KEITH Windschuttle claims to have exposed sloppy and dishonest history writing by some prominent academic historians. No graver charge can be made against historians. If history is to have any value it must pursue truth, or it degenerates into propaganda.

That the evidence for many incidents is only oral or based on memory is a significant problem. Such sources are notoriously unreliable – especially when the evidence is a combination of distant memories told and retold. However, no matter what one thinks of “memorial’’ sources, when there are many instances one can reasonably conclude whether they contain at least some truth.

The following incidents were written down in response to Windschuttle’s campaign to indicate the variety of unrecorded events. The evidence that supports them varies: the first two rely entirely on individual memory.

• In the 1950s a retired farmer from Flaxley in South Australia told me that on his farm poisoned meat was left hanging in the slaughter house and the door left open in the hope that Aborigines would steal it and eat it.

• At a family party, shortly after Don Dunstan became SA’s Attorney-General in 1965, I overheard a relation, a policeman, complain that beating Aborigines had become risky. Dunstan had instructed that a report be sent to him, by the police involved, whenever they used force on Aborigines. Whether such an order was issued I do not know, however, at the very least the policeman’s attitude and comments, as I remember them, indicated that he and his mates knocked Aborigines about and enjoyed doing so; that it was standard police practice and should be allowed to continue.
(After writing this I came across the following supporting evidence. In April, 1968,
the ALP and Dunstan lost the election. Later that year an Aborigine, who claimed that he was assaulted in the Adelaide watchhouse by two members of the Adelaide CIB, also alleged that police told him that “Don Dunstan could not help black bastards like him now”.)

• Remembering a newspaper report from the 1960s about the written intention of a large leaseholder to poison water holes knowing that nomadic Aborigines roamed “his” lands, last year I began researching the practice after World War II. (I had hoped that the poisoning of Aborigines, well-documented in the 19th and early 20th century, had ceased by the middle of the 20th century.) Not only have I found proof of my recollection, I unexpectedly came across several complaints of poisoning water holes to kill goats and native animals, even though nomadic Aborigines were known to use the area, and of spreading dog or dingo baits near mission stations.
Such incidents, even if they were not intended to harm Aborigines, were, at the very least, irresponsible, and may very well have caused illness and deaths that were never recorded.

• The last and most dramatic example probably would have remained unrecorded had I not asked Ian Savage to write it down for this article. Savage is a white man­ with no axe to grind. Sandy Smith, an Aborigine, told the story to Savage’s father, and his family still has photographs of Sandy.

In the tin mining area of Queensland’s Atherton Tablelands in the 1880s, a tribe, denied their normal seasonal hunting movements in search of food, began to kill cattle. When the station owners became aware of this they sought them out and shot them all - except one boy. He escaped into the scrub and hid in a hollow log. Another boy about the same age scrambled into the log after him. Wounded, he bled to death, trapping Sandy in the log.

A Cornish tin miner, who was working a claim in the area, heard the shots and suspecting some form of incident had taken place, headed in the direction of the noise and eventually found most of the bodies, which he began to bury. While looking for more bodies he must have alerted Sandy. The miner released him by chopping through the side of the log. Once released, Sandy was unable to run away because he had been so cramped up in the log. The miner took Sandy in. At some stage, the miner confronted the men he suspected of the crime, but nothing could be established except that Sandy was very scared of them. About 20 years later, when the miner retired, Sandy became the yard man for Savage’s grandparents, and came to know his father well.

These previously unrecorded examples indicate many more incidents: some unwitnessed, some where the witnesses died without recording them, and probably many more where there were no survivors and no evidence was ever found.

Although Windschuttle may have exposed exaggeration and dishonesty, he has not diminished the case that Aborigines were maltreated, killed and massacred by Caucasians from the late 18th Century through at least to the middle of the 20th.
The historians he has accused of exaggerating their case have, if his allegations are true, damaged the cause they meant to promote. Did they assume that no one would ever check their references?

After writing this I came across Wind-schuttle’s The Historian as Prophet and Redeemer (Quadrant, December 2002). The piece (based on a speech to the WEA in Sydney) shows him to be obsessed by revisionist missions and reliant upon over-generalization, over-simplification and unprovable assertion. Importantly it is not only when writing about Aborigines that he makes bold, even absurd, assertions. It is part of his historical thinking. For example, he writes that “… the reality of the Australian convict system was that it was a successful program of penal reform that turned most convicted criminals into useful labourers and law-abiding citizens.”

Even if the convict system were “a successful program of penal reform’’, the facts, as distinct from Windschuttle reality, included exploitation, lashings, chain-gangs, injustice, starvation, solitary confinement in dark cells, and so on.

The speech contains numerous other wild assertions: “… the notion of the frontier as a place where white men could kill blacks with impunity ignored the powerful cultural and legal prohibitions on such action. Most colonists were Christians to whom such actions would have been abhorrent. Moreover, it was against the law to murder human beings, Aborigines included, and the penalty was death.”

But judging by the tiny number of whites tried and found guilty of murdering blacks, whites did murder with impunity. And his asserted implication, that whites would not murder blacks because it was against the law and punishable by death, is almost unbelievably naïve. White men alone in the outback, days from lawmen, knew that the likelihood of being caught and convicted was minimal.

Windschuttle employs dramatic challenging oversimplifications to grab attention, such as: “In all of Europe’s colonial encounters with the New Worlds of the Americas and the Pacific, the colony of Van Dieman’s Land was probably the site where the least indigenous blood was deliberately shed”. Windschuttle knows there was comparatively little black blood to shed, and says so a few pages on. Are these traits the result of his missionizing, of deliberately ignoring evidence to prove a pre-decided point? A parallel trait in both his assessment of the treatment of convicts and Aborigines is, it seems to me, equally significant: lack of humanity and empathy – a fatal flaw in an historian.

Once the fuss has died away Windschuttle’s revisionism will have made no overall difference to the case.