Whitewash confirms the Fabrication of Aboriginal History.(History)

THE FIRST VOLUME of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History makes three main points. First, there was no genocide in Tasmania. Second, there was nothing that deserved the label of frontier warfare either. Third, those historians who have claimed there was either genocide or frontier warfare, especially Henry Reynolds, Lyndall Ryan and Lloyd Robson, have misinterpreted and grossly exaggerated the conflict between Aborigines and colonists that did occur and, in a number of cases, invented their evidence.

The claim that the Aborigines of Tasmania suffered genocide is today widely accepted throughout Australia. The Tasmanian Aboriginal activist Michael Mansell told the Hobart Mercury last month that to commemorate the imminent bicentenary of British settlement in Tasmania would be like celebrating the arrival of the Nazis.

Thanks to the international success of Robert Hughes's book The Fatal Shore, the claim that Tasmania was the site of the one clear case of genocide in the British empire is also widely accepted internationally. In the new and otherwise impressive book and television series by Niall Ferguson on the British empire, the author accepts and repeats Hughes's verdict uncritically. Hughes took his claim from Lyndall Ryan's conclusion in The Aboriginal Tasmanians that the colonial government had instituted "a conscious policy of genocide".

Australian academic historians do not themselves usually compare the Australian colonists to the Nazis but when activists like Mansell or the internationally-known Australian journalist Phillip Knightley actually do this, none of them have ever raised a voice in protest. However, when I go public arguing this comparison is a gross travesty of our history, they write letters to the editor, articles in the press and whole books denouncing my motives, my character and my scholarship.

Robert Manne's anthology Whitewash does not address the empirical evidence for genocide. In her essay in this collection, Lyndall Ryan does not attempt to uphold her original claim. Nor does Henry Reynolds defend his version of the topic. Reynolds has always said that the government did not intend genocide against the Aborigines, hence there was no conscious policy at work. However, Reynolds' thesis is that it was the Tasmanian settlers who wanted to exterminate the Aborigines. He claims they supported this demand throughout the 1820s and early 1830s.

In Fabrication, the longest chapter is devoted to disproving this claim. It shows that in none of Reynolds' sources does any settler demand extermination in the 1820s. It demonstrates that the colonial press largely worked to discourage the idea. It even shows there was a questionnaire survey of leading Tasmanian settlers conducted in 1830 to determine their attitudes about this very issue. Reynolds knew this survey existed but kept it from his readers in case they wanted to know the survey's results, that is, all the results, not just a handful of carefully selected quotations.

The full historical record, not the selective and deceptive version provided by Reynolds, shows that even at the height of Aboriginal violence in 1830, very few settlers entertained such a notion. The prospect of extermination divided the settlers deeply, was always rejected by government and was never acted upon.