Morality and history.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)

SIR: Fond as he is of false contrasts, Keith Windschuttle claims (October 2003) that "[t]he current debate about Aboriginal history is not a moral debate but an empirical one. It is about what really happened in the past. "Well, of course it is about that, but that is a moral matter too, for as Windschuttle rightly observes in Fabrication, "the debate over Aboriginal history goes far beyond its ostensible subject: it is about the character of the nation and, ultimately, the calibre of the civilization Britain brought to these shores in 1788". And redeeming that character is Windschuttle's deepest, indeed almost desperate, concern.

The sociologist Emile Durkheim pointed out that "a society is constituted above all by the idea it has of itself". And so this discussion is of great importance. It's the real reason this debate rolls on. However, Windschuttle's is a dramatically inadequate contribution to it, whatever the results of the forensic quarrels he so likes to wage. For the architecture of his book is dominated by something else: his determination to force a complex history into one of two apparently exclusive and exhaustive alternatives. Either you are one of the "orthodox", who all believe Governor Arthur is simply an earlier version of Adolf Hitler, or you are with Windschuttle, happy to conclude that the history of decimation of Aboriginal populations throughout the country, and their almost total elimination from Tasmania in thirty years, is really much ado about nothing.

Now Windschuttle is right about one thing. The Australian story is very far from Nazism. Tragic as the history of settlement has been for Aborigines, it is not a unique or unprecedented tragedy. Nazism was. When I began trying a few years ago to get some measure of our history of settler--Aborigine relations I read the so-called "orthodox" historians, among them Reynolds and Rowley. They said nothing of the Holocaust. What they described gave plentiful reminders, not of that but of the old wisdom that homo homini lupus, man is a wolf to man. There is not much consolation in the ordinariness of that fact, but it remains true that there is little unimaginable in the terrible things that happened here. Our difficulty has been to imagine that our sort had been involved in them, not that anyone could be. ...