What I have seen, (The Age and the Australian), straight and fair.
There is nothing new to be revealed, and as has already been said, Wilson’s identity doesn’t really add much to the import of the fact that the hoax was possible and so easily carried out.
I imagine as a news story this will now fade. Windschuttle’s one-liner in the Age indicates that he certainly hopes so.
In the longer term, those involved and perhaps the academics will have to work out what it all means, and what the implications are.
5 Comments
The SMH was very flattering to Katherine Wilson I thought with nice big picture story promoting Green Roof Australia. A great initiative by the way. I’ve been meaning to write on it via clips etc. And if memory serves The Oz quoting her father alot was also a nice touch in keeping with their patriarchical Murdoch leanings. But The Oz were putting an angle on it with their headline about her being a cultural/gmo “warrior”. That is to portray as axe grinder to be read down accordingly, that she didn’t have ‘real’ points of principle to make.
Keep in mind WindThrottle is on the ABC Board our premier cultural institution. He wants this to go away desperately. THAT is the political dimension. He should resign.
So do the conservatives at The Oz want it to fizzle, the fact WindThrottle demands but can’t meet his own academic standards. People forget the Howard Years hurt alot of people. Alot. And Windthrottle was part of that machine. That’s why they hid it away on page 4 far margin. SMH went even page too but big summery size and picture. That says alot. Like goodbye John Howard, ousted from Bennelong for good measure.
Let the fangs of the left have their prey, it’s the Darwinism The Oz itself would approve, as per big Rupert’s ‘be prepared for competition’ in the next age.
Sitting up here in phnom penh i have really enjoyed windschuttles embarrassment.I have always viewed him as a useless windbag with nothing good to contribute to australian history except ridiculous denial.
I have worked on building sites all over australia for most of my life and i think that I have a much more rounded view of history than windbaggle.
My user name seems to have generated a life of its own and that is another story.
I have been posting as mr latham on blogs and sites for many years and up here in phnom penh where i reside i am often addressed as mr latham.
In 1998 I heard latham on the radio in parliament claiming that the east timorese were better off under indonesian rule than governing themselves.
I sent latham an incendiary fax message which resulted in him calling me on my mobile in perth one saturday morning.His language would have been considered extreme by most but as a building worker just par for the course really.He said that my fax was the most abusive that he had ever received-beauty I thought.
And he said that I should never fax him again and then hung up.
I would have loved to have had a discussion but he didnt give me the opportunity.I dobbed him in to a west australian journo who then pursued him all weekend.
Eventually he denied saying what he had said-pretty weak I thought.
So I have used his name ever since-thanks mark.
My arrival at Crikey began with the Gould Hoax Quadrant article – congratulations to Katherine Wilson for managing to get a snippet of GM into The Age.
I’m a member of the MADGE network (Mothers are Demystifying Genetic Engineering) http://www.madge.org.au
Faced with the quandrary of media reporting on GM issues I did what everyone must eventually do – find out who owns and runs Australian media.
Being a Victorian I had to ask “What’s going on at the The Age?” and now I know. Thought it was time to find some alternative media
Very much enjoyed Katherine Wilson’s Overland article on PR man Ross Irvine, so wasn’t surprised about the Sharon Gould identity – would’ve had to know something about GM to put that article together.
I think the most likely response is we will see a host of imitators coming through. Editors beware.
I doubt it will end up a significant dot point in the intellectual history of the times, though anything it does to send up a petty man like Windschuttle is probably of merit.
Those who read his histories (and the many more who do so because they feel forced to) will probably not change their views of the man’s own work, but his media career may suffer somewhat.
Still lively and fun. No real harm done or intended, and the outer layer of a public gas bag somewhat punctured. A nice Aussie story to start the year with.
Thanks must go however to journalists for covering and dissecting it. If nothing else it helps remind the wider public there are still some forums for intellectual debate in this country, even if in a weak state.
I was banned from Andrew Bolt’s website and told by his acolytes that I have no place on a conservative blog, but do not wish to be shoehorned into ideological boxes of left, right or anything else. Too many people judge their position on Windshuttle, Wilson or any other subject depending on whether they see themselves as left or right.
The essential issue and my guiding principles are intellectual integrity, honesty and judging issues on the evidence. The assumption that others held these values cost me my career, and it took a NSW District Court judge to point out my folly when he said “Dr Shehan, the weakest part of your case is that no sensible person would act as you have done.” He got an earful from me along the lines of “Well excuse me for thinking that integrity and the facts mean anything…” I was acquitted and even the prosecutor saw what was going on and the arresting police officer shook my hand at the conclusion of the trial, but my scientific career was destroyed and I was left with a diagnosed condition of Post Traumatic Stress disorder. (My crime had been to call into question the conduct of the head and staff of a research unit. Counter claims were made against me by these people. It did not occur to me at the time that the politically correct notion that women are the victims, never the perpetrators would rule out any objective examination of the evidence.)
Having lost one career I was retraining as a teacher, but while in a tutorial I was attacked by two people as a bigot and a racist for stating that the life expectancy in advanced industrial countries is twice that of hunter gatherer societies. It is enough to decide that an argument is not helpful to or elicit sympathy for aborigines to bring about this sort of thing. Stating that I was of partial aboriginal descent only increased the attack.
As a scientist and scholar who believes in integrity and honesty (being a fetishist I had also studied toward a graduate diploma in History and Philosophy of science while working as a scientist) I have yet to see Windshuttle’s critics refute his well researched and presented argument that historians exaggerated and fabricated aspects of history. Apparently it is enough to decide he is right wing and say that he is just “nitpicking” or having a fetish about footnotes.
The activities of the historians involved are a disgrace. Original sources are to historians what scientific data is to scientists. Misrepresenting such cited sources is the equivalent of manufacturing and doctoring data in science. The fact that having been so exposed, these people still have their careers and cheer squads whereas a scientist would be forever tainted is a disturbing comment on scholarship in the humanities.
It is interesting that Margaret Simons appears to have been in on the fraud. I began to read her book The Meeting of the Waters on “secret women’s business” and the Hindmarsh Island affair. The irony is that Wilson and Simons say that Windshuttle should have been alerted to early hints in the article that the author may be lying.
Yet in the first paragraph of the chapter titled Trust on page 30, Simons writes
“I have been told that many Aboriginal people are staggered by the amount of trust Europeans place in strangers…Our whole way of doing things rests on the assumption that people will not lie to us, and that they are whom they hold themselves out to be. Transparency, or the appearance of it, is a necessary part of adult life.
Among traditional Aboriginal cultures, trust, and truth, is mainly for kin.”
Then Simons goes on to support every claim made by aboriginal women who “revealed” the secret women’s business, while dismissing in patronizing terms the testimony of aborigines, including a whistleblower, who disputed the claims. I stopped reading the book at about that point.
The following is the unedited version of my letter published in The Age on 9/1:
Those who think that the fraud (as it would be called if published in a scientific journal) perpetrated on Keith Windshuttle discredits his critique of sloppy scholarship are wrong. If anything, this episode vindicates his argument, that editors and publishers depend on the professional diligence and integrity of their authors, a trust that is not always warranted. Even prestigious scientific journals have been caught out by fraud. There is nothing particularly clever about “Dr Sharon Gould” putting one over an editor of a non-scientific publication. The Age of 7/1 notes: “the projects cited are not implausible, and similar technologies are in development”. I have refereed scientific manuscripts prior to publication and checking cited references is not a routine part of the process, unless there is a reason to smell a rat, and the Quadrant article was not a rigorous technical piece submitted to a scientific journal.
Windshuttle demonstrated in his book, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, that in a number of texts, professional historians had made claims in that were not supported by the references they cited as original sources. Windshuttle did not criticise the publishers of these texts. He criticised the authors, who bear the prime responsibility for ensuring their scholarship is up to scratch and free of fact-tinkering for ideological purposes. Windshuttle is not a scientist and did not write the Quadrant article. Windshuttle is only guilty of falling victim to the problem he alerted publishers, editors, scholars and the public to – some authors will lie.
Dr Philip Shehan