Reassuring "White Australia": a Review of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One, Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847 - Book Review

Journal of Social History, Winter, 2003 by Gregory D.B. Smithers

In 1996, the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, used the annual Sir Robert Menzies Lecture to make the following observations about Australian history:

   [There is a challenge] to ensure that our history as a nation is
   not rewritten definitively by those who take the view that
   Australians should apologise for most of it. This 'black armband'
   view of our past reflects a belief that most of Australian history
   since 1788 has been little more than a disgraceful history of
   imperialism, exploitation, racism, sexism and other forms of
   discrimination. I take a very different view. I believe that
   the balance sheet of our history is one of heroic achievement
   and that we have achieved much more as a nation of which we can
   be proud than of which we should be ashamed. (1)

The Prime Minister's remarks echoed those of conservative historian Geoffrey Blainey, who in 1993 linked the "Black Armband View of History" with those who celebrated multiculturalism. (2) Both Prime Minister Howard and Professor Blainey have articulated for many Australians a sense of anxiety about their place in a multicultural society. Critical of liberal immigration policies, multicultural education, and the politics of Aboriginal land rights, those on the right of Australian politics have taken issue with historians who focus on issues like racism and sexism, issues they consider to be "politically correct." For Prime Minister Howard, the "facts" of Australian history have been lost amid this overemphasis on "issues." (3) This self-serving position is shared by Keith Windschuttle in his new book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. (4)

The Fabrication of Aboriginal History is the first volume of a projected series that will reevaluate the history of Australian Aborigines since 1788. Volume one focuses on Van Diemen's Land (renamed Tasmania in 1855) between 1803-1847. Windschuttle rejects the last thirty years of historical scholarship that, since the 1970s, has challenged the idea of Aboriginal passivity in the face of European colonization. According to the pre-1970s orthodoxy, Aborigines were "driven from the more fertile parts of the continent' into the arid interior, where they 'vanished like shadows in the bush.' " (5) In the 1970s, scholars began to reassess such views. In 1972 M.C. Hartwig published an important essay that placed Aboriginal history since 1788 in the context of racism, imported to Australia by the English. (6) Similarly, in the early 1970s C.D. Rowley published a "three-volume report to the Social Sciences Research Council on 'Aboriginal Policy and Practice.' " (7) Entitled The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, Rowley's work shattered the previous orthodoxy that had rested on "the twin legends of heroic pioneers and an egalitarian society." (8) Following Hartwig and Rowley's lead, subsequent Australian historians have produced a voluminous historiography that has rescued Aborigines from their former status as "a melancholy anthropological footnote." (9) These historians portray Aboriginal people as active agents in shaping the history of European-indigenous relations.

The recent historiography of European-Aboriginal con tacts in Tasmania highlights this shift in historical focus. Historians Sharon Morgan, Henry Reynolds, Lloyd Robson, and Lyndall Ryan argue that colonial Van Diemen's Land was "an extremely violent society" in which the "bloody flagellation of convicts was common, because it was a cheap and efficient method of punishment which did not lead to the victim being absent from work very long." Similarly, public execution by hanging was not unheard of, constituting an efficient means of ridding "the colony of malefactors." (10) Despite this violence, most historians agree that the British acquisition of land did not result in major conflict with Tasmanian Aborigines until the 1820s. (11) By then, British settlements, with their fences and hedgerows, expanded into the Tasmanian bush. (12) Thereafter British pastoralism grew rapidly, disrupting Aboriginal society, and sparking violent conflicts. (13) This violence fueled settler paranoia and hysteria, resulting in what contemporaries called the "Black War." Responding to Aboriginal violence, which Henry Melville described as "Guerilla war" in his 1836 book The History of Van Diemen's Land, the government of Van Diemen's Land declared martial law in 1828, a decision that gave rise to "roving search and capture parties." (14) Their "final solution," according to Lloyd Robson, was the "Black Line." By "forming a line of soldiers and civilians across the island," the British hoped that the "most hostile Aboriginal bands [could be driven] in a south-easterly direction towards and then across the narrow isthmus on to Tasman and Forestier's Peninsulas." (15) Scholars divide over the success of the Black Line, some arguing that it was a military failure (capturing only two Aborigines), (16) while others contend it achieved its objective of "clearing the settled districts of the Aborigines." (17) Historians similarly disagree over the number of Aborigines killed in the 1820s and 1830s, some estimating that the figure could be as high as 700. (18)