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

(11.) Sharon Morgan, Land Settlement in Early Tasmania: Creating an Antipodean England (Cambridge, 1992), 143; N.J.B. Plomley, The Aboriginal Settler Clash in Van Diemen's Land, 1803-1831 (Launceston, 1992), 6; Henry Reynolds, Fate of a Free People (Ringwood, VIC, 1995), 28-30.

(12.) Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, 31.

(13.) Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians (2nd Edition, Crows Nest, 1996), 83.

(14.) Henry Melville, The History of Van Diemen's Land: From the Year 1824 to 1835, Inclusive During the Administration of Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur (Book One, edited by George Mackaness, Sydney, 1959), 27 [emphasis in original]. See also Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, 66; Lloyd Robson, A History of Tasmania, 212; Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, 101.

(15.) Robson, A History of Tasmania, 215,218-220; Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, 117.

(16.) Robson, A History of Tasmania, 220; Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, 78, 118.

(17.) Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, p. 112.

(18.) Ibid., 174. Henry Reynolds notes that the best historians can do in this respect is to come up with estimates. See Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, 76, 81.

(19.) Windschuttle, The Fabrication, p. 418.

(20.) Ibid., 4, 402, passim.

(21.) Ibid., 404,406.

(22.) Ibid., 284.

(23.) It is not uncommon to hear Australians in our time talk of their nation's Anglo-Celtic heritage; however, it must be stressed that this is not part of Windschuttle's conceptualization of a virtuous Australian nation. Windschuttle's construction of an Anglo-Saxon Australia goes back to nineteenth century images of the Irish as convicts and of peasant origin. See for example Beverley Kingston, The Oxford History of Australia: Glad, Confident Morning 1860-1900 (Volume 3, Melbourne, 1993), 124. This point can also be seen in James Bischoff, Sketch of the History of Van Diemens Land, Illustrated by a Map of the Island, and an Account of the Van Diemens Land Company (London, 1832), 35, which argues that "Bushrangers," who were often ex-convicts, and Aborigines, were the most significant early difficulties encountered by settlers in Van Diemen's Land.

(24.) Windschuttle, The Fabrication, 3. Windschuttle's conceptualization of early Australia is in stark contrast to earlier accounts, like that of Manning Clark, who described early colonial Australia as a society in which "life was brutish and short, that it was one of wretchedness and squalor." C.M.H. Clark, A History of Australia: From the Earliest Times to the Age of Macquarie (Volume I, Melbourne, 1962), 243. Contemporaries, like the Reverend Samuel Marsden, senior chaplain of New South Wales, complained in 1829 that "Drunkenness and whoredom are the two sins to which the unguarded missionary is the most exposed, and particularly the latter sin amongst the heathen [Aborigines]." Marsden quoted in Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester, 1992), 100-101. See also Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality (London, 2003), chapter 7. On the issue of historical objectivity Windschuttle cites, for example, Henry Reynolds, who in his 1981 book The Other Side of the Frontier claimed that his "book was not conceived, researched or written in a mood of detached scholarship. It is inescapably political dealing as it must with issues that have aroused deep passions since 1788 and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future. Ibid., 6. Windschuttle fails to point out that Reynolds went on to say that "Many people may find it an uncomfortable book. It will challenge myths and prejudices embraced by both white and black communities and in so doing may please neither" Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia (Ringwood, VIC, [1981] 1996), 1.