Introducing Keith Windschuttle.

IT IS MY VERY GREAT pleasure to introduce Keith Windschuttle to deliver the Sir John Latham Memorial Lecture for 2006. In many ways Keith does not require an introduction. As a writer, commentator and intellectual over the past decade he has come to be the person who has shaped much of the debate in Australian public intellectual life. His work on the destructive influence of postmodernism on contemporary historical writing, and on the way in which many Australian historians have distorted and "fabricated" the writing of Aboriginal history, has been extraordinarily influential and has sold in great quantities. It is to understate the situation to say that he is the bane of the entrenched progressivist Left in Australia, many of whom have left no stone unturned in their attempts to discredit him and his work.

In short he is a man whose work has engendered much passion, especially by his critics but also by his supporters as they, and he, seek to defend what can only be described as an approach steeped in the rational values of the Enlightenment as opposed to the often wild and Romantic ideas of his opponents.

To understand why Keith Windschuttle generates such a passionate response in his opponents it is worthwhile to reflect on the intellectual history of Australia and Keith's place in it. This is especially appropriate given the title of tonight's lecture, "The Struggle for Australian Values in an Age of Deceit."

There has been a long defence of Western values in Australia and it is true to say that Quadrant has been in the forefront of that defence. But what has that defence involved and what sort of values have been defended? Now I'm going to stick my neck out and say that the key to those values is summed up in the two words Classicism and Enlightenment. By Classicism I understand the idea that there are principles of harmony, proportion and order underlying the universe. The use of reason and empirical observation as the sources of true knowledge underpin the Enlightenment.

The enemies of Enlightenment and Classicism have been Romanticism and progressivism, the elevation of feeling over rationality and a worship of mutation and change over order and structure.

The defenders of Western values in Australia have long been Classicists or defenders of the Enlightenment or both. James McAuley was a Catholic classicist but he had also been influenced by Classicist philosopher John Anderson. In fact Quadrant combined Catholic-ism and Andersonian atheism so easily because of their common faith in Classicism.

Keith Windschuttle is a ...