books
15 Feb 2010
The Culture Wars Are Over — And Here's The Proof
Late last year Keith Windschuttle released another book questioning the existence of the stolen generations. But this time, nobody cared, writes Naomi Parry
Very few people would be aware that Keith Windschuttle released volume three of his series The Fabrication of Aboriginal History in December last year. As Robert Manne observed in his review of the book in The Monthly, it arrived to only the most "strangely muffled fanfare from his friends".
This fanfare has consisted of some blog puffery by Janet Albrechtsen and Andrew Bolt and limited coverage in The Australian, which published an article in December claiming Rabbit Proof Fence was grossly inaccurate, and, this month, an article by Imre Salusinszky and an extract from the book which was uncharacteristically balanced by a very decent-sized response by Manne. Michael Duffy did invite Windschuttle onto Radio National’s Counterpoint but Manne appearing the next night on Phillip Adams’s Late Night Live balanced that. It would seem the most reliable media combatants have done their duty, but half-heartedly, so you have to wonder, what will be the impact of this book?
Windschuttle’s argument, as Manne spells out, is that there was no stolen generation, because although substantial numbers of children were removed, they were taken for reasons that applied to white children in welfare and they were treated the same as those children. I suppose this book must have been at the printers when the Rudd Government issued its second (and as I argued here at newmatilda.com, belated) apology to child migrants and the forgotten Australians, but the second apology undermines his argument that Aboriginal people have no grounds for complaint and means the book was out of date even before it was published.
The person most viciously attacked in this book is Peter Read who exposed child removal policies in a 1981 pamphlet written for the NSW Government called The Stolen Generations. Read and Coral Edwards, who grew up in the Cootamundra Girls Home, formed Link-Up NSW and worked through Aborigines Welfare Board and Youth and Community Services records to help families and children reunite. The Stolen Generations came out of that work, and Windschuttle claims it underpinned the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission report Bringing them Home, so attempts to eviscerate it, calling it "advocacy research". (I acknowledge here that Peter Read was one of the markers of my thesis which was about black and white child welfare in NSW and Tasmania.)
Windschuttle slashes Read’s estimate of the numbers of Aboriginal children removed from 5000 to 2600, but that is because he only counts children mentioned in Aborigines Protection Board records. As all historians working in the field know, younger Aboriginal children who were considered able to pass as white were dealt with by the State Children’s Relief Department (SCRD), not the Board. A sense of their numbers can be gleaned from the 1915 SCRD Annual Report in which the president complained he had 80 children from Aboriginal camps who were, in his view, absolutely unfit to live with white children. At this time, the Board had no more than 120 children under its direct control, but if you add the 80, it is easy to see that Read’s estimates are far more robust than Windschuttle would have anyone believe.
Windschuttle is at his most outrageous, and egregious, when he writes about Aboriginal apprenticeships. His apparently devastating insight that 66 per cent of children in the Board’s records were in fact teenaged apprentices has already been established by dozens of researchers, including Inara Walden, Heather Goodall, Victoria Haskins and myself. He claims that the practice was a supported employment scheme like Therese Rein’s disability placement enterprises and argues that, although the Board wanted to close down reserves and remove children permanently, it failed to do so, and in fact acted as a "country employment agency".
I also have to dispute Windschuttle’s claim that Aboriginal children were treated the same as white children. Although there were superficial similarities between the apprenticeships of black and white children, the Board’s systems were unique. Aboriginal children were not inspected regularly or even given the same legal protections until at least the 1940s, by which time apprenticeship as domestic servants was almost unheard of for white children.
Windschuttle presents himself as a master of evidence but then hypocritically dispenses with it when it suits him. On page 121 he argues that Aboriginal people supported this policy and saw the Board as protector of their children, yet provides no footnote and no source while dismissing incidents of Aboriginal protest at child removal recorded in the Board’s own minute books. He says the Aboriginal activist William Ferguson must have supported the Board because he served on it in the period 1940 to 1950. In fact, Ferguson told a 1937 government inquiry that the apprenticeship system was "very close to slavery". Windschuttle cites this report elsewhere but does not mention that fact, and if he had read the Board’s minutes of the 1940s, he would have found just how often Ferguson was threatened with suspension and condemned by his fellow Board members for attacking their policies.
I could go on, but in a sense, the detail matters little. What does matter is the question of motivation and it is here that I have to admit I feel a sense of satisfaction from knowing that I can finally be sure what drives Keith Windschuttle. In a nutshell, it is class envy, resentment of the academy, racism and a fervent desire that the policies of old should live again today.
You can see class envy when he writes that the grade three education offered at Aboriginal schools was like his own state school in the knockabout western Sydney suburb of Canterbury, while pointing out snidely that Read attended an elite north shore private school, Knox Grammar. His attacks on academic historians are disgustingly personal. He hates them most for receiving "six figure salaries" from publicly funded universities and informing government policy. As the editor of a national (publicly funded journal), who sits on the board of a cherished public institution (the ABC) and has considerable personal wealth (including his own printing press), he is in no position to attack them for receiving public funds.
Is it just that he hates them for occupying the ivory towers he once rejected?
I don’t think so. Windschuttle could have chosen any number of topics and any number of historians to have a go at but he chose Aboriginal history. He bends over backwards to repudiate any sense of Aboriginal will or consciousness, let alone self-determination. He writes that Aboriginal people were not bothered by child removal until Read put the idea into their heads. Link-Up’s three decades of dedicated support of people seeking their families is dismissed as an Aboriginal industry, started by a white man (Coral Edwards’s work, as a black woman, is ignored). Aboriginal writers like Margaret Tucker have misremembered the past because white people with political motives influenced them. Sally Morgan’s grandmother’s stories matter much less than stories told by her grandmother’s employer. This is the racism.
But, ultimately, I think what drives Keith Windschuttle is nostalgia. He has no expertise in Aboriginal policy yet has firm views on the abolition of outstations, spelled out in this transcript of Counterpoint from 2004. He appears to long for a time when it was acceptable to talk about forcing Aboriginal people to live a different way so he writes the present into the past, telling a story of how the Board realised its efforts to provide welfare to Aboriginal people had failed and the traditional ways were gone, so it benevolently removed young people from their nasty home lives, to the cities, where they might learn the ways of modern industrialised nations.
Read closely, this book is nothing more than a paean to the Northern Territory Intervention. Windschuttle is himself trying research advocacy but he’s not very good at it, he’s left his run too late and I hope the lacklustre response proves his advocacy is redundant.
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So Krudd and Macklin may be fans of Windschuttle? How else can they explain their treatment of Indigenous peoples in the NT, so much as K.Windschuttle would wish it.
Macklin said last night that she consulted thousands of Aboriginal WOMEN in scheming up her plan for continuing the Howard Govt. Invasion and scrapping of Human Rights.
Really??? I very much doubt it. And Aboriginal Men seem to have been very much ignored by this Minister, in her hatred of all things male. Her hatred now extends to all things Aboriginal.
Perhaps Macklin and Krudd read Windschuttle’s books!
Perhaps her and Krudd’s treatment of Indigenous Peoples may have just a tad of something to do with the decreasing Public support for Krudd and Co. in the polls. Because all their policies are a total failure. So much for Change!
And the fact that Windschuttle is still on the ABC Board is a crying shame, shame that can only be shafted to Krudd and ‘Control’ Conroy, and their Right Wing Religious fervour.
Probably there are quite a few buyers of Windschuttle’s books in the Krudd Government. Would not surprise me in the slightest.
Certainly his Authoritarian desires and wishes have been taken up by Krudd and Co. , in spades!
But, I am NOT arguing for a return of the Howard Heavies under the Mad Monk! That would be really a disastrous road.
If Windshuttle is worried about his $ value then maybe he should give up on history and try climate change denialism. The money is better and he already has the major techniques down pat.
Hi Naomi, well and bravely put. You could also mention Peter Read’s other book “A rape of the soul so profound” (1999), also about the stolen generations.
To criticise Peter as Windschuttle seems to have done is really nasty, even for Windschuttle. I remember Link-Up getting going. Peter was ensuring that Coral was running the show, and that he was there simply to add research skills. In my experience he was always self-effacing, never big-noting himself or looking for kudos, just trying to help Aboriginal people get at the truth. A thoroughly nice scholar and gentleman.
I haven’t been able to read any Windschuttle since the first one, a subject I know a bit about, and found him cherry-picking, choosing stuff that illustrated his ideology.
I always saw him as part of the push by the Right to get control of the past. They firstly tried to destroy Manning Clark, and at least marginalised his work. Then Blainey became even more overtly involved in politics, and then, with Geoffrey aging they needed someone to pick up the torch and continue attacking “left-wing historians” and rewriting the past in a way that would suit Howard’s white armband Australian past. Dr Windschuttle was willing and able to be the Right wing gadfly, and he has been well-rewarded.
Perhaps someone wanted more of Keith Windschuttle. I was listening to ABC Radio National yesterday afternoon, between 3 and 4pm. Well, sort of listening, catching bits here and there.
Caught what really seemed to be either Windschuttle or a carbon copy of him, involved in some sort of talk-back show.
When I caught it, he was not getting it all his own way, but still had his denialist garbage down pat, still working hard on behalf of his mate JWH, who rewarded him so well.
Perhaps, with The Mad Monk, a religious follower of JWH still, KW has found a fellow traveller, and wants to assist him.
I think we have not heard the worst from TA yet. As he goes further into the past, where he is most comfortable, he may dredge up a lot more filth that even JWH may have drawn the line at, because TA does seem to have no moral or ethical qualms whatsoever in his pursuit of destroying the Krudd Government. With the Krudd Government so very close to the Howard Govt. in all its actions and with so many retained Howard cronies in high and influential positions, with policies so very close to the Howard ones, TA will have to move even further to the Lunar Right, perhaps even excelling the NSW Labor right, or for that matter the Far Right Religious NSW Liberals.
All assistance towards these ends will be happily accepted by TA.
Naomi, shouldn’t the volume in question be number TWO in the projected series of three? If it is number three then number two must have sunk on launching.
http://noahsarc.wordpress.com/kangaroos-thylacines-and-aborigines-1/
He apparently skipped number two because he thought it was more important to get the proposed number three out first. Why the originally planned numbering system was kept is probably a chronological thing. Hopefully number two will now die a natural death.
Excellent, humane article by Naomi Parry.
2 key propositions buttress humanitarian indignation over what must be called a continuing Aboriginal Genocide in an Apartheid Australia - one is that “all men are created equal and have an unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and the other is the legal definition of Genocide in International Law as set out in Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention: ““In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
For a detailed compendium of analyses about the ongoing “acts committed with intent to destroy” unique Indigenous Australian people (9,000 avoidable deaths annually out of a 0,5 million population) and cultures (50 languages left out of 250 in 1788) see “Aboriginal Genocide”: http://sites.google.com/site/aboriginalgenocide/ .
Of course for decent anti-racist Australians, wringing their hands is not enough - we must hold the Apartheid Labor Party responsible. My family was ethnically cleansed from Hungary in1944-1945 and my consequent (surely understandable) position of “zero tolerance for racism” means “Australian People Put Apartheid Labor Last” (APPALL).
Of course the Lib-Nats of the dominant Lib-Lab duopoly are just as bad - but I have obtained expert advice from one of Australia’s top corporate strategists that in 2010 the fundamental rule should be “punish the incumbent” (otherwise you are simply saying “Business As Usual” or BAU, the Indonesian word for “smell”).
I do my duty to Australia by informing the world about the continuing Aboriginal Genocide in Apartheid Australia (NT Aboriginals are excluded by race-based legislation from the protection of the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act). Thus I have made a Formal Complaint to the International Criminal Court (ICC) over Australian involvement in an ongoing Aboriginal Genocide (as well as other ongoing genocidal atrocities): http://sites.google.com/site/aboriginalgenocide/9-january-2010-formal-co… .
Peace is the only way but Silence kills and Silence is complicity.
Yes both black and poor white children were removed. The difference was that every action was taken to stop black children from having any communication with their parents or community. As being farmed out as domestic and farm hands with no rights and everything controlled including their money was reserved for the black children. This is not much different from many of the intervention today. There was no action taken to improve the conditions within the family home. Full blacks were left alone. I have deliberately use the term blacks, as this was how they were seen. I do not use this term today as it is very insulting and as t happened to them was. No amount of denying what happened will change the horror done to these people.
Isn’t it time we had either an orthographical ban or straight censorship of people whon refer to our Prime Minister as Krudd? It’s just so tiresome and shallow and banal. At least “Lying Rodent” had some solid foundation to it. And the Rodent offered the greatest endorsement of Keith Windschuttle, “The Daily Telegraph”, Alan Jones and that forgotten Polish republican who poses as an english gentleman. Oh well, you can’t win them all. Some are still to be forgotten.
Well done! Thank you Naomi, you are very much across these issues. But dont expect a rsponse - Windschuttle is no academic, he takes the opportunity to ignore issues raised by his detractors if he cant meet their argument and so does not enter into a dialogue which is of course what history-making is about. He did not respond to this article for example http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/lab/85/grieves.html
Dazza the program that you heard is AWAYE! on ABC Radio national hosted by Daniel Browning and by the end of this Windschuttle was silenced - joy to the ears! It is worth listening to the whole program. I thought that Professor Gordon Briscoe’s points were particularly telling http://www.abc.net.au/rn/awaye/
Where is volume 2? it was supposed to be about the fabrication of Aboriginal history in NSW, LOL it may well be a fizzer as you suggest.
Dr Polydori, what a PC old woman you are with your raving about genocide.
The tyranny of distance and look the other way Terra Australia: people dismissing as “raving” serious concerns about genocide as documented by medical epidemiologists and as defined by the UN Genocide Convention go to gaol for up to 10 years in Austria if their comments relate to minimizing the WW2 Jewish Holocaust.
Peace is the only way but Silence kills and Silence is complicity.
Gideon, you are right about genocide occurring in Australia. My own research (see link in my comment above) indicates that by about 1860 most children being born to Aboriginal mothers were being sired by white fathers, and that any ‘full-blood’ Aboriginal male’s chances of becoming a father at all were diminishing to zero in the areas of white settlement. I conclude from this fact that there was differential mortality among young ‘full-blood’ black males as against black females. A reason comes readily to mind, and in my view blows Windschuttle out of the water.
Therefore, given the history of race relations in this country, it does not surprise me that apartheid is the reality west of the Dividing Range, and that rather than being imposed on them by the whites, it comes from the Aborigines themselves. Generally, they don’t want integration, education, or the nuclear-family-based living offered them by white Australia. And who can blame them?
Ian, your information about Aboriginal male disempowerment and exclusion is consonant with Germaine Greer’s analysis in her incisive book “Rage” (for a review see: http://sites.google.com/site/bookreviewsbydrgideonpolya/greer-germaine ).
In short, Germaine Greer argues that over 2 centuries of disempowerment, dispossession, discrimination, defamation, sexual abuse, marginalization and active and passive murder – a huge burden of violent White Australian racism that continues to this day - has left many disempowered Indigenous Australian males helpless and angry and that this has contributed to substance abuse (alcohol, petrol sniffing, drugs) and violence (notably violence to women and children) in impoverished Aboriginal communities.
The abuse of Aboriginal men by White Australia was compounded by the sexual abuse of Aboriginal women by white Australians that continues to this day. Aboriginal men were not only disempowered in their own land but also in their own social groups through White sexual enslavement of aboriginal women – noting that Indigenous Australians had evolved the most elaborate partner selection systems in a remarkable adaptation to the need to minimize in-breeding in small tribal groups.
Some relevant current statistics are quoted by Dr Germaine Grreer in her well-referenced book, thus (p74):”Fewer than half of the self-identified Aboriginal and Torres Straights Islander families are likely to be headed by an Aboriginal or Islander male. According to the 1996 census, Aboriginal women were almost as likely to be married to or cohabiting with a non-Aboriginal man as with an Aboriginal man”
Peace is the only way but Silence kills and Silence is complicity.
Gideon: The disempowerment of modern Aboriginal men I see as an echo of the events (mainly in the 19th C) which enabled white men to step into those Aboriginal mens’ ancestries. A major part of the modern problem is the fact that every male Aboriginal child who resulted from the normal white male x black female mating had a father who was in no position to pass to his son the knowledge and skills making up Abriginal male enculturation, and commonly not interested in contact of any sort, thus placing the ‘half-caste’ boy in a cultural no man’s land familiar in the literature of anthropology. Only an ever-decreasing number of ‘full-blood’ Aboriginal boys received proper enculturation. And once the chain was broken, there was no way to fix it. The ‘half-castes’ and all their male descendants simply carried this non-enculturation on.
Added to this of course was the other major factor of there being no place for Aboriginal hunter-gatherers in the white pastoral economy, save as (for males) lowly paid and poverty stricken station hands and stockmen and (for females) similarly rewarded domestic help. (One should add the observation here that the female housemaids were commonly subject to sexual predation by their white bosses.) The traditional Aboriginal hunter-gatherer lifestyle could not be continued on white-owned lands.
As there were no ‘half-caste’ boys resulting from white female x black male matings, the possibility of such a ‘half-caste’ boy none the less receiving the full enculturation from his black father was irrelevant.
This situation only came about in the first place thanks to the fact that so many young Aboriginal men were eliminated from the Aboriginal breeding population in the areas of white settlement in the 19th and early 20th centuries. A major contributing factor was the huge imbalance of the sexes in the white populations of the 19th C Australian colonies. The elimination was achieved, not to put too fine a point on it, by murder of black ‘full-blood’ males by white males, and in sufficient numbers to not only cause the rise of the ‘mixed-blood’ population to dominance in Tasmania, Victoria and NSW, so that they became ‘the Aborigines’ but also to make it an attractive option for black women to seek safety by shacking up with a white man; the situation portrayed by Ted Egan in his celebrated song ‘The Drover’s Boy’, and carried out by the Tasmanian Aboriginal women (with Bass Strait sealers) from whom the greater part of the modern Tasmanian population identifying itself as Aboriginal is descended.
As far as I can see, no other explanation fits the facts. Certainly not the white-armband denialism touted by Windschuttle in his books on the alleged ‘falsification of Aboriginal history’. (Interestingly though, the latter does team up rather well with the climate change (AGW) denialism he markets through ‘Quadrant’.)