Last week’s furore over the Keith Windschuttle/Quadrant hoax seems to have died down – you can read a summary of some of the reaction here. While Crikey and one my fellow bloggers at this site put quite a lot of focus on it, I must say I found it hard to get very worked up about it one way or the other.
Given Keith Windschuttle’s history, it is understandable that people may have got some pleasure from his discomfort over the incident. But if that sort of personal element hadn’t been present, I think ever fewer people would have given the whole thing a second thought.
To me, John Quiggin made an immensely more important point about Keith Windschuttle and hoaxes. I quote almost of it below, because I think it should repeated as widely as possible. Quiggin writes
about another hoax, namely the repeated promise of a Volume 2 of The Fabrication of Australian History. When Volume 1 came out back in 2002, Windschuttle promised further volumes on an annual schedule, covering Queensland and WA. Since Queensland in particular was the focus of Henry Reynolds’ main work, and since the evidence of numerous massacres seems incontrovertible, this promised volume was central to Windschuttle’s claims of fabrication. The promise was repeated year after year, but no Volume 2 ever appeared, and the “research” supposedly already undertaken has stayed out of sight.
Then in February 2008, Windschuttle published extracts from a Volume 2, promised for publication “later this year”, but now on a totally different topic, that of the Stolen Generation. His target this time was Peter Read, an eminent historian who’s done a lot of practical work reuniting Aboriginal children with their birth families. It’s 2009, the promised volume hasn’t appeared, and there hasn’t been any reference to it on Windschuttle’s site for some time.
The real hoax victims here have been those on the political right, who’ve repeatedly swallowed Windschuttle’s promises to refute well-established facts about Australian history “later this year” and who are now getting their “science” from his discredited magazine.
In my view, one of the major things holding Australia back as a nation, particularly in regard to eliminating inequality between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, is our inability to genuinely acknowledge and comprehend the widespread killings, forced removals and relocating of Aboriginal peoples, as well as the various other acts, many of which also led directly to more widespread death through disease and state neglect.
That’s why I think the efforts of those such as Keith Windschuttle who try to create a cloak of deniability about the widespread killing that occurred, despite the ample evidence to the contrary, are so damaging to our society.
The hoax which John Quiggin refers to is the one which really should the subject of widespread public debate.
One Comment
Yeah, I think you’re right about our lack of acknowledgement or understanding of our history being a major barrier to eliminating inequality, but there’s also the problem that once you do learn about it, feeling incredibly inadequate and powerless. In the absence of any decent political leadership on the issue it’s hard to see the status quo improving.
I don’t understand how Windschuttle and the like have any credibility when there are so many historians whose work gives the lie to his drivel.