The catches of Whitewash.

KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE sat on the fight, facing the inquisitorial gaze of a packed auditorium, under the interrogatory glare of stage lighting. Robert Manne sat on the left, cocooned in cool shadow. The date was August 27, 2003; the event was a debate sponsored by the Melbourne Writers' Festival between the author of Fabrication and the editor of Whitewash.

If it crossed Windschuttle's mind that the discrepancy of the fighting might have been deliberate, he would have, no doubt, told himself not to be paranoid. But he could have been forgiven if he had found it difficult to distinguish paranoia from reality, because there were an awful lot of academics out to get him.

A few days earlier Robert Marine, with the help of ex-Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, had launched the missile-bristling battle-book called Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle 'S Fabrication of Aboriginal History. In it a score of highly qualified, conspicuously respected authors (most of them in the employ of publicly funded universities) had applied their extensive array of scholastic talents to the worthy task of critiquing Windschuttle's book--employing an array of the most unworthy of tactics.

This is a review of the first third of Whitewash--its introduction and first two chapters. It makes no pretence at historical scholarship. However, since the task of Whitewash is to answer a book written for all interested Australian readers, it may be analysed by any such reader in relation to its execution of that task, and in relation to its own internal logic and integrity or lack thereof.

INTRODUCTION, BY ROBERT MANNE

Yossarian tried another approach. "Is Orr crazy?" "'He sure is, "Doc Danneka said. "Can you ground him?" "I sure can. But first he has to ask me to. That's part of the rule. "... "And then you can ground him? '" Yossarian asked. "No. Then I can "I ground him." "'You mean there's a catch?"

--Joseph Heller, Catch-22

IN THE INTRODUCTION to Whitewash, its editor Robert Manne foreshadows the book's primary methodology, its dominant tone, and its verdict. First he sketches the political events he considers relevant, from W.E.H. Starmer's breaking of "the great Australian silence", through Mabo, to Prime Minister John Howard's challenge to all that is correct and beautiful. Then he introduces Windschuttle "singing a song many people wanted to hear", and Whitewash's first catch: Anyone who is convinced by Windschuttle 's arguments is politically prejudiced to do so.

Taking it for granted that the approval of the elected leader of the country would be considered the kiss of death for any historian's credibility, Manne portrays Windschuttle pushing Howard's political barrow against the left-wing elites. He mentions that Windschuttle denied a political agenda, "with an apparently straight face", but not that he was of the same political persuasion when he toed the "orthodox" line about Australia's colonial history as he was after his discovery of the empirical evidence (or lack of it) that changed his view.

Typical of the misrepresentation that one has to get used to in order to read Whitewash is Manne's report that Windschuttle "expressed astonishment at the discovery that Henry Reynolds' estimate of 20,000 killings, that he had previously accepted on trust, was not even based on a tabulated list of every occasion on which an Aborigine had been killed". Of course, as any Windschuttle reader should know, his initial astonishment wasn't that there was no tabulated list of every killing, but that half of Reynolds' estimate was based on a report that records no killings of Aborigines whatsoever!

Typical of the sort of character assassination that one has to get used to in order to read Whitewash is the juxtaposition of Fabrication with Helen Demidenko's novel The Hand That Signed the Paper, which she fraudulently claimed to be drawn from the experience of her Ukrainian family during the Holocaust. "What was so dispiriting about the Demidenko affair," Manne concludes,

   was the lapse of critical judgement in so large a part
   of Australia's literary intelligentsia. What is even
   more alarming in the reception of The Fabrication
   of Aboriginal History, is the way so many prominent
   Australian conservatives have been so easily misled
   by so ignorant, so polemical and so pitiless a book.

If Keith Windschuttle is a fraud, and his book "counterfeit coin", Whitewash must surely bring him down. Its authors are clearly motivated with the zeal of an ecclesiastical inquisition in pursuit of a heretical apostate. One of the inquisitors, Henry Reynolds, once boasted that he got "a whole team ... together with jackhammers" to bring down Geoffrey Blainey. Marine's tribunal makes Reynolds' old team of sixties activists look like the etiquette committee of a suburban bowling club.

To open the battering, in the first and longest chapter of Whitewash, is James Boyce.

"FANTASY ISLAND", BY JAMES BOYCE

"Sure there's a catch, "Doc Danneka replied. "Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy. "'

ACCORDING TO James Boyce: "Windschuttle can impose his contemporary conclusions on Van Diemen's Land history only by limiting his selection of sources, thereby not only silencing ordinary Van Diemonians but--with almost unheard-of presumption--even the privileged classes." This, he claims, leads to so many "gross oversights and mistakes", that his days must be tersely numbered. "170 years of scholarship, 200 years of well-accessed and widely read records, will leave this particular attempt to deny our story looking very shallow indeed." This is the pledge of James Boyce, Tasmanian academic and author of God's Own Country? The Anglican Church and Tasmanian Aboriginals.

Like an avenging angel with a jackhammer, Boyce sets about undermining the Fabrication "edifice". Denunciations of Windschuttle's "extraordinarily naive", "transparently flawed", "distorted and unbalanced perspective", his "startling omission[s]", "profound ignorance" and "serious", "embarrassing", "elementary errors" go by, page after page. Anticipation of the disclosure of examples of this litany of scholastic crimes mounts, then gets lost in the next wave of denunciations, then mounts again.

The problem is that when a reader tries to put his finger on exactly what "gross oversights and mistakes" the denunciations denote, their identity proves to be mysteriously elusive. Sometimes opposite accusations cancel each other out. When the baffled reader finally gets to the last of the chapter's fifty-four pages he can be sure of only two things: James Boyce is incensed by Windschuttle's "unheard-of presumption", and damns his usurping "attempt to deny our story" to hell. It is not even clear who the collective "our" includes, except that Boyce is well and truly in that congregation, and Windschuttle is most definitely out.

The work of Boyce's jackhammer is too relentless to analyse blow by blow, but assuming he would make his very first and very last blows two of his best, let us examine those, and pick one from the middle of his chapter, and see how they hold up.

Boyce opens his chapter thus:

   Keith Windschuttle needs to spend much more time
   in Tasmania. Then, perhaps, he would rely less on
   tourism web pages for weather information and
   refrain from describing the climate of windy
   Flinders Island as "much like that of a Southern
   Mediterranean port".

His footnote refers to page 230 of Fabrication. On page 230 the relevant passage reads: "Flinders Island enjoys a temperate, maritime climate, much like that of a Southern Mediterranean port ... in summer, the average maximum temperature is 21.5 degrees Celsius ... in winter, the average minimum is 6.5 degrees Celsius", its rainfall is "759 mm per year". These figures are from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, not from the tourism web page that Fabrication mentions in passing to illustrate Flinders' attraction as a holiday destination.

In the Mediterranean port of Naples, the highest monthly average maximum temperature is 29.5 Celsius, the lowest monthly average minimum is 3.8, and the rainfall is over 1000 mm per year. Which makes it a few degrees warmer, but wetter than Flinders Island. As for the wind, the only reference Fabrication makes to it is a contrast between Flinders Islandand the Tasmanian west coast, which is buffeted by the "roaring forties".

Boyce's opening sarcasm falls flat under the facts, but he is not about to let an opportunity go by for a piece of ridicule that will resonate in the minds of readers prejudiced to the belief that Tasmania's weather is as cruel as its history. This is typical--where Windschuttle works the facts, Boyce works the perceptions of his readers.

To go from the lame to the insane, on page 38 we find Boyce backing Windschuttle into a corner with the rhetorical question: "why, on Fabrication's own terms, [were] the orders against committing acts of violence against Aborigines ... even necessary ... if no Aborigines had been killed?" What Boyce would have concluded if there had been no orders prohibiting violence towards Aborigines he doesn't say, but the Catch22 is plain: Anyone who shows that the British outlawed the killing of Aborigines implies that the British were killing Aborigines.

In the last paragraph before his conclusion, Boyce makes his last accusation: that Windschuttle sets impossible criteria for the validity of evidence so as to understate the violence done to Aborigines. His parting shot to exemplify this goes as follows: "Another comment is dismissed [by Windschuttle] because the Aborigine [who made it] is not tribal", and he footnotes a reference to page 101 of Fabrication.

On page 101 Windschuttle argues against the claim that Tasmanian Aborigines mounted an organised resistance to the occupation of their tribal lands. As a minor part of his argument he notes that the only resistance statement on record was attributed to Black Tom, an Aborigine who had been raised in Hobart by a white merchant before becoming a bushranger in league with a mainland Aborigine, but that: "[e]ven if we accept the conversation as authentic it still doesn't count as the opinion of a tribal Aboriginal, which Tom was not".

So contrary to Boyce's implication, Windschuttle was not dismissing Black Tom's credibility or patriotism simply because he was "not tribal", rather he was making the point that Tom from Hobart could hardly be considered a tribal spokesman. Boyce reveals only part of the context so as to make it appear that Windschuttle concocts any excuse to dismiss evidence, restraining as usual his academic integrity from getting in the way of a slant that adds to the desired impression.

So much of Boyce's rhetoric distorts, blurs or confuses the issue at hand that it would be easy to miss his valid points. He exposes a few minor errors--a wrong date for the French (Baudin) expedition (the date of the publication that reported it), and two Aboriginal deaths that were recorded in Fabrication's text but omitted from its table of Aboriginal deaths (which, when corrected, increase the total death toll from 118 to 120). Both these errors had been corrected in the second printing of Fabrication, which was published six months before Whitewash appeared, but that didn't stop them being quoted at every opportunity.

Boyce's thematic allegation is that: "Fabrication's fatal flaw, the source of its many factual mistakes, is the exclusion of almost all primary source material from the period in question, 1803 to 1847." This indictment gains weight from an impressive display of sources. In an extraordinary gesture of objectivity in the face of Boyce's unscrupulously hostile attack, Windschuttle publicly expressed admiration for Boyce's "expertise and knowledge of the sources". But herein lies a mystery.

THE MYSTERY OF THE BLACK HOLE

OF THE THIRTY relevant works produced between 1803 and 1847, Boyce declares, only three are recorded in Fabrication's bibliography. Therefore, he deduces, Windschuttle didn't read the other twenty-seven, which include the accounts of the French and British explorers. "The significance of these omissions," pronounces Boyce, "cannot be overstated." In addition he claims that the works of James Bischoff, George Lloyde, David Burn and James Ross and all the academic theses since 1977 have been ignored, and (most preposterously) that the works of Rev. John West have been silenced. Finally, leaving a "hole of such magnitude that it alone should discredit Fabrication's central argument" is the omission of "the extensive collection of diaries and letters available from the relevant period", such as those of Michael Steele, Adam Amos, J. Wedge, Hamilton Wallace, G. Boyes and Rosalie Hare.

It is, no doubt, grandiose indictments like this that led one of Phillip Adams' guests to extend some genuine sympathy to Windschuttle for the imminent demise of his career. Boyce's style would do a Spanish inquisitor proud: "[T]he material in these documents" that the heretic "almost completely ignores", he pontificates, "leaves Fabrication's central argument in tatters". As the prosecution proceeds, however, it is Boyce's indictment that proves to be "very shallow indeed".

First, Boyce's accusation rests on his assumption that everything an historian ever read on his topic would be listed in his bibliography. If such an assumption were true, the two-page bibliography of Boyce's own book would not reflect well on his scholarship. In fact, however, Fabrication's eighteen-page bibliography of 206 books and articles and forty-three other sources lists only the works referred to in the book's 1000 or more footnotes, which is unlikely to be all the relevant works known to the author.

Second, if Windschuttle is to be condemned for the inadequacy of the sources he names, many prominent historians should share his fate. A comparison of history books with regard to their references is complicated by the fact that they use different methods to list them. Nevertheless a cursory investigation suggests that some history books such as Lyndall Ryan's 1995 The Aboriginal Tasmanians list more sources than Fabrication; some such as Henry Reynolds' 1996 Fate of a Free People list less, and some such as Reynolds' 1999 Why Weren't We Told? (which blithely repeats Reynolds' "estimate" of 20,000 Aborigines killed before Federation), list no sources at all.

Boyce does not tell us what expletives he applies to Reynolds' "profound[er] ignorance" due to the hole of even greater magnitude in his sources. No doubt he would take into account the biographical format of Why Weren't We Told?, if not the "study of ... the nature of the written history" format of Fabrication; but what about Fate of a Free People, which is Reynolds' history of Tasmania? Its references to the sources that Boyce considers essential are much fewer than Fabrication's!

But comparisons of history books are not going to settle the case because the important issue is not who historians claim they know but what they know. Regardless of how much reading Boyce and Windschuttle have or haven't done of what sources, the onus of proof is on Boyce to make good his claim that: "Fabrication's findings are contradicted by the primary source record itself".

So third, and crucially, a "hole of such magnitude" should be very easy to illustrate with examples ripe for the kind of ridicule Boyce is diligent never to shirk. Why, for instance, does he not simply list all the killings of Aborigines recorded or implied in the alleged reservoir of sources ignored by Windschuttle? "Fantasy Island" extracts from the hole a few colourful descriptions of conflicts, inflates their effect by quoting a few more from the sources Fabrication refers to, and promises tattering evidence of killings--but what does it deliver?

The hole of infamous magnitude seems to have a gravitational pull of such magnitude that its reservoir of evidence just won't be released. The promised fountain of ignored sources produces the following squirts: a reference to one Aboriginal woman killed in 1829 (from the diaries of J.H. Wedge), a reference to two Aboriginal men allegedly killed in 1827 (from the diary of Michael Steele), and a reference to twelve Aborigines allegedly killed by shepherds and the crew of the cutter Fannie (from the journal of Rosalie Hare).

The twelve deaths referred to by Rosalie Hare, it is claimed in a later Whitewash chapter, occurred at Cape Grim in 1828 in an incident that Fabrication records as costing not twelve but six Aboriginal lives. Which means that even if all the references Boyce syphoned from Windschuttle's "profound ignorance" were valid they would increase the number of deaths recorded by Fabrication by one in 1829, two in 1827, and six in 1828, which would increase Fabrication's tally from 120 to 129 that is, by 7.5 per cent. If we eliminate the testimony of Rosalie Hare, as Windschuttle did from Fabrication due to its being discredited by her own publisher, the revelations of the magnitudinous hole shrink to three deaths.

In The Other Side of the Frontier Henry Reynolds estimates that 10,000 Aborigines were killed by Whites in Queensland, but Windschuttle reveals that the report he based his estimate on records no killing of Aborigines. In The Tasmanian Aborigines Lyndall Ryan implies that the Robinson journals record stories of 1400 Tasmanian Aborigines being killed by Whites, but Fabrication reveals that they record stories of 188 killings, which means that Ryan inflated Robinson's already inflated stories by 745 per cent. And these fabrications are by no means isolated incidents, merely two choice examples of a litany.

Whitewash doesn't dispute Windschuttle's revelations regarding these two fabrications, nor does it offer any explanation for them. But it is not the works of Ryan and Reynolds that Boyce considers to be "in tatters", it is Fabrication that is in tatters, because its case has allegedly been "unravelled" by a factor of 3 per cent, or, if we accept Boyce's evidence in its entirety, by 7.5 per cent.

If Boyce had delivered evidence of killings that when added to Fabrication's table would double its death toll he would have had something to go on about. Even then he would not have unravelled Fabrication's central arguments, since a doubled tally would in no way undercut Fabrication's rejection of the genocide thesis, and would still be about one third of Ryan's estimate. But at least a doubled tally from the black hole might make Boyce's profligate pronouncements of "profound ignorance" sound a little more sane, and a little less like a scholastic temper tantrum.

   "It seems almost incomprehensible," effuses Boyce,
   that Windschuttle could claim that he has been
   able "to record every killing of an Aborigine
   between 1803 and 1834 for which there is a
   plausible record of some kind" without looking at
   such crucial and readily accessible primary source
   material.

What is totally incomprehensible is how a statement like this can be blurted, typed, edited, published, touted, without the presentation of the evidence of the readily accessible plausible records that Windschuttle has allegedly so incomprehensibly omitted. What could be a quicker, more decisive way to demonstrate how "very shallow indeed" Windschuttle's "counterfeit coin" is? Why would Boyce not simply present the evidence of the "hole of such magnitude"? Why wouldn't the editor insist on it? Have these people been partially lobotomised? Do they think their readers have been?

But the black hole that releases no evidence to support the allegations made on its behalf is not the only mystery set to baffle the conscientious "Fantasy Island" reader. A second problem becomes evident when he starts parting the field of condemning connotations looking for the substance of Windschuttle's one-man scholastic crime wave and finds that it is not at all clear what he is being tried and sentenced for.

THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING CRIMES

BOYCE IDENTIFIES that Fabrication presents two "key conclusions ... [t]he first, and less significant, is that it is possible to make a definitive statement that few Aborigines were killed by the British". But it may surprise readers to discover, if they carefully read what is being said beneath the bluff and bluster, that as far as this conclusion that few Aborigines were killed is concerned, Boyce is in substantial agreement with Windschuttle. If this seems to makes nonsense of the whole "hole of such magnitude" issue discussed above, the nonsense is Boyce's.

Near the top of page 18 Boyce states that: "Fabrication's arguments are contradicted not only by contemporary academics but by literally scores of writers, of all political shades, from 1820 onwards", but at the bottom of the same page he implies that Fabrication's arguments on the death toll are not "in substance, saying anything new", and that ever since the 1820s, "a number of writers have suggested that massacres have been exaggerated".

When he is not denouncing Windschuttle's arguments on the death toll issue as being "fundamentally flawed", "worthless"--that is, radically wrong--Boyce is dismissing those same arguments as saying nothing new--that is, as being too conventionally right. The Catch-22 is: If Windschuttle is not contradicting 170 years of scholarship, he is to be dismissed as saying nothing new.

Boyce is trapped into this contradiction by his fury and his scholarship--the former determines his denunciations and the latter his agreement with the substance of Windschuttle's conclusion. On page 46 he says:

   Definite body counts and firm statements about
   the low level of violence Aborigines experienced
   are not evidence-based. Fabrication's low
   Aboriginal death rate figure at the hands of whites
   ... reflects the author's political agenda, not
   serious historical research.

And yet on page 59 he states: "on this Island much less conflict occurred in the first generation after white settlement than occurred almost anywhere else"--an observation that Windschuttle is routinely pilloried for making. Boyce's statement was intended to counter Windschuttle's argument that the Aboriginal culture did not censure the killing of Whites. It fails in its intent because it ignores the facts that the Aborigines weren't going to murder Whites with whom they wanted to trade, and that the Whites could defend themselves. But it, along with Boyce's agreement that the Aborigines bested the British in bush warfare, pretty much concedes Windschuttle's case that the Aboriginal death toll of frontier violence was low.

Despite his denouncing rhetoric, the only consistent disagreement Boyce seems to have with Fabrication's conclusions on the death toll is that: "no one before Windschuttle had been prepared to nominate such a definitive body count or draw a correspondingly firm conclusion about the low level of casualties". In other words, Boyce's beef is not that Fabrication records too few Aborigines being killed by Whites necessarily, but that it is too "definitive" about it. But if by "definitive" he means "final and closed" then he has no beef at all, since Fabrication states explicitly that its death tally is not final and closed, and in fact invites additions to be made to it. If on the other hand he means "definitive" in the sense that it is based on definite evidence, then Fabrication is guilty as charged.

To dredge the bottom of the depravity of Fabrication's definitiveness, Boyce makes an issue out of the distinction between "plausible" and "highly plausible" evidence of killings. This is little more than a semantic distinction, since both categories are included in the tally of 120 killings, but Boyce latches on to it as grist to the mill of Windschuttle's infamous, fundamentally flawed, ridiculous, bizarre methods (all these descriptions in the space of half of page 45). And so, he concludes: "Windschuttle's Aboriginal death rate figure" (which is saying nothing new) "has no credibility, even as a starting point for further research."

If Windschuttle does it so terribly wrong, a "Fantasy Island" reader might wonder, which historians do it right? Boyce argues that Ryan and Reynolds do it right (even though Ryan's estimate of over 700 Aborigines killed in Tasmania is now considered far too high) because they present "general estimates based on broad perusal of the evidence available, not definitive claims". J.E. Calder is also mentioned, but he is not one of Windschuttle's orthodox targets, and is not so "general" about Aboriginal deaths, judging by the fact that Fabrication quotes Calder's tally of nineteen Aborigines and ninety-nine Whites killed between 1827 and 1831--a crime of definitiveness that Boyce says nobody before Windschuttle committed.

The making of definitiveness into a crime is revealing. The way Boyce and other Whitewash authors think, it's okay for the likes of Ryan and Reynolds to make estimates of killings, so long as they don't present evidence to back their estimates that might turn them into "definite claims". They can quote these "estimates" as if they were established fact for decades, and allow them to become the basis of a folklore of genocide--but it is despicable for Windschuttle to present his estimate with the evidence it is based on so that it can be challenged or added to!

Boyce's condemnation of Windschuttle's "definite claims" and sanctification of the orthodox historian's "general estimates" cling to his assertion that Windschuttle can't prove that unrecorded killings never occurred. But this is a rationalisation that inverts logic, mocks common sense and perverts justice. It is no more possible for Windschuttle to prove that unrecorded massacres did not occur, than it is for you to prove that a ghost did not just sit on your lap--because there is no evidence of either event for you to dispute. But you don't have to prove the non-existence of a ghost on your lap, and Windschuttle doesn't have to prove the non-existence of unrecorded massacres in Tasmania, because the onus of proof is on he who asserts the positive. It is up to anyone claiming there is a ghost on your lap, or that there were massacres, to present evidence--"definite" evidence of some kind, written, oral or circumstantial evidence that stands up to scrutiny. In the absence any valid evidence, claims of ghosts and massacres are arbitrary assertions and their cognitive value is zero.

Boyce, to his credit, doesn't claim high levels of killing himself, and be steps well back from the genocide thesis--"undoubtedly some massacres have been exaggerated". But he wants to hold on to the methods used by the genocide theorists--"general estimates" requiring no "definite claims"--that is, arbitrary assertions that may be presented as history. When Boyce can find evidence or argumentation for his story (whether valid or fallacious), he prefers to use that for his "local defence", but he keeps the fabrication door ajar: "[I]t is equally likely that [other massacres] remain unknown to us", he insists.

Windschuttle points out that unrecorded massacres are less likely in Tasmania than anywhere else because of its particularly extensive collection of source data-a point confirmed in different contexts by Ryan, Reynolds, and most emphatically by Boyce. Nevertheless, Boyce wants to defend the correct sort of historians and hold "[t]he deep mystery [of] our overwhelming ignorance in relation to the Tasmanian Aborigines" as a blank cheque for any future "general estimates" that may be required to protect his "messy and bloody story". As to why this story must be preserved at all costs, Boyce doesn't explain.

Before the publication of Fabrication, Tasmania was widely regarded as the place where white colonists carried out a "conscious policy of genocide". What a pity it is that Boyce can't find the integrity to state explicitly his disagreement with those who maintain the genocide line, let alone the grace to acknowledge the enormous service Windschuttle has done all Australians, and posterity, by exposing that miscarriage of justice. Had Boyce been able to do so he would have made the writing, and the reading, of "Fantasy Island" a much less tortuous task.

THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING WAR

ON FABRICATION'S first "key conclusion", that the Aboriginal death toll at the hands of Whites was low, Boyce's impossible assignment is to condemn Windschuttle for his scholarship while agreeing with, or at least being unable to contradict, his conclusion. On the second "key conclusion", the "defence of territory" issue, Boyce's assignment is nearly as difficult--to condemn Windschuttle's scholarship and his conclusion, while agreeing with most of his premises.

The orthodox view, which Boyce defends, is that "the Aborigines conducted a violent, protracted, but ultimately tragic war in defence of their homeland against European invaders". Windschuttle's view is that frontier violence "did not represent the defence of any communal interests" by the Aborigines.

Boyce agrees with Windschuttle (albeit inadvertently, grudgingly or inconsistently) on the following premises: the Aborigines formed peaceful trading relationships with the colonists; most early skirmishes were related to kangaroo hunting; the Aborigines bested the British in bush combat; the frontier death toll was comparatively low; the Aborigines coveted the white man's goods; and, as Boyce conceded it, "disease might have been widespread, even the major source of the population decline". Apart from quibbling over emphasis, these agreed premises leave Boyce very little to attack--a problem he tries to overcome with his second wind of bluff and bluster. This no doubt makes good copy for a Robert Marine reading to the faithful, but for more discerning readers it has the effect of hyperbolising the sense out of any arguments Boyce may have.

In his defence of the argument that "the destruction of native game ... and the alienation of Aborigines from their traditional lands" triggered an Aboriginal war of resistance, Boyce argues that Windschuttle ignores: the British use of locally recruited "field police"; kangaroo feeding patterns on burnt grasslands; the impact of dogs on kangaroo numbers; and the disruption of the Aborigines' coastal food gathering; and he also claims that Windschuttle is quite wrong to imply that kangaroo hunting decreased after 1818. "Windschuttle's narrow reading of sources thus causes a principal occupation of the white population, and its consequent impact on the Aboriginal occupation, to disappear."

Boyce produces one piece of evidence on these issues to back his "narrow reading" accusation, a letter of petition by kangaroo hunter Thomas Toombs, taken from a 1977 publication; the rest of his data comes from the same sources that Fabrication refers to. The black hole stubbornly refuses to release its magnitude of Windschuttle-ignored primary source evidence.

Boyce's strongest case is his accusation that Windschuttle falls to adequately take into account the effect of land occupation in advance of full land ownership in the 1820s, as sanctioned by tickets-of-occupation, annual licensing, and formal and informal leasing. But it is difficult to see how this gap in Windschuttle's thesis, if it proves to be one, would affect its conclusions much, since it already acknowledges that land occupation increased rapidly during the period. Fabrication doesn't dispute that white occupation increased frontier violence, rather it presents a different interpretation of the nature of that violence. Boyce's claim that Windschuttle underestimated white occupation doesn't address that interpretation.

Even if Boyce were to succeed in discrediting Windschuttle's arguments on a few issues of the order described above, he is only tinkering around the edges of Windschuttle's thesis. Boyce's arguments do practically nothing to dent Fabrication's extensive evidence and logical argumentation against the orthodox thesis that the Aborigines went to war because they were starving. Many of Boyce's descriptions of frontier life sound valid until he interprets them as proving Windschuttle wrong, when they could just as well be interpreted as supporting Windschuttle's views. It is just Fantasy Island fluff for Boyce to claim that Windschuttle's "selective reading leaves [him] profoundly ignorant of some of the basic realities of Van Diemonian frontier life, meaning that his work consistently lacks the correct context".

There is certainly a context that Windschuttle's work "consistently lacks"--a context that Boyce may be so enmeshed in that he hears a view that arises from a different context as "unheard-of presumption". This would go some way to explain why he allows his obvious fury to corrupt his obvious scholarship. But it is not the historically correct context that Windschuttle lacks, it is the "politically correct" context.

It is Boyce who consistently lacks the right context--objectivity. He clearly wrote "Fantasy Island" as a "local defence" of his "island's story" against the invasion of the history snatchers. He will fight them on the beaches, he will never surrender the "messy and bloody reality of our beautiful Van Diemonian earth" to an alien who knows "almost nothing of what has been written about life in Tasmania over the past 200 years ... very few of the island's many historians ... none of our letter writers, diarists ... no academic thesis written in the past 25 years ..."

To try and make sense of such an hysterically preposterous reaction to a book that is bulging with evidence and references and detailed argumentation, we would have to assume that Boyce believes that all data pertaining to the period under discussion must be canvassed whether relevant or not, whether superfluous or not. If that is his criterion it would have been interesting to discover which history books comply with it. Works such as Reynolds' certainly do not. But then they are politically correct.

To satisfy Boyce's criterion Fabrication would have to be much heavier in data, much longer in quotations and much fatter in facts. But the conclusions of Fabrication-Fat would be essentially the same--at least Boyce has failed to present evidence to the contrary. And what would have been gained? The fat necessary to fortify a thesis against an attack such as Boyce's would bury its clear graspable thesis, and destroy its readability by the general public. That would make Boyce happy, as Fabrication-Fat took its place amongst the unread doctoral dissertations on some dusty library shelf somewhere on some campus of some university. But that would not make Windschuttle as happy. Nor would it serve truth-seeking Australians.

What Boyce's criteria adds up to is another Catch-22: Anyone who presents a clear graspable challenge to the establishment inadequately canvasses the data.

Boyce's chapter does not leave Fabrication a "crumbling edifice", it leaves its central arguments unscathed. Over and over he employs the most extravagant terms to assert Windschuttle's "embarrassing factual mistakes", then blithely proceeds to the next set of indictments without providing convincing explanation of what exactly is so embarrassing. But fanatically emphatic repetition of denunciations deficient in evidence, logic, cohesion or pertinence does not make a case. And despite the fact that his chapter is supposed to be an "overview" of Fabrication, it says absolutely nothing about Fabrication's exposure of the grand-fabrications of the orthodox historians which, lest we forget, is Fabrication's primary theme. Let us see if the second chapter of Whitewash does better.

"THE CHARACTER OF A NATION", BY MARTIN KRYGIER & ROBERT KRIEKEN

Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask," and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions.

IN THE FIRST CHAPTER of Whitewash James Boyce implies that Fabrication is far too short, omitting as |it does all the data essential for its success. In the second chapter, Professors Martin Krygier and Robert Krieken argue that it is far too long, including as it does all the data that denies it any chance of success. But at least Krygier and Krieken deliver their verdict with less: hyperbole and more artistry.

Their chapter, titled "The Character of the Nation", begins thus:

   If, as Cyril Connolly and George Orwell both
   alleged, within every fat man there is a thin man
   struggling to get out, we might ask if this also
   applies to works such as Keith Windschuttle's
   Fabrication of Aboriginal History. This portly if
   handsome volume on the history of relations
   between Europeans and Aborigines in Tasmania is
   apparently to be followed by two more dealing with
   the rest of Australia. The result is to add up to some
   500,000 words. But what is this tubby tome about?

The fat that Krygier and Krieken object to is facts. The "sieving and separating facts, no-longer-facts, not-quite-facts, never-were-facts, about the nature of frontier violence in Australian history", is carried around its middle like a spare tyre. "Much of its size arises from the painstaking detail of its examination of a range of accounts of frontier violence in colonial Tasmania."

Why--a reader might be moved to groan--did Krygier or Krieken or the editor or somebody not tell this to James Boyce? And why did Boyce not tell Krygier and Krieken how quickly Fabrication would be relegated to the reactionary-pop basket had it not included copious facts to back its thesis? Or did they know it?

The second major problem with Fabrication according to Krygier and Krieken is that it attempts a self-contradictory task. Windschuttle's attempts to view history from a detached perspective to expose the prejudiced view of leftist historians, they argue,

   actually serve as an embarrassment for
   Windschuttle: the more they convince us, the more
   they weaken Fabrication itself, because whatever
   the outcome of the dispute between him and his
   targets, it soon becomes obvious that this book is not
   a politically disengaged pursuit of facts at all.

The Catch-22 is clear: Any historian who attacks a view of history for being a politically motivated fabrication is to be dismissed as politically motivated and prejudiced himself.

By means of sophistry such as this the academic establishment may grant itself immunity from censure and its historians the freedom to fabricate. But what is involved is more than a defence strategy. Krygier and Krieken create a false dichotomy: either Windschuttle stands detached in pursuit of facts or he is engaged in a polemical battle. But at least one other alternative is possible: that he is detached in pursuit of facts about Australia's history, and engaged in a polemical battle to have the facts he has discovered recognised.

What is most revealing about the false alternative Krygier and Krieken set up is the side they urge Windschuttle to jump to. Rather than urge him to abandon his alleged political agenda and go back to the archives to discover where it led him astray, they urge him to stop chasing facts and abandon his "proud boasts of detachment"--that is, to embrace the polemical side of the false dichotomy. But when Windschuttle has taken their advice and given up his delusions of being able to discover what actually happened in the past, what is he left with to be polemical about?

Krygier and Krieken believe they have detected what Windschuttle's real but unacknowledged motivation is. It is the projection of his view of "the character of the nation and the calibre of British civilisation" that "provides the motivation, rationale, the indefatigable energy and the spine of the larger work".

Compared to some of Whitewash's assessments, this may be read as a gracious compliment to Fabrication's soul. But there is a catch. Krygier and Krieken's approach, much more subtle than the jackhammer approach of Boyce, is to try to corral and brand Windschuttle. Provided he gives up his "proud boasts" that he can present the truth about colonial frontier violence, they will grant him the role of promoting "a particular style of thinking about ... our shared history" that might soothe the battered passions of his conservative constituency. This role for Fabrication-Thin would better engage the real debate, which, as they see it, is less about accurate identification of what actually happened in the past, than about what Australians feel about their nation and civilisation.

"Most of us care deeply about both the character of the nation ... and the calibre of the civilisation we embody", they explain:

   at issue is not really, or at any rate is not merely, the
   past wei es eigentlich gewesen, but the present. Or,
   more precisely, that the imagined past is being
   treated as a crucial part of the present, and it is that
   present-past that is the focus and explanation for the
   passions these past events still manage to inspire.
   This suggests that as important as the subjects of the
   debate, and the texts that are their vehicles, are the
   sub-texts that fuel them.

This is the sort of statement we may be tempted to hurry by, as past a shadow in a graveyard, not understanding what it means, and not sure we want to find out. But the words are transmitted from the Pentiums of influential professors of sociology and law; so we ignore them at our peril.

Stripped of its obfuscating elegance, the statement says: At issue is not the past but the present, or more precisely the imagined past qua the present, that is, the present-past which is the focus for the inspired passions and the sub-text's fuel, that is, the imagined past.

That is: At issue is not really (or at least not merely) the actual past but the imagined past.

One of the professors applied this doctrine to the "child removal" debate, then it was repeated proudly in Whitewash in relation to the Windschuttle debate. What it implies in these contexts is that, whatever those involved imagine happened is at least as important as what did happen. If they imagine their grandparents were stolen, or feel their parents were abused, or intuit that their ancestors were massacred, or just "know" that the Tasmanian Aborigines were the victims of a conscious policy of genocide, or imagine that all their problems are the fault of a rapacious Western culture, then that is what is really important or at least it's as important as what actually happened.

An acceptable role for Fabrication-Thin, Krygier and Krieken hint, is the projection of a counter-view that would highlight some of the better aspects of the character of the nation and the calibre of Western civilisation. Why sweat over the arduous task of sieving, separating, authenticating facts in a naive attempt to discover the truth about the nature of frontier violence, when such a pursuit misses the point of the exercise? Far better that Fabrication-Thin present a right-wing past-present that would form a "counter-myth" to balance the left-wing past-present, but bypass the pretence that it could discover and prove what actually happened.

Krygier and Krieken acknowledge that some black-armband perspectives on our history have gone awry, but condemn Windschuttle's attempt to correct "mythological elements" as heavy-handed, simply "lurching" the debate "towards an equally flat, monochrome counter-caricature". There are "other ways", they assert, than this simplistic "binary" approach. And they offer as an exemplar of the better way: Henry Reynolds!

The role Krygier and Krieken have ordained for Fabrication-Thin implies a profoundly sceptical view of history as a discipline and of the role of historians. All Fabrication (or, presumably, any history book) can really do, they seem to believe, is present its "own version" of history, which has no more claim on truth than any other, regardless of how many supporting facts it clutters itself with.

When historians discover solid evidence indicating that Menes became Pharaoh of Egypt in 3165 BC, that proposition is taken to be "the truth" unless or until other valid evidence contradicts it. But when Windschuttle discovers, for example, evidence proving Sir William Deane's 2000 AD statement that "there was a considerable killing of Aboriginal women and children ... at Mistake Creek in the 1930s" to be baseless fabrication, Krygier and Krieken consider this to be "clearly only [Windschuttle's] version", with no more claim to truth than Sir William's version, or anyone else's. The facts and arguments Windschuttle presents for "his version" seem to be irrelevant as far as Krygier and Krieken are concerned, presumably because they believe them to be incapable of elevating it to the status of "the truth", and because such a distinction would miss the real issue anyway, which is not what really happened at Mistake Creek but what people imagine happened there.

As far as Krygier and Krieken are concerned, Windschuttle may present his own massacre-free version of the history of Mistake Creek if he wishes, as his counter-myth, but for him to pretend that he can stand detached, sieve the facts and discover the truth is nothing but a deluded "boast", for he (like everybody else interested enough to comment) is too engaged to be able to discover the truth. Not to mention that to claim that he is right and Sir William and everybody else is wrong is very bad form.

It just so happens, however, that facts exist independent of the observer, that detached research and accurate identification of those facts are possible, and that the truth can be discovered. While some historians may "make up figures" to more powerfully promote their conjured-up viewpoint, others may powerfully promote a viewpoint because they induce it from the facts. There is an arbiter. It is not the numbers of voices, nor their prestige, nor their present-past passions--it is the demonstrable facts and their non-contradictory identification and integration.

Does the discovery and presentation of the truth require disengaged disinterest? On the contrary, it requires the "indefatigable energy" of engagement; and if the truth challenges an established orthodoxy, it requires courage; and if the challenged establishment is belligerent, it requires combativeness. Without such qualities a challenge to an establishment would disappear without a trace. We will never know how many voices in our humanities classrooms have been silenced by some version of the Catch-22: Anyone confident and combative enough to be heard is an arrogant and ignorant reactionary.

Unless of course, what he is being combative about is a variation on the orthodox theme, in which case he's a compassionate visionary.

There may come a time, with Fabrication's help, when there will be a place for a more easily read Fabrication-Thin. If Geoffrey Blainey can present A Short History of the Worm in under 700 easily read pages (not to mention his new Very Short version), a history of Australia's colonial frontier should be achievable in something less. But as long as Windschuttle's views are an anathema and his challenge an embarrassment to the closed ranks of academia, any presentation by him without the backing of researched facts would quickly, and perhaps justifiably, be called by another name: myth. Then the debate would be no more than a pressure group war, the outcome of which would be determined by which myth could command the greater passion of the greater number--or political force.

Such an outcome may not bother Krygier and Krieken. Whereas Boyce wants Fabrication to fatten itself like a doughnut to be swallowed up by academia, they want it to thin down so it can be bounced like a ping-Pong ball against the ivory tower until it buckles into its Self-eating "past-present".

Krygier and Krieken think Fabrication's title is terrific (faint praise to remind us that they are not vindicators), but they don't want it to live up to that title's ambition. But live up to it it must. It must stay wedded to its researched facts and whatever they indicate about the character of the nation, for better or worse, in comfort or discomfort, until newly discovered facts demand a reassessment. That is its justification and power, not any white-man's myth it may inspire. Why would it give that up to fight on its opponent's terms? False theories rely on mythology, and the more complex and obscure their presentation the better. Correct theories, and those aspiring to be correct, rely on facts, and the more integrated and clear the presentation can be formulated the better. Fabrication must proudly boast that it is presenting the objective truth, for if it, or any history book cannot, why would anyone want to read its subjective non-truths?

Given Krygier and Krieken's scepticism about "proud boast[s] of detachment" and discovery of historical truths, we have to wonder about their own discussions about Australia's history--are they about the real past, or the imagined past qua the present? Never mind; since trying to imagine a past that is not really what happened but only what we imagine happened for the sake of the present is like trying to chase one's prejudices in ever decreasing circles, we must assume that Krygier and Krieken's scepticism does not extend to their own views and that their interesting discussions pertain to the real past.

Krygier and Krieken, like Boyce, stand well back from claims that genocide or massacring occurred in Tasmania. But Windschuttle gets no credit for exposing those fabrications. Instead Krygier and Krieken imply that murder is too much the focus of Windschuttle's concern to the exclusion of other crimes. This criticism, however, is one that cannot in justice be made of Windschuttle, without first making it of the historians whose fabrications generated the genocide story and made it the focus of the world's attention, and therefore, necessarily, of Windschuttle's.

Krygier and Krieken broaden the debate with interesting discussions of: the meaning of genocide, dispossession, imperialism, the Lockean View, the Enlightenment influence, Christian influences, the rule of law, and of how each of these impacted on the colonies. Then they draw these discussions towards a final criticism.

Windschuttle fails, they argue, to live up to his own directive, that an historian be an "investigator" rather than a "vindicator". As a "rough guide" to his vindicator status they argue that he lacks the investigator characteristics of leaving "loose ends" and being "puzzled and taken by surprise [and] led to new and different conclusions".

Of course this is quite wrong. Windschuttle was indeed "puzzled and taken by surprise", and he was indeed "led to new and different conclusions". That conversion occurred in 2000, and it led him to the new and different conclusions presented in Fabrication.

These new and different conclusions", however, do not cut it with Krygier and Krieken. Fabrication can be accepted as the product of investigation only if it has loose ends itself, and only if it itself says: "Whoops! got it all wrong".

It would be interesting to confront Krygier and Krieken with all the loose ends their co-authors claim Fabrication left untied (Boyce claims to have a black hole full of them), and ask whether they will either repudiate those claims or grant Windschuttle an investigator status. But then there would still be the "whoops" test to pass. It seems that Fabrication has a final Catch-22 to surmount: Anyone who doesn't get the conclusions of his investigation all wrong is to be dismissed as a vindicator.

Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

"That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed.

"It's the best there is." Doc Danneka agreed.

John Dawson wrote on The Pentium Primitivism of Greg Lehman" in the March issue. A footnoted version Of this article is available by e-mail on request to the Quadrant office.