and said that The History Wars "rolls out the canvas of this debate." Macintyre's critics, such as Greg Melluish (History Lecturer at the University of Wollongong
University of Wollongong
The University of Wollongong is a public university located in the coastal city of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia, approximately 80 kilometres south of Sydney...
), responded to the book by declaring that Macintyre was a partisan history warrior himself, and that "its primary arguments are derived from the pro-Communist polemics of the Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
." Keith Windschuttle said that Macintyre attempted to "caricature the history debate." In a foreword to the book, former Chief Justice of Australia
Chief Justice of Australia
The Chief Justice of Australia is the informal title for the presiding justice of the High Court of Australia and the highest-ranking judicial officer in the Commonwealth of Australia...
Sir Anthony Mason said that the book was "a fascinating study of the recent endeavours to rewrite or reinterpret the history of European settlement in Australia."
National Museum of Australia controversy
In 2001, writing in QuadrantQuadrant (magazine)
Quadrant is an Australian literary and cultural journal. The magazine takes a conservative position on political and social issues, describing itself as sceptical of 'unthinking Leftism, or political correctness, and its "smelly little orthodoxies"'. Quadrant reviews literature, as well as...
, historian Keith Windshuttle argued that the then-new National Museum of Australia
National Museum of Australia
The National Museum of Australia was formally established by the National Museum of Australia Act 1980. The National Museum preserves and interprets Australia's social history, exploring the key issues, people and events that have shaped the nation....
(NMA) was marred by "political correctness"
Political correctness
Political correctness is a term which denotes language, ideas, policies, and behavior seen as seeking to minimize social and institutional offense in occupational, gender, racial, cultural, sexual orientation, certain other religions, beliefs or ideologies, disability, and age-related contexts,...
and did not present a balanced view of the nation's history. In 2003 the Howard Government
Howard Government
The Howard Government refers to the federal Executive Government of Australia led by Prime Minister John Howard. It was made up of members of the Liberal–National Coalition, which won a majority of seats in the Australian House of Representatives at four successive elections. The Howard Government...
commissioned a review of the NMA. A potentially controversial issue was in assessing how well the NMA met the criterion that displays should: "Cover darker historical episodes, and with a gravity that opens the possibility of collective self-accounting. The role here is in helping the nation to examine fully its own past, and the dynamic of its history—with truthfulness, sobriety and balance. This extends into covering present-day controversial issues." While the report concluded that there was no systemic bias, it recommended that there be more recognition in the exhibits of European achievements.
The report drew the ire of some historians in Australia, who claimed that it was a deliberate attempt on the part of the Government to politicise the museum and move it more towards a position which Geoffrey Blainey
Geoffrey Blainey
Geoffrey Norman Blainey AC , is a prominent Australian historian.Blainey was born in Melbourne and raised in a series of Victorian country towns before attending Wesley College and the University of Melbourne. While at university he was editor of Farrago, the newspaper of the University of...
called the 'three cheers' view of Australian history
History of Australia
The History of Australia refers to the history of the area and people of Commonwealth of Australia and its preceding Indigenous and colonial societies. Aboriginal Australians are believed to have first arrived on the Australian mainland by boat from the Indonesian archipelago between 40,000 to...
, rather than the 'black armband' view. In 2006 columnist Miranda Devine
Miranda Devine
Miranda Devine is an Australian columnist and writer noted for her conservative stance on a range of social and political issues. Her column, formerly printed twice weekly in Fairfax Media newspapers The Sydney Morning Herald and The Sun-Herald, now appears in the News Limited Daily Telegraph with...
described some of the Braille
Braille
The Braille system is a method that is widely used by blind people to read and write, and was the first digital form of writing.Braille was devised in 1825 by Louis Braille, a blind Frenchman. Each Braille character, or cell, is made up of six dot positions, arranged in a rectangle containing two...
messages encoded on the external structure of the NMA, including "sorry" and "forgive us our genocide" and how they had been covered over by aluminium discs in 2001, and stated that under the new Director "what he calls the 'black T-shirt' view of Australian culture
Culture of Australia
The culture of Australia is essentially a Western culture influenced by the unique geography of the Australian continent and by the diverse input of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and various waves of multi-ethnic migration which followed the British colonisation of Australia...
" is being replaced by "systematically reworking the collections, with attention to 'scrupulous historical accuracy'".
An example of the current approach at the NMA is the Bells Falls Gorge Interactive display, which presents Windshuttles's view of an alleged massacre alongside other views and contemporary documents and displays of weapons relating to colonial conflict around Bathurst in 1824 and invites visitors to make up their own minds.
History wars and culture wars
The "history wars" are widely viewed, by external observers and participants on both sides as an extension of the "culture warCulture war
The culture war in American usage is a metaphor used to claim that political conflict is based on sets of conflicting cultural values. The term frequently implies a conflict between those values considered traditionalist or conservative and those considered progressive or liberal...
" originating in the United States. William D. Rubinstein, writing for the conservative British think tank
Think tank
A think tank is an organization that conducts research and engages in advocacy in areas such as social policy, political strategy, economics, military, and technology issues. Most think tanks are non-profit organizations, which some countries such as the United States and Canada provide with tax...
the Social Affairs Unit
Social Affairs Unit
The Social Affairs Unit is a right-leaning think tank in the United Kingdom. Founded in 1980 as an offshoot of the Institute of Economic Affairs, it publishes books on a variety of social issues...
, refers to the history wars as "the Culture War down under". Participants in the debate including Keith Windschuttle
Keith Windschuttle
Keith Windschuttle is an Australian writer, historian, and ABC board member, who has authored several books from the 1970s onwards. These include Unemployment, , which analysed the economic causes and social consequences of unemployment in Australia and advocated a socialist response; The Media: a...
and Robert Manne
Robert Manne
Robert Manne is a professor of politics at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.Born in Melbourne, Manne's earliest political consciousness was formed by the fact that his parents were Jewish refugees from Europe and his grandparents were victims of the Holocaust...
are frequently described as "culture warriors" for their respective points of view.
Protagonists
- Geoffrey BlaineyGeoffrey BlaineyGeoffrey Norman Blainey AC , is a prominent Australian historian.Blainey was born in Melbourne and raised in a series of Victorian country towns before attending Wesley College and the University of Melbourne. While at university he was editor of Farrago, the newspaper of the University of...
- Stuart MacintyreStuart MacintyreStuart Forbes Macintyre , Australian historian, academic and public intellectual, is a former Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. He has been voted one of Australia's most influential public intellectuals...
- Robert ManneRobert ManneRobert Manne is a professor of politics at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.Born in Melbourne, Manne's earliest political consciousness was formed by the fact that his parents were Jewish refugees from Europe and his grandparents were victims of the Holocaust...
- Henry ReynoldsHenry Reynolds (historian)Henry Reynolds is an eminent Australian historian whose primary work has focused on the frontier conflict between European settlement of Australia and indigenous Australians.-Education and career:...
- Lyndall RyanLyndall RyanLyndall Ryan is an Australian academic. She has held positions in Australian Studies and Women's Studies at Griffith University and Flinders University and is currently Foundation Professor of Australian Studies and Head of School of Humanities at the University of Newcastle...
- Keith WindschuttleKeith WindschuttleKeith Windschuttle is an Australian writer, historian, and ABC board member, who has authored several books from the 1970s onwards. These include Unemployment, , which analysed the economic causes and social consequences of unemployment in Australia and advocated a socialist response; The Media: a...
See also
- History of AustraliaHistory of AustraliaThe History of Australia refers to the history of the area and people of Commonwealth of Australia and its preceding Indigenous and colonial societies. Aboriginal Australians are believed to have first arrived on the Australian mainland by boat from the Indonesian archipelago between 40,000 to...
- Australian frontier warsAustralian frontier warsThe Australian frontier wars were a series of conflicts fought between Indigenous Australians and European settlers. The first fighting took place in May 1788 and the last clashes occurred in the early 1930s. Indigenous fatalities from the fighting have been estimated as at least 20,000 and...
- Indigenous AustraliansIndigenous AustraliansIndigenous Australians are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands. The Aboriginal Indigenous Australians migrated from the Indian continent around 75,000 to 100,000 years ago....
- Tasmanian Aborigine
- Black WarBlack WarThe Black War is a term used to describe a period of conflict between British colonists and Tasmanian Aborigines in the early nineteenth century...
- List of massacres of indigenous Australians
- New HistoriansNew HistoriansThe New Historians are a loosely-defined group of Israeli historians who have challenged traditional versions of Israeli history, including Israel's role in the Palestinian Exodus in 1948 and Arab willingness to discuss peace. The term was coined in 1988 by one of the leading New Historians, Benny...
(comparable Israeli phenomenon) - Welcome to Country and Acknowledgement of Country
Further reading
Books- Attwood, Bain (2005). Telling The Truth About Aboriginal History , ISBN 1-74114-577-5
- Dawson, John (2004). Washout: On the academic response to The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, ISBN 1-876492-12-0
Articles
- Bonnell, Andrew G., and Martin Crotty. "Australian "Historikerstreit"? The Australian Journal of Politics and History. Volume: 50. Issue: 3: 2004. pp 425+. online edition
- Foster, S.G. Contra Windschuttle, Quadrant, March 2003, 47:3
- Francis, P., The Whole Truth...?, (2000) , The Journal of GEOS
- History Wars Special in the Sydney Morning Herald
- Keith Windschuttle, "Postmodernism and the Fabrication of Aboriginal History"
- Gould, Bob. McGuinness, Windschuttle and Quadrant: The attempt to revise the history of the massacre of Aborigines on the British colonial frontier in Australia. (Annotated bibliography of colonial history).