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

   The notion of a precolonial Indigenous intelligence persisting in
   'settled' eastern Australia in the form of a signified landscape
   'inside' the colonial landscape is in some ways subversive; that
   this signification might include the borrowing and
   recontextualisation of elements of the coloniser's own culture
   threatens the perceived solidity of that culture and hence, in a
   sense, its right to be there. (77)

This brings us to the heart of the issue. Windschuttle, like Prime Minister Howard, wishes to portray Australia as a virtuous, moral, and heroic nation. He does this by denying the existence of Aboriginal massacres, and by implication, that Aborigines had any reason to resist. Moreover, his use of historical sources, as I have shown, is at times anachronistic. The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, then, is a therapeutic history for white (Anglo-Saxon) Australians that distorts and distracts. (78)

ENDNOTES

I wish to thank Brian Behnkin, John Smolenski, Alan Taylor, and Clarence Walker for their insightful comments on early drafts of this paper.

(1.) Prime Minister Howard quoted in Jon Stratton, Race Daze: Australia in Identity Crisis (Annandale, NSW, 1998), 122.

(2.) Quoted in Ibid., 120.

(3.) Ray Cassin, "Memo Mr Howard: Facts can Interfere with a Good Story," The Sunday Age, April 30, 2000, 14.

(4.) Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One, Vand Diemen's Land 1803-1847 (Sydney, 2002).

(5.) A.G.L. Shaw, The Story of Australia (London, 1961), 24, and M. Barnard, History of Australia (Sydney, 1962, 651 quoted in R.H.W. Reece, "The Aborigines in Australian Historiography in John A. Moses (ed.), Historical Disciplines and Culture in Australasia: An Assessment (St. Lucia, QLD, 1979), 253. Reece draws this information from the Australian Encyclopedia (Sydney, 1958, vol. 1), 187. The view that Aborigines were a dying race was widely held. See for instance Ernest Scott, A Short History of Australia (7th Edition, Melbourne, 1947). For the most recent historical analysis of the "doomed race" theory see Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880-1939 (Melbourne, 1997).

(6.) M.C. Hartwig, "Aborigines and Racism: An Historical Perspective" in F.S. Stevens (ed.), Racism: The Australian Experience (vol. II, Sydney, 1972). English attitudes about the blackness of Australian Aborigines can be glimpsed in Tim Flannery (ed.), Watkin Tench: 1788 (Melbourne, [1789] 1996), 52-53; Lloyd Robson, A History of Tasmania: Volume I, Van Diemen s Land from the Earliest Times to 1855 (Melbourne, 1983), 13-14.

(7.) Reece, "The Aborigines in Australian Historiography," 266.

(8.) Rowley's The Destruction of Aboriginal Society: Aboriginal Policy and Practice (Canberra, 1970), quoted in Reece, "The Aborigines in Australian Historiography," 267.

(9.) J.A. La Nauze,"The Study of History, 1929-1959," Historical Studies, 9,33 (November 1959), 11.

(10.) Lloyd Robson, A Short History of Tasmania (Melbourne, 1985), 20-21.