The Windschuttle thesis.(The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847 by Keith Windschuttle)(Book Review)

The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847, by Keith Windschuttle; Macleay Press, 2002, $49.95.

MOST REVIEWERS will ignore this book. Or, if they do notice it, it will be only to rubbish it. I hope I am wrong. But if the critics do not confront the Windschuttle thesis, it will only strengthen the message of his influential book The Killing of History that most orthodox contemporary historians are ideologues whose research you can never trust.

Let us begin with one of Sir William Deane's more bardic pronouncements from the High Court bench. In his Mabo judgment this respected lawyer declared that the colonisation of Australia was "a conflagration of oppression and conflict" in which the colonists "dispossess, degrade and devastate the Aboriginal peoples and leave a national legacy of unutterable shame".

There must be a certain troth in this. There obviously was dispossession of land and devastation of traditions followed inevitably by the degradation of life.

This perception is not confined to bleeding hearts and dogmatic lefties. James McAuley said much the same sort of thing forty years ago about our fatal impact on the Melanesians, in his haunting epic of colonisation, Captain Quiros.

But is it the whole story? It is essential to get the story right, if we are to do something about the continuing consequences of colonisation. If the colonisers of Australia were evil and genocidal oppressors of the indigenous people, then the appropriate policy today must be some sort of denazification of our society. But if the tree story is one of tragic confrontation, then a policy of reconciliation becomes practicable.

It is here that Keith Windschuttle stakes his huge claims and, if he is right, makes a major contribution. He argues at great length and with painstaking detail that many Australian historians have abandoned inquiry for propaganda and presented false and tendentious legends as scholarship. Their corruption of history has dangerously damaged the cause of practical reconciliation.