The nullius ideal: on "terra nullius reborn" by Henry Reynolds.

THE WORDS terra nullius were probably never spoken on the Endeavour by Captain Cook in 1770, nor written by the quill pen of Governor Arthur Phillip in 1788, nor heard anywhere in Botany Bay during the eighteenth century. In fact according to Tasmanian writer and historian Dr Michael Connor, the phrase was probably never used in relation to the colonisation of Australia until the second half o the twentieth century.

In an article rifled "Error Nullius", in the Bulletin, August 26, 2003, Dr Connor explains that nobody except a handful of historians and international lawyers had ever heard of terra nullius until it was adopted and adapted by "the best-known and most trusted historian on Aboriginal and White conflict", Professor Henry Reynolds. In The Law of the Land, published in 1987, Professor Reynolds redefined terra nullius. He took a 1938 passage, which defined terra nullius as "land not under any sovereignty", and a 1910 passage with the term res nullius, which he replaced with terra nullius in square brackets. He then commandeered the ms nullius definition, "a thing which has no owner", and attached it to terra nullius.

This hybridised term, says Connor, replaced clarity with confusion by muddling the historical/political concept terra nullius, with the legal concept ms nullius, and to further muddy the waters, with the geographical concept (meaning uninhabited). The result, says Connor, was "a mutating linguistic virus":

   After fixing it in place, Reynolds' career was based
   on disproving its validity. The work of the mirrors
   was done. His mangling of international law,
   common law, and translation produced a late-twentieth-century
   superstition. Once introduced, the
   Latin tag was quickly loved by historians, social scientists,
   lawyers, clergy, journalists, and racial
   activists. It meant whatever its users wanted it to
   mean. Impressive sounding, it was ridiculously easy
   to mock.

It was just what the "1969-style" radicals who had taken over Australia's humanities faculties needed for their latest campaign. Terra nullius sounded scholarly and high-status and was ripe for equivocation. It was propagated through ideologically primed schools, manoeuvred skilfully through the media, and when it arrived on the bench of the High Court in 1992 it was "the only explanation for the British settlement of Australia" the court was to consider.

"Historians more interested in politics than archives," argues Connor, "misled the legal profession into believing that a phrase no one had heard of a few years before was the very basis of our statehood, and Reynolds' version of our history, especially The Law of the Land, underpinned the Mabo judges' decision-making."

Its job at the High Court done, terra nullius was placed behind museum glass as a permanent reminder that our nation was founded on an "idiotic" iniquity. Imagine then the reaction of the breeder of this ideological weapon, at the thought that it might escape in a form mutated beyond his control; and this may go some way to explain the undercurrent of paranoia that runs through Henry Reynolds' chapter in Whitewash, which he titled "Terra Nullius Reborn".

HENRY REYNOLDS' contribution to Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttles Fabrication of Aboriginal History (the third chapter) begins: "There is no doubt about Keith Windschuttle's ambition. He seeks to bring the concept of terra nullius back to life." Reynolds presents no direct evidence to support this assertion, but then the presentation of evidence is not his strongest suite. His certainty rests on his own assessment that this ambition is: "a central feature of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History".

Terra nullius is not what Keith Windschuttle says Fabrication is about. In its introduction he says it's about "the methodology of history". He says it "examines how we can know about the past, the kinds of evidence we can regard as reliable, and how to detect false claims when they are made". He says it examines "the nature of the written history of the relations between colonists and Aborigines". He says it challenges the orthodox view that "violence was ever present along the ragged line of early interaction ... through a century-long campaign of guerilla warfare". He says Fabrication was "written in the belief that the factual details are matters not to be waived aside". He says nothing about terra nullius. But Reynolds believes he knows better. He knows that history books are written as political tools.

On the first page of his first book, The Other Side of the Frontier, published in 1981, Reynolds states that his book:

   is based on extensive research among a vast array
   of historical records. Yet the 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.

Near the end of Why Weren't We Told? re-published in 2000, Reynolds declares:

   I thought from the beginning of my career that
   historical writings were inescapably political--the
   history of race relations especially so. How could I
   pretend otherwise? Historians do not shed their
   ideological clothing or their personal feelings when
   they venture back into the past seeking to hear the
   words and delve into the minds of their chosen
   subjects.

There is a sense in which the last sentence is true Historians cannot be expected to "shed their ideological clothing or their personal feelings", any more than judges, surgeons or engineers can. What can be expected of professionals, however, is that when they go to work they focus on reality rather than on what their ideology or feelings would have that reality be--and that they record it accurately without bias. It is this objectivity, however, that Reynolds discards as beyond the responsibility or even the capacity of historians. In fact, even if objectivity were possible, he insinuates, it would miss the point of the exercise.

The point of the exercise was exposed by Michael Duffy in a letter to the Bulletin, September 2, 2003:

   In writing off terra nullius as mere fiction, Michael
   Conner ignores the important need it fills. To
   believe our founding fathers used a ludicrous notion
   to justify their invasion of Australia makes them
   appear absurd, even contemptible. This makes it
   easy to condemn them. By seeking to remove this
   moral cordon sanitaire between the ancestors and
   ourselves, Connor threatens that consoling sense of
   superiority so essential to modern identity. Surely
   there are times when the truth needs to be sacrificed
   for a higher end?

Reynolds would not put it in those words, at least not in public, but his approach implies that historians are necessarily driven by their ideologies to find a history that supports it, or to fabricate one if necessary, then to write history books to further their political agendas; for example, an historian might start with an anti-colonial ideology, fabricate 20,000 Aboriginal deaths, write a book that might influence High Court justices to apportion 'unutterable shame" and overturn terra nullius. If another historian attacks his book that must mean, he concludes, that his antagonist's ambition is to reverse his work and bring terra nullius back to life.

Reynolds is right to consider the message of Fabrication to be the antithesis of his own. But he is wrong to suppose that its ambition is merely political. If it turns out to be the case, as per Reynolds' conviction, that Windschuttle's thesis would reverse the High Court's Mabo judgment against terra nullius, that would be revealing--but it would reveal only a secondary consequence of a challenge that is not primarily political, but epistemological.

Reynolds' vested interest is to keep the focus of the debate on political implications, whether real or paranoid. An historian with a political ambition that is the reverse of his own is a challenge he can handle with nonchalant condescension. He is comfortable with political opposition; it fuels his ideology and rallies his power base. But he is irritated and stupefied by Windschuttle's claim that Fabrication was the outcome of a dispassionate search for truth. The suggestion that an opponent could approach history via a methodology that is the reverse of his own invokes incensed antipathy.

The notion that an historian could focus on the discovery of what happened, then generalise from his discoveries and integrate a true picture of a period, that he is capable of judging his preconceptions, that he might even re-examine them in the light of what he discovers, is to Reynolds an anathema. It touches a raw nerve that runs deeper than his attachment to the Mabo decision--it goes to the root of his career's credo.

It is true of course that history has political implications; and Reynolds is an expert at detecting, designing and predicting them, which suggests that Windschuttle's thesis might indeed threaten the Mabo judgment. But if it does, that will not automatically imply that Fabrication was written with that as its goal. It could be that Fabrication's ambition to expose the faulty methodology of orthodox historians had the effect of overturning a court decision influenced by the false conclusions of that faulty methodology. As philosopher Leonard Peikoff notes: "Method is fundamental. It is that which underlies and shapes content, and thus all human achievement in any field."

REYNOLDS DOESN'T want to fight on the exposed lowlands of his methodology, so he plants his banner on the battlements of the High Court, and with a cry of "Remember Mabo" he rallies the faithful to his side in its defence, and mobilises them for an attack on Windschuttle's alleged ambition to restore terra nullius. Nothing less will inspire the kind of crusade Reynolds needs. Nothing less will divert attention from those relentless f words: by assuming this haughty stance Reynolds hopes to sweep aside Fabrication's revelations of how his portrayal of Australia's history has been distorted by his falsehoods, fictions, fabrications and fantasies.

Falsehoods such as his report that Lieutenant-Governor Arthur recognised the tactic of the Aborigines as the type of guerilla warfare he had witnessed in Spain; whereas Arthur had never served in Spain and did not liken the Aborigines to guerillas. Such as Reynolds' report that the so-called Black War of 1824-31 was Australia's biggest ever internal threat, waged by Aboriginal patriots locked in a "struggle of momentous proportions" that inflicted a per capita death rate higher than Australia suffered in the First World War. Such as the contradictory orthodoxy that Aboriginal guerillas whose bush knowledge and agile fighting skills easily outfought the bumbling soldiers and settlers, nevertheless suffered four times as many casualties as their adversaries. Such as Reynolds' report that frontier violence provoked a state of panic among the settlers and convinced the British that the survival of the colony itself was at stake. Such as Reynolds' report that the "drastic action" of the Black Line took place because the Governor feared the "eventual extirpation of the colony".

Fictions such as Reynolds' claim that fierce competition for land was a major cause of frontier violence as settlers encroached on tribal territories and fenced off Aborigines' hunting grounds; whereas only a very small portion of the island was occupied, and hardly any of it was fenced. Such as Reynolds' claim that the Aborigines were starving due to the impact of colonisation; which contradicts the evidence, defies logical analysis, and hides the fact that colonisation augmented the Aborigines' food supplies. Such as an Aboriginal population at the commencement of settlement estimated to be 5000 to 7000 on page 4 of Fate of a Free People but 4000 on page 52 of the same book. Such as Reynolds' claim that "there were no epidemics in Tasmania" and that the Aborigines "remained healthy until they came into European settlement", which flies in the face of white observations. Fictions such as Reynolds' claim that Broughton's 1830 committee proselytised "the compulsion of savagery" theory, which allowed him to dismiss it without his readers learning that its findings contradicted his claims about Aboriginal patriotism, starvation and guerilla warfare.

Fabrications such as a verbal guarantee allegedly made by George Augustus Robinson that the Aborigines would be given a self-determined Bass Strait island. Such as a negotiated settlement between Robinson and the Aboriginal tribes for their transportation to Flinders Island; whereas the reality was abject surrender by collections of individuals from several different tribes that had all but disintegrated. Such as an unrecorded verbal treaty divined out of a petition to Queen Victoria and political wishful thinking, for which there is no support in the historical record. In addition to his own fabrications, Reynolds endorses the fabrications of other orthodox historians such as Lyndall Ryan, as long as they fit his agenda--although he is willing to contradict them if they don't. For example, in contrast to his usual portrayal of the Aborigines in the most victimised terms, he contradicts other orthodox historians to portray the Flinders Island community as full of "dynamism ... adaptability ... resourcefulness ... zest for life ... and political passion", which better suits his treaty fabrication and land-rights agenda.

Fantasies such as his portrayal of the Black Line campaign of 1829-30 as an early example of "ethnic cleansing"; whereas it cost a total of three Aboriginal lives. Such as his exaggerated portraits of white brutality and inflated death tolls of Aborigines killed by whites. Such as the "conscious policy of genocide" fantasy, which was stated explicitly by Lyndall Ryan but fuelled by Reynolds' misrepresentation of the views of prominent settlers and newspapers. Such as the portrayal of twelve prominent settlers as advocates of genocide to exemplify the mood of the colony; in fact only two of the twelve considered genocide an option, but Reynolds quotes the others in such a way as to convey a different message than their full statements actually conveyed when made. For example he excerpts portions of warnings that policies must be changed to avoid the possibility of genocide, and presents them in such a way as to turn warnings against genocide into advocacy of genocide.

Windschuttle's revelations of these falsehoods, fictions, fabrications and fantasies are backed by compelling evidence and cohesive argument. They add up to a comprehensive and shocking indictment of a professor in whose hands the nation placed the education of its youth, and the portrayal of its heritage. So what does Professor Reynolds have to say about it?

WHEN FABRICATION was published, on November 22, 2002, the Sydney Morning Herald reported Reynolds' reaction to one of Fabrication s allegations. To the claim that Reynolds had misquoted Lieutenant-Governor Arthur to the effect that he feared Aboriginal hostilities would lead to the "eventual extirpation of the colony", Reynolds retorted: "I've never said that. That's quite, quite misleading ... Nowhere did I suggest that Arthur thought they could wipe out the colony. That would be a silly thing to say."

But the reporter, Andrew Stevenson, was not so easily fobbed off. In his column on the November 30 he reported: "After confirming the allegation made [by Fabrication] last Friday, the Herald made several calls to the professor's office but he did not respond until six days later", when he admitted "a bad mistake. I obviously didn't know it existed, far from it that I had done it deliberately to distort the story. I was amazed when I saw it myself."

This was not the sort of attention this veteran media-manager was used to. It didn't take him long, however, to regain his footing. When Christopher Bantick of the Mercury, Hobart, tracked him down a few days later, his reaction to questions about Fabrication's claims was "both cautious and reflective". Bantick reported him triailing the following responses:

   The most obvious way to endeavour to destroy
   someone's argument is to allege that evidence has
   been mishandled ... What Windschuttle has done is
   ransack people's footnotes to see inconsistencies. I
   don't think he found much at all ... There are areas
   where we disagree with interpretation ... I think this
   detracts from the serious debate about the issues ...
   It's a bit disturbing ... outside the normal reach of
   scholarly interaction ... The mistake he found was,
   of course, embarrassing. It was a bit of bad
   craftsmanship on my behalf ... I must have copied
   it down inaccurately ... People are going to make
   raids on his footnotes ... he will be unpicked as well
   ... People tried to destroy Manning Clark because of
   his errors.

By the time Reynolds' review of Fabrication was published in the Weekend Australian in mid-December 2002 his strategy was set: dismissal of Windschuttle's scholarship on the one hand coupled with portents of his base political appeal on the other. Academia to be roused in solidarity, any public support for Windschuttle to be dismissed as ill-bred predilection, and positive reviews to be branded as politically motivated. But all depends on keeping the focus off the f words. An ongoing series of acknowledgments of the kind the Herald extracted could not be countenanced. On the other hand, as that experience, and twentieth-century politics taught, it's the cover-up that gets you. A fine line indeed to be walked, and much smoke to be blown as a screen.

Reynolds' review began: "THIS is it! Right-wing Australia has found its historian and a book that radically retells the history of Aboriginal-European relations." The review was a call to arms against this "audacious, combative, provocative" and "powerful polemic". An articulate outline of Fabrication's high points was presented, but reference to Fabrication's devastating f word allegations was screened behind acknowledgment that the book "successfully attacks some of the more outlandish stories ... that are widely circulated, more commonly overseas". The issue of the "mistake" (singular) that he had "admitted to" was deftly handled and a promise was made that Windschuttle's "scholarship will be rigorously examined and fully exposed to view. And this will happen sooner rather than later."

Vicious attacks poured forth from academics venting their rage at the apostate who dared to set foot on their turf--slander, threats, innuendo, impertinence, misrepresentations, race-card rhetoric and character assassination flowed. Three professors circulated a letter attacking newspapers for giving Windschuttle space when he had "no reputation as an historian" and a "twisted view of history". Others maliciously manipulated Windschuttle's words to impugn his scholarship, motivations, qualifications and veracity.

But that was only the "sooner" version, a bemused observer was free to suppose; the real scholarly attack was being held back for the promised book. Typical was the approach of Patricia Grimshaw, Professor of History at Melbourne University. In a debate with Windschuttle she spat a tirade of ad hominem and race-card emotionalism, and without countering one fact presented in Fabrication, she dismissed all of its f word revelations with one sentence to the effect that the accused historians would answer in time.

The orthodox school's time was up with the publication of Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History in August 2003. It is the official answer to Windschuttle's allegations. And Reynolds' answer to the discrediting revelations summarised above is: nothing!

When cornered by the Herald reporter the previous year, Reynolds had said: "I presume there are no more mistakes because Keith would have found them ... I must acknowledge [my mistake] and thank [Windschuttle] for pointing it out." Keith had found more mistakes, so more corrections and thankyous were due. But not one of the f word allegations sketched above are addressed in Whitewash, not by Reynolds nor by any of the book's authors. Some of the issues involved are referred to in general terms or mentioned in passing but no answers to the specific allegations are presented, no corrections made, no rebuttal provoked, no defence proffered, no concessions admitted, no withdrawals announced, no reasons explained, no importance acknowledged.

Reynolds wrote his chapter as if the allegations had never been made. Which demonstrates contempt not only for Windschuttle's readers, but for his own as well, not to mention his students, his university, and the Australian public. Reynolds' silence in this official answer to Fabrication tacitly admits that the allegations are all true, but implies that he expects us all to acquiesce to his professorial disdain, disregard his falsehoods, fictions, fabrications and fantasies, and focus our attention on what he decides we should.

No politician, CEO, public servant, journalist or shock-jock would get away with a betrayal of trust of the order implied by Fabrication's uncontested, unretracted, uncorrected, unacknowledged revelations.

RATHER THAN ANSWER Fabrication's allegations or deal with its main thesis, Reynolds tries to focus readers' attention on one eight-page section of the 472-page book, which is headed "Aboriginal Concepts of Land Ownership and Trespass", and its conclusion that the concept of land ownership was not part of the culture of the Tasmanian Aborigines. Reynolds narrows the focus even more by making a unilateral judgment that "the most powerful proposition we are presented with" for Windschuttle's conclusion is contained in the following quote:

   The Aborigines did not even have a word for [land].
   None of the four vocabularies of Tasmanian
   Aboriginal language compiled in the nineteenth
   century, nor any of the lists of their phrases,
   sentences or songs, contained the word "land".
   Nor do they have words for "own", "possess" or
   "property" or any of their derivatives.

Reynolds believes these three sentences, or more narrowly still, the proposition that the "Aborigines did not have a word for property" is seen to have "great discursive power". He wants his readers to believe this to be Windschuttle's "all-important" core issue on which much depends.

Reynolds' first argument against Windschuttle's evidence is a disingenuous appeal to ignorance. There is no guarantee, he asserts, that the nineteenth-century translators didn't miss the relevant words, so "for all we know" natives may have even named themselves after their homeland.

Second, he admonishes Windschuttle for "apparently" not consulting any "Aboriginal linguistics published in the twentieth century". In particular, the omission of "N.J.B. Plomley's 1976 book, A Word List of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Language" was "most serious", and he explains the implications as follows:

   At first sight [Plomley's list] would appear to support
   the Windschuttle position. There are no entries
   for "land", "property" or "possessions". But everything
   is not as it seems. When Aborigines talk about
   land, they most commonly referred to "country",
   hence we hear of "caring for country", "returning to
   country", "claiming country", "living on country"
   ... So where does this leave Windschuttle's claim
   that the Aborigines had no words relating to territory
   or ownership or possession? Clearly it cannot
   be sustained.

Which, Reynolds deduces, is why Windschuttle was "careful to keep from his readers" this information--evading the possibility that Windschuttle had consulted Plomley but had not arrived at Reynolds' creative conclusions.

All of which is a very nice try. Except that it misrepresents Windschuttle's argument, and leaves us wondering why, if the compilers of the Aboriginal vocabularies considered that land, own, possess or property were what the Aboriginal words they were translating really meant, none of them said so, rather than translating them into the "rubric" word country or one of its derivatives?

It also leaves us wondering how the word territory popped into: "Windschuttle's claim that the Aborigines had no words relating to territory or ownership or possession". Windschuttle doesn't deny the Aborigines had a conception of "territory" (or of "land" in that sense), or that the word country might be used to denote it. On page 105 of Fabrication he paraphrases Rhys Jones as follows: "Each band's territory occupied approximately 200 to 300 square miles, which was known as the 'country' of the band it belonged to". And the paragraph that precedes the three sentences that Reynolds quotes states:

   Overall, Robinson's diaries indicate that some
   Aborigines did identify themselves with certain
   territories to which they had an emotional affinity
   because of childhood and family connections ...
   Beyond this, however, there is no evidence from
   what we know of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture that
   they had a concept of what other societies know as
   "land" at all ... They certainly had the notion that
   the game and other fruits of the land belonged to
   them, as Chapter 2 discusses. But the idea of "land"
   itself as property is quite different and is a concept
   that derives from agricultural society, not that of
   hunter-gatherers.

Windschuttle's argument is not discredited by Reynolds' triumphant discovery of the Aboriginal word country--on the contrary it is supported by it, because country is not the synonym of land or property that Reynolds' "ideological clothing" or "personal feelings" want it to be.

"Country" according to the first definition in the Oxford English Dictionary is: "A tract or expanse of land of undefined extent; a region, district". (It is derived from contra, meaning against, opposite, that which lies opposite or fronting the view, the landscape spread out before one.)

"Land" according to the first definition in the Oxford English Dictionary is: "The solid portion of the earth's surface, as opposed to sea, water". (It is derived from the same root as the Irish lann and the Welsh llan, meaning enclosure, and the Breton lann, meaning heath.)

"Property" according to the first definition in the Oxford English Dictionary is: "The condition of being owned by or belonging to some person or persons". (It is derived from proprete, which is also the root of propriety, meaning "that which is proper".)

The Macquarie Dictionary definitions are similar. All three words denote an area of the earth's surface. But country in its primary sense denotes an area where someone resides; land in its primary sense denotes an area where someone uses the soil productively and permanently; and property, in its primary sense denotes an area (or other thing) that someone owns. There are contexts where these words can be used loosely as synonyms, but when used more precisely they mean three different things.

If all the lexicographers chose "country" as the English concept closest to the Aboriginal concept they were translating, rather than "land" or "property", they were clearly implying that the Aborigines were talking about a location where they or someone lived, rather than an area for permanent productive use or an area they owned. Reynolds presents no compelling evidence that by country the Aborigines meant anything other than what the translators said they meant. His insistence that all the interpreters who had the closest contact with the Aborigines took the same expedient of lumping the same three concepts under the same one word is backed by nothing but his wishful supposition.

Windschuttle's evidence, and Reynolds' as well, suggests that the Tasmanian Aborigines knew what territory or country they belonged to but knew nothing of land as property to be owned, because "such concepts were not part of their culture". Which is hardly surprising. What need would hunter-gatherers have for such concepts?

The fact that the Aborigines had no use for "land" as "property" that they "owned", is not "an axiom that is beyond argument"--it is identification of the reality. Concepts are not abstractions floating around in Alice's Wonderland available for attachment to whatever entities we choose--they have meanings, definitions and referents. And the particular referents of these particular concepts were nowhere to be found by those who observed the hunter-gatherers of Tasmania. The Tasmanian Aborigines had no more use for land, property and own than the European settlers had for assembly-line or website.

So much for Reynolds' demolition of the disingenuous straw man he creates by equating country/territory with land/property. To sustain this linguistic farce, Reynolds would have his readers believe that Windschuttle was ignorant of, or tried to hide, the Aborigines' conceptions of territories--conceptions that are analysea in Fabrication, of territories discussed repeatedly and even presented on a map.

HAVING SO DEALT with Windschuttle's "most, powerful" argument for his "all-important proposition, Reynolds brushes the strewn straw from his jumper and moves on to declare that:

   If the use of linguistic evidence leaves much to be
   desired, the treatment of the historical record is
   equally flawed. This is particularly so when
   Windschuttle comes to discuss the views about
   Aboriginal land ownership current among the
   colonists of the nineteenth century.

Reynolds accuses Windschuttle of denying the existence of any contemporary evidence that the Tasmanians had a sense of "territory or property" and of leaving out of Fabrication evidence to the contrary. To make this allegation stick, Reynolds relies again on the sleight-of-hand of coupling "territory" with "property". If he were to get away with it he could apply a characteristic of the former (it being of concern to the Aborigines), to the latter, and so "prove" that property was of concern to the Aborigines and that Windschuttle is wrong to imply their culture didn't recognise it. And since he believes he has gotten away with it that is exactly what he proceeds to do over the next six pages.

>From pages 114 to 120 of Whitewash Reynolds produces arguments and quotes to demonstrate that "territory" was of concern to the Aborigines as the place where they hunted and gathered and fought and lived; and that white men might be attacked in those areas, especially if the Aborigines thought they were being "driven off their kangaroo hunting grounds". None of which is likely to surprise Windschuttle, nor anyone else.

What none of Reynolds' quotes or arguments demonstrate, however, is any Aboriginal conception of any area being "land" for permanent or productive or exclusive use, or it being property that they owned. Which again is hardly surprising. Much of Reynolds' evidence supports Windschuttle's view that the Aborigines recognised territory (or "country"), or a concept close to its English meaning. None of it supports Reynolds' view that the Aborigines recognised "property" or any concept close to its English meaning, least of all the two quotes with the word property in them.

The best quote for Reynolds' case is that of Roderick O'Connor, who observed that Aboriginal hunting grounds were defended as tenaciously as the settlers' farms were. This certainly implies "the notion that the game and other fruits of the land belonged to them", as Fabrication puts it. But this attachment to "country" (or "land" when used in that sense) cannot be equated with post-Neolithic attachment to land which derives from the mixing of labour with the soil for the rewards that may be reaped months or years later--nor with the concept of property that flows from it, entailing distinct boundaries and exclusivity--nor with the concept of ownership that follows, entailing a system of government that protects property rights.

Whatever considerations hunting and gathering traditions may have afforded the Aborigines, Reynolds would not have been able to advance their cause had he been in Tasmania during the 1830s by mangling the English language to blur distinctions on paper that were perceptually inescapable in reality. But he feels free to mangle it today so as to render it malleable, like linguistic papier mache that may be shaped to support his political agenda--land rights for an extinct culture that knew neither land nor rights. Which would be dismissed as Humpty Dumpty nonsense, but who in academia dares to, and who outside of academia cares to?

Reynolds is used to getting away with any methodology that produces a politically correct outcome. The "high calling" of his profession, says Fabrication, has been corrupted in the name of the "vain and self-indulgent" declaration that "historians are free to impose their politics onto their scholarship". It is "a measure of the degradation of standards within our universities that its perpetrators not only get away with it without reproach but have no inhibitions about declaring that they are perfectly entitled to do so".

HAVING USED nearly half his "in general" chapter to attack a section of Fabrication that takes up less than 2 per cent of the book, Reynolds proceeds reluctantly to deal with the other 98 per cent.

On page 121 he asks rhetorically: "Was the Black War a serious matter of enemies in conflict or a police action aimed at 'saving the Aborigines from the consequences of their own actions'?" But instead of dealing with the evidence that Windschuttle produces in Fabrication, he simply reverts to his tried and untrue method of attributing Windschuttle's position to his alleged political ambitions. He also produces a number of references and quotations that demonstrate that the British frequently referred to hostilities on the front as "war", a point discussed in Fabrication, a point implicit in the term "Black War". A point however, that does not address Windschuttle's empirical evidence and argument that frontier violence in Tasmania lacked the fundamental characteristics of a two-sided war.

On page 125 of Whitewash Reynolds raises "the question of guerilla warfare, the subject which calls forth Windschuttle's scorn for historians who had imposed onto Aboriginal history 'an anachronistic and incongruous piece of ideology'". On this issue Reynolds puts up a credible defence. After analysing the etymology and historical applications of the word guerilla (some of which Fabrication discusses), he concludes that "there is, then, nothing anachronistic about referring to guerilla war in the 1820s, nor is there any incongruity in applying the term to Aboriginal patterns of resistance". His argument for the first of these conclusions is convincing. Given the use of the term through the centuries there seems no reason why it should not be used to describe a nineteenth-century Tasmanian action.

For Reynolds' second conclusion to be sustained however, he needs to do more than show that "guerilla war" is not an anachronism--he needs to demonstrate patterns of organised warfare that fit either a nineteenth-century or a modern definition. Against Windschuttle's argument that the Aborigines didn't attack soldiers or have political objectives, the best Reynolds can do is subjectively assert that Windschuttle's is a mere subjective judgment that many experts subjectively contradict And he concludes with his customary ad hominem speculation about Windschuttle's political motives, in this case that he wanted to deny the Aborigines the prestige of guerilla warriors.

What is most revealing about Reynolds' spirited, and partially successful, defence against the allegation that he used the term guerilla inappropriately, is the floodlight it switches on over the litany of much more serious allegations made against him in Fabrication that he completely ignores. If he had a shred of a defence against any of Fabrication's allegations it would have been presented in Whitewash, as his defence against the "guerilla" allegation was.

On page 127 Reynolds finally turns to the issue of the "Aboriginal death toll arising from conflict with Europeans", and as the orthodox reflex action demands, he attacks Windschuttle's thesis. But to do so while avoiding reference to Windschuttle's exposures of his own fabricated death tolls, Reynolds skips past this most serious issue in unseemly haste.

"It is little more than bravado for Windschuttle to assume that it is possible to account for every Aboriginal t death directly or indirectly caused by the Europeans during the period of the Black War,", he states. And maybe it would be if Windschuttle did so assume. Fabrication does make a statement that sounds similar, but it doesn't include the words "or indirectly" and does include the words: "for which there is any plausible record of some kind" at the end. It also invites additions to be made to the tally lest any had been missed.

But leaving aside Reynolds' misrepresentation, what evidence or argument does he present for his "little more than bravado" assertion? After a brief discussion of population decline and unrecorded killings that avoids mentioning his equivocation on population figures and his fabrications of killings, he moves on to assert on page 128 that Windschuttle:

   fails to deal adequately with the large amount of
   testimony throughout the early years of settlement
   from many sectors about the activities of stockmen,
   sealers, bushrangers and escaped convicts. The
   armed and usually mounted stockmen who
   inhabited the outer fringes of settlement and the
   sealers living on the Bass Strait Islands were almost
   universally reputed to be the main destroyers of the
   Aborigines. There seems no compelling reason to
   doubt that this was the case. In fact it is hard to find
   anyone who argued this was not so. And it is not as
   though the matter wasn't constantly discussed in
   official documents, in letters of the settlers, and in
   newspaper articles. There are literally dozens, if not
   hundreds, of references to the murderous attacks by
   the "borderers" as they were called. There is much
   more circumstantial evidence about ruthless attacks
   on the Aborigines than exists to support many of
   Windschuttle's propositions about frontier conflict.

Finally, Whitewash readers may gasp, we have a worthy response to the serious issue of Aboriginal deaths at the hands of whites. We can now expect, in the next paragraphs, pages, chapters of Whitewash, to become acquainted with the "dozens, if not hundreds", of references to these murderous attacks that Fabrication ignores. The faith of Reynolds' followers is about to be rewarded. The scepticism of Reynolds' critics is about to be rebuffed. Reynolds' scorn of Windschuttle's death-toll hypothesis is about to be vindicated. Here come dozens, hundreds of accounts of murderous attacks, implying hundreds of probable murders of Aborigines over and above Windschuttle's tally of 120. Reynolds' next sentence reads: "Space forbids any more than a brief reference to the extensive literature."

How is a reader supposed to react at this juncture? With laughter? With disgust? For whom does Reynolds write such a sentence? For his faithful fans--on the assumption that they are so gullible, or uninterested in the truth? For Windschuttle's fans--on the assumption that nothing he presents would persuade them anyway? Does he insult both groups of readers, and those who are in neither category, those who are still trying to decide who to believe? Does he insult our intelligence or our integrity or both?

The Aboriginal death toll at the hands of whites is the most important and controversial topic raised by the book that Whitewash purports to answer. But Reynolds would have his readers believe that, after using most of his "in general" chapter on tangential issues and fantasies, he can find no space for this evidence--no way to shorten other chapters of dubious relevance to make space--no way to squeeze in even a sprinkling of this vital data so as to stomp Windschuttle's death-toll thesis out once and for all. This is what Reynolds pretends to expect his readers to pretend they believe.

"Space forbids any more than a brief reference to the extensive literature", states Professor Reynolds. This is it:

   Governor Arthur observed in a dispatch to the
   colonial office in 1828 that on arrival in the colony
   he found that "the quarrel of the natives with the
   Europeans" was "daily aggravated, by every kind of
   injury committed against the defenceless Natives,
   by the stock keepers and sealers, with whom it was
   a constant practice to fire on them whenever they
   approached".

      The Aborigines Committee also dealt with the
   question and took testimony from persons of "long
   residents in the colony" who explained that the
   Tasmanians had been "sacrificed in many instances
   to moments of caprice or anger". Windschuttle's
   response to the committee's findings about the
   brutality of convicts and bushrangers is quite
   characteristic. The report, he noted, found that they
   were "probably guilty of a number of atrocities".
   To argue that many Aborigines were not killed in
   unrecorded clashes overlooks a huge body of
   circumstantial evidence and suggests that large
   numbers of reputable columnists were suffering
   from collective delusion.

      There are other serious problems with
   Windschuttle's calculations of Aboriginal deaths.

Thus endeth Reynolds' evidence of hundreds of murders. In case readers can't quite believe that what is presented here is Reynolds' entire verbatim testimony or this issue, they may find it on page 129 of Whitewash >From all the accounts that he says he know Windschuttle ignores, he presents the one forty-wore excerpt quoted above, taken from Shaw's Van Diemen's Land. It is no more evidence of killings than any number of quotes Fabrication presents and analyses from similar sources. To bolster it, Reynolds follows with a quote from the Broughton committee's report, a work he disdainfully evades as an advocate of "the compulsion of savagery" when it suits him.

Having squandered nearly half a page on the evidence of hundreds of murders that Reynolds says were "constantly discussed in official documents, in letters of the settlers, and in newspaper articles", he has no space for more examples and moves to "other serious problems": injured Aborigines, the disruption of Aboriginal communities by roving parties, sexual abuse and kid napping; which fill the next six pages without straying into waters infested with death tolls or Fabrication' unanswered allegations.

WHENEVER THEIR CASE feels too shaky, there is always one fallacy the orthodox school can rely on to deflect culpability onto Windschuttle: the appeal to pity. So it is after touching the hot plate of the death toll issue, that Reynolds finds reason to quote Bonwick and Wes lamenting the sorry state of the Aborigines on their way to Flinders Island. "The Victorian prose might be unfashionable," he concludes, "but both Bonwick and West show the capacity for empathy and compassion so conspicuous by its absence in the pitiless prose of Keith Windschuttle."

The thought that Bonwick and West were showing empathy and compassion for living, breathing human beings of their acquaintance in need of urgent help; whereas the prose of Windschuttle's history books are about people who have been dead for over 150 years, none of whom were known to anyone now living, seems not to occur to Reynolds. Nor does it seem to occur to him that a history book's mandate is to tell what happened dispassionately, and it is entirely appropriate to let the reader decide what emotions should be applied to the facts.

It is not a fallacy to express pity. It is, however, the fallacy of "argumentum ad misericordiam" to use it as a substitute for an argument, a deflection of attention from the facts, or a means of evading an opponent's case. The way Reynolds and his colleagues use it so frequently can be nothing more than a cynical attempt to evade facts and tap society's subterranean reservoir of guilt in an attempt to bolster their moral authority. Just as the medieval priesthood harnessed the doctrine of original sin, so the orthodox brotherhood of today's ivory tower harnesses the doctrine of "white man's guilt".

In Tasmania the hypocrisy of the orthodox brotherhood's use of the appeal to pity, and of "reconciliation", is exposed. The campaign to have up to half of the state handed over to bodies such as the Tasmanian Aboriginal Land Council and Indigenous Land Corporation cannot possibly be motivated by justice for the pitiable dispossessed, because there are no desperate blacks to play the part of victimised recipients of white atonement. Reynolds knows this better than most--he grew up in Tasmania without ever seeing an Aborigine until he travelled to Brisbane as an adult.

The Tasmanians making land claims are much more white than Aboriginal, and are the very whites who descended from the very "invaders" whose actions are supposed to be reconciled. In a Four Corners interview of August 2002, orthodox historian and Whitewash author Cassandra Pybus admitted that the "wonderful irony" in Tasmania is that "in order to claim you're Aboriginal, you've got to have a family tree that goes back to the 1830s which means that your ancestors are the very pioneers ... who have got rid of the Aboriginal people in the first place".

Irony is one word for it. Travesty is another. But the most appropriate word is: farce. Tasmanian native title is a farce such as Alice might expect to find in Wonderland. A vast land grab is made by white "Aborigines" for the alleged purpose of restoring their "cultural identity" with a tiny part of their ancestry, real or imagined, who were allegedly displaced by the larger part of their ancestry. Their sense of "identity" with the extinct culture of their landless nomadic ancestors can be restored only via ownership of land, on which they can hold a festival from time to time. For this purpose much of Tasmania is to be locked away from post-Neolithic developers and productive individuals of any colour, in perpetuity.

Apart from the "sense of well being" the claimants gain from watching the weeds grow on native title land that capitalist exploiters can't get their hands on, what ideals are the claimants and their mentors striving to achieve? The "grandiose notion of Aboriginal Nations" as Bill Hayden calls it? Do any claimants seriously want to establish an autonomous nation within the Australian state, restore the Aboriginal hunter-gatherer culture, and live off the land with or without their clothes? Or, like Rousseau, who damned civilisation for robbing him of the ability to eat acorns, will they damn McDonald's for robbing them of the inclination to eat witchetty grubs, and demand that those who don't damn capitalism supply them its benefits?

There was a time when the academic's charter was the discovery of objective truth, the defense of civilisation, the advancement of the culture, and the betterment of human lives. Whatever their disagreements, academics agreed that their method was reason, and their purpose was discovery and progress. Even those infected by the Marxist epidemic that swept the universities in the twentieth century maintained that their smashing of capitalist eggs was justified for the sake of the utopian omelette they were creating. When the stench of rotting omelettes could no longer be ignored most of them abandoned omelette making; but many were so addicted to egg smashing that they made of it an end in itself, requiring no human advance as its justification.

Reynolds and many of the authors and supporters of Whitewash are of this Left-over inclination. They are effective polemicists and activists, but are no longer for any realisable advance, only against--against the British "invasion", the admiration of Western culture, the despoiling of the country by agriculture, the exploitation of the country by industry, "individualistic-aspirationalism" and so on. They can tell us what is bad--all that provides every life-sustaining benefit they take for granted--but what is the good they project as their ideal? Their multiculturalism is against cross-cultural evaluation, their egalitarianism against superiority, their environmentalism against progress, but these are negative ideologies, they don't project any ideal society. The 1969-style academics are postmodern, but pro-nothing. If what they are striving to achieve could be called an ideal, it might best be called The Nullius Ideal.

AS FORCEFUL as Reynolds' chapter is, it neither counters the revelations of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, nor projects any just cause or positive goal worth fighting for. Reynolds is the orthodox school's champion, he commands its power, its prestige, its resources, its scholarship, its experience, its eloquence and he is desperate to "unpick" Fabrication, but he comes up empty-handed and nonplussed and in several places he loses the plot completely. Until suddenly, on page 133, with three pages to go, as if the sight of the finishing line, or the exit door, gives him a shot of adrenalin, the tone of his polemic changes.

With the bumbling about quotes, manoeuvring around no-go areas, bothering over pseudo-proofs and manipulation of data all behind him, a more confident, strident polemicist finally emerges. Freed from the constraints of providing evidence, examples, references, or connections to anything discussed in his chapter, Reynolds is in his element and he lets fly with a cathartic tirade.

Windschuttle is: "biased", "cantankerous", "vilifying", "combative", "egregious"; he "air-brushes", "filters", "confuses", "tumble[s] over" himself and "forgets what he said before"; he can't deal with "complexities", "subtleties" or "characterisation"; he makes "mere assertions, which the reader is expected to take on trust because he fills up his text with detail ... much of it irrelevant". Yes, this is Reynolds describing Windschuttle! And one quote more: "if this is what he really thinks, we can only look on in amazement at the entire absence of self-reflection". Spooky, isn't it? But any similarity between Reynolds' characterisation of Windschuttle and anyone he knows more intimately is best left between him and his psychiatrist.

With one page to go Reynolds finally says something, albeit obliquely, about the allegations made by Fabrication regarding his methods. Like a slap of defiance before bolting for the door, he mocks his image of Windschuttle struggling heroically for truth against an "intellectual junta" of "rascals" who are "guilty of fraud, malpractice, fabrication, deception and suppression of information". He doesn't explain why the image is inaccurate--presumably space doesn't permit. But it is inaccurate--"rascals" is not the right word.

John Dawson contributed "The Catches of Whitewash" to the May edition. A fully footnoted version of this article is available from the Quadrant office.