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Australian right takes aim at Aboriginal history
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Updated: 2003-03-03 15:40

When the British settled Australia, they raped and flogged Aboriginal women, burned the natives with brands, roasted them alive, fed their flesh to dogs and dashed out the brains of babies.

Or did they?

Rebel history writer Keith Windschuttle believes such tales of bloodshed told in some history books about colonial Australia are "misrepresentation, deceit and outright fabrication".

His claims have often been uttered by conservatives outraged at a new Australian history, which emerged 30 years ago, painting British colonialism as a violent invasion rather than a benign act of civilising savages as it had long been seen.

But Windschuttle's publication late last year of the first of three planned volumes on "The Fabrication of Aboriginal History" has kicked off a "History War" more vigorous than any before because his views reflect those of the conservative government.

His assault on a version of history that Prime Minister John Howard has derided as "black armband" coincides with a review of content at the National Museum of Australia.

Conservative critics say the relatively new museum focuses too much on violence against Aborigines and not enough on heroic, nation-building deeds of white settlers.

"It's a battle over Australian identity, a battle over Australian nationalism," said Bain Attwood, senior research fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra.

"History is always a battle over the present."

FAKES?

At issue for Windschuttle is a "fake" picture of widespread killings and even officially sanctioned genocide he says was painted by a cabal of left-wing historians in order to create an "edifice of black victimhood and white guilt".

"My quarrel is not with Aboriginal people, my quarrel is with white historians," he recently told a Sydney Institute seminar.

Facing an audience evenly divided between those who thought their forefathers had been maligned by talk of genocide and others infuriated by what they saw as his disregard for Aboriginal suffering, Windschuttle said the debate about colonial history did not only affect indigenous Australians.

"Ultimately it's about the character of the Australian nation and the calibre of the civilisation that Britain brought to their shores in 1788," he told the Sydney-based think-tank.

In the first volume of "Fabrication," Windschuttle focuses on the island state of Tasmania in the early 1800s, then known as Van Diemen's Land, where Aborigines were largely wiped out by white settlement.

After three years cross-checking footnotes, he concludes that accounts of massacres, and of indigenous resistance, are wrong or made up and that only about 118 Aborigines were killed by whites -- savaging the reputations of eminent historians in the process.

Sure, the full-blooded indigenous population died out.

"But this was almost entirely a consequence of two factors -- their 10,000 years of isolation had left them vulnerable to introduced diseases...and the fact that they traded and prostituted their women to convict stockmen and sealers to such an extent that they lost the ability to reproduce themselves."

The historians Windschuttle accuses of getting the facts wrong have not yet retaliated with equal vigour.

Partly, they say, because they do not regard him as an academic nor his methodology as up to date. Some fear lawsuits.

They say history has also moved beyond the focus on violence it had in the 1970s when Aboriginal rights were first asserted in a nation that for more than half the 20th century did not class them as citizens, but dealt with them under flora and fauna laws.

Last month, the National Museum published a collection of papers delivered at a December 2001 conference held to discuss Windschuttle's claims when they were first raised. In it, his views are a solitary voice of dissent.

The established historians' main response will come in May or June with a book being edited by Windschuttle adversary Robert Manne. Two of Windschuttle's main targets, historians Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan, have agreed to contribute.

MERE CLASH OR WATERSHED?

Some dismiss the debate stirred up by "Fabrication" as just another clash between historians that will soon fade.

Others see it as far more significant because of the political environment in Australia seven years after Howard and his conservative Liberal-National coalition came to power.

"Every age gets the book it deserves, and the Windschuttle 'Fabrication' is the kind of book that fits this period," said Manne, sociology professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne.

Gradually but relentlessly, the Howard government has managed to overturn some of the prevailing liberal trends left by the previous centre-left Labor administration of Paul Keating.

Australia's doors are now shut to boatpeople.

Progress towards "reconciliation" with Aborigines has stalled, and regret for the "Stolen Generation" -- light-skinned indigenous children taken from their parents to be assimilated in white society -- has been replaced by a refusal to apologise.

WAKING UP ON THE LEFT

The current "History War" appears to open the next front in the rightward shift, coinciding as it does with the unexpected -- and some say politically inspired -- review of the museum.

"A journalist once described me as a middle of the road historian and I would have agreed with that," said Graeme Davison, head of history at Monash University in Melbourne.

"Then I suddenly realised that there was a lane or two to the right of me that I hadn't noticed before," Davison, an adviser to the museum, told Reuters.

A museum-in-the-waiting for around 30 years until it was finally opened in March 2001, the National Museum in Canberra has already had 1.5 million people pass through its doors. Surveys show that 92 percent of visitors are happy with its displays.

But conservatives have persistently lashed out, in particular at the indigenous section which uses contested Aboriginal oral history and tells of at least one disputed massacre.

Of the main critics on the museum board, David Barnett is the prime minister's biographer and Christopher Pearson his former speech writer. The head of the four-person review -- sociologist John Carroll -- was recommended by a government minister.

The reviewers will have the power to suggest changes to the act which set the museum up, including a requirement that it have a display on Aboriginal culture and history.

"What has now been joined at the (museum) is a fight for ownership of the past in the sure knowledge that whichever side of politics owns the past will also own the future," wrote columnist Glenn Milne in The Australian newspaper.

Museum director Dawn Casey, an Aboriginal Australian herself, told Reuters she had no problem with the review.

But Casey concluded with a word of caution^ "It's incredibly important for Australia in the years ahead that we do recognise what happened in the past. I'm not saying we should feel guilty."



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