Talk:Keith Windschuttle/Archive 1

Marxist past
I've restored the sentence


 * A Marxist before the 1980s, Windschuttle has moved sharply to the right.

It's absurd to suggest this is POV. Windschuttle is open about his Marxist past and his rejection of it.

"In The Killing of History, Windschuttle defended the of practices and methods of traditional empirical history against postmodernism, and praised left-wing historians such as Henry Reynolds who relied on traditional empirically-oriented approaches. Subsequently, he has adopted an overtly polemical position, attacking Reynolds and others and freely mixing political and empirical arguments." Windschuttle praised Henry Reynolds in his 1994 book TKOH because at that time he believed Reynolds' work to be the result of an empirically-oriented approach. It wasn't until about 2000 that he started checking the evidence for the claims made by Reynolds and others and found that the 'evidence' didn't check out. He found that rather than being 'empirical' Reynolds was 'political', ie had misrepresented the 'evidence' to be found in source documentation to support a political cause.


 * It's clear that Windschuttle now takes a position of polemical advocacy, and collects evidence to support his side of the case. You can find writing from him well before 2000 making political attacks on multiculturalism and so on. When he started checking, it was with the express purpose of finding errors. In Reynolds' case, he found only one minor error, yet that didn't lead Windschuttle to restate his earlier support. JQ 09:40, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

‘It's clear that Windschuttle now takes a position of polemical advocacy, and collects evidence to support his side of the case.’

The essence of Windschuttle ‘dispute’ with postmodernism is that history should be an attempt to portray what happened in the past (and why it happened) as accurately as the available evidence allows. It is not a case of ‘you are entitled to your truth and I am entitled to mine’. The truth about historical events should be advocated and untruths should be refuted. The basis for that is the collection and examination of the evidence. And where historians make errors with their evidence, that should be exposed and the proper response of a historian who has had it proved that they made an ‘error’ with the evidence, is to correct it in print asap. Attacking the person who proved you wrong by attributing a political motive to them for doing so isn’t the way to retain any semblance of respect.

“When he started checking, it was with the express purpose of finding errors.”

Of course it was to find errors, that’s why you check anything. What other purpose does checking the evidence serve than to find out whether what you are checking is accurate/correct/truthful?

I assume the ‘only one minor error’ you refer to is the only error Reynolds has admitted to, ie where the record of the words of Lieutenant-Governor Arthur that he feared ‘the eventual extirpation of the aboriginal race itself’ appeared in Reynolds work The Other Side of the Frontier changed to say he feared ‘the eventual extirpation of the colony’. Just because this is the only error Reynolds has admitted to doesn’t mean it’s the only ‘error’. Windschuttle’s writings contain many more criticisms of Reynolds than that one ‘error’. He includes the use by Reynolds of ‘unsubstantiated guesswork’ in reaching his (in)famous assessment of the aboriginal death toll by settlers’ rifles and Reynolds reliance on sources such as the missionaries Threlkeld and Gribble without revealing the fact that both had been caught out making false claims of mistreatment and murder of aboriginals by settlers.

How about Reynolds use of carefully selected quotes from replies to an 1830 government questionnaire sent to Tasmanian settlers? Reynolds quotes only the minority of respondants who advocated genocide or whose words can be made to seem that they favoured it and doesn’t inform his readers that most of the replies to that questionnaire were sympathetic to the aboriginals and most definitely against genocide. Windschuttle has absolutely no reason to become a supporter of Reynolds again.

As for his alleged attacks on multiculturalism, multiculturalism isn’t holy writ. Its benefits and potential drawbacks to Australian society, if carelessly handled, are up for discussion and debate. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 138.130.203.197 (talk • contribs) 00:12, 20 March 2006  (UTC+10 hours) (the above somewhat tardily signed by T.A. Yates, Brisbane = User:138.130.203.197)

Hitchens
I'm dubious about the section on Hitchens for two reasons. First, there are many people who've shifted from left to right, and it's not clear why Hitchens is chosen. Second, although Hitchens is vehement in his support of the Iraq war and an aggressive response to Islamism, he doesn't seem, like Windschuttle, to have become an orthodox rightwinger (at least not yet). —Preceding unsigned comment added by John Quiggin (talk • contribs)


 * I've WP:BOLDly deleted the text user added. Here's a copy:
 * For comparison, see also Christopher Hitchens, another former left-wing intellectual who has become a committed right-winger.
 * Prof. Quiggin is quite right.
 * If we wanted an example of a move from left to right, there are plenty of people to choose from — Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol and David Horowitz, for example.
 * Hitchens still regards himself as being "on the left", not as a "right-winger" and certainly as neither an "orthodox rightwinger" nor a "committed right-winger". For example, his hostility to Henry Kissinger has not softened at all (yay!). He claims that in supporting the overthrow of facist regimes (meaning the Taliban and the Iraqi Baathists) he is being more consistent with leftist ideals than those who opposed toppling those regimes.
 * I can't help wondering whether this sentence was added purely as an attack on Hitchens. Nevertheless, I'd be happy to see a cleaned-up version put back into the article.
 * —Chris Chittleborough 19:18, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Left-wing historian
Is the term left wing historian helpful? Unless Reynolds et al. freely admit to interpreting history from a left-wing perspective, adding 'left-wing' seems to be dubious commentary. Ashmoo 07:08, 26 June 2006 (UTC)


 * I agree. The terms left-wing and right-wing are intellectually sloppy and fail to take into account the diversity of opinions on political matters that any individual may hold. For instance, many left-wing catholics are anti-abortion, a typically right-wing or conservative view. Add that to the fact that 'left wing historian' is clearly an attempt to allege political bias in Reynolds' work. This makes the section clearly biased towards Windschuttle's view that many historians associated with the left are politically motivated. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 124.176.48.24 (talk • contribs) 07:46, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

Criticisms of Windschuttle's Reasoning and Replies to his Accusations
Shouldn't some of the rebuttals to Keith Windschuttle's accusations be published here to maintain neutral point of view? I'm also of wary of idealised (or psychologised) representations of what Keith WIndschutle's objectives are. Many of the criticisms of the inductivism of David Stove are relevant to Windschuttle's arguments (interestingly, the POV of the David Stove entry is in question due to a lack of these criticisms). Also relevant are documented incidents of double standards in Windschuttles writings.

Calling for "impartial objectivity", while ignoring evidence on contrived technicalities, or more importantly, cricising Cultural Studies (wrongly conflated with Post-Modernism) in The Killing of History, then employing a culturally relativistic approach to belittling Tasmanian Aboriginies in Fabrication. Specifically arguing that they had no words for humanity or compassion therefore were unable to concieve them. An approach contradicted again in Fabrication, where WIndschuttle accuses Abroiginies of a willingness to prostitute their women. Contradicting the earlier "humanity and compassion argument" because there were no words for prostitution. (Arguments by John Quiggin)

His foray into Science Philosophy, in Killing of History also drew some criticisms back in the day, particularly his extention of David Stove's critcisms of Popper (including a blatant staw man against Popper's position on knowledge.) Said Straw Man tactic was observed to be used against the "POMOs" at the August 2002 "Great Debate About History" held at the University of NSW. (Arguments I believe penned by Catherine Keenan)

Possibly the replies by Lyndall Ryan should be considered, given that she was the focus of some of the more material criticisms by Windschuttle, rather than the rather more pedantic (and utterly singular) attack on Reynolds. I think that she has published these replies (after spending a good deal of time going back over her criticised work.)

Raverant2006 13:35, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

If you are going to publish the rebuttals then do you publish the rebuttals of the rebuttals and so on? You’d wind up with a discussion page the length of several books. For example, Whitewash (edited by Robert Manne) was supposed to be the ultimate rebuttal of Windschuttle’s work, Washout (author John Dawson) dissected Whitewash and rebutted it quite thoroughly.

There is no need for psychologised representations of what Keith Windschutle's objectives are, he has stated them repeatedly; read his work, the best starting point being The Killing of History. In many of the comments, I’ve made on this page (and elsewhere) I’ve merely paraphrased Windschuttle’s own statements of his objectives. The psychologised representations of Windschuttle's objectives I’m most wary of are those that suggest that his historical arguments must be influenced by his political beliefs. Look at the historical arguments, look at the evidence. Is the evidence accurately and fully disclosed? Does the evidence support Windschuttle’s arguments and not those of his opponents? Answer: yes. The political beliefs of a historian are only relevant if the historian manipulates the evidence to support a political position, which is exactly what Windschuttle criticises.

Interesting to see that the above refers to “documented incidents of double standards in Windschuttle’s writings” without identifying what the “documented incidents” are.

What evidence did he ignore? And on what contrived technicalities? From what I’ve seen, Windschuttle fairly states the case made by the ‘other side’; accurately describes the evidence they rely upon, presents other evidence that the ‘other side’ either didn’t mention or dismissed without giving adequate reason for doing so and then draws his conclusions giving reasons why some evidence is to be preferred. I am not the only one to make this observation about his work.

Instances in which I have seen this kind of accusation levelled at Windschuttle include the incident at Risdon Cove in which Windschuttle allegedly ignores the evidence of the ex-convict, Edward White, and bases his conclusion solely on the reports by the military officer and the surgeon. If you actually read Windschuttle’s account of this incident you can see that he fairly reports White’s evidence (at greater length than the other accounts, in fact) and that of the other two accounts. He gives good reasons why the contemporary reports of the officer and the surgeon are to be considered more reliable than that of the ex-convict, given many years later. These reasons are consistant with standard historical practice.

What I find ridiculous is the suggestion that we should believe the unsupported story told many years later by an ex-convict with every reason to make up a nasty story about the troops who were also his former jailers, i.e. the ones who flogged him and kept him from escaping. We are expected to simply presume that the officer and the surgeon both lied when no evidence to contradict their statements has been presented except the statement of an ex-convict.

Where did Windschuttle argue that that because they had no words for humanity or compassion therefore (they) were unable to conceive of them? Page number, please? I have seen him argue that people and societies are broadly influenced by certain factors including philosophical and religious standards. For example, he argues that Christian standards and Enlightenment philosophy influenced colonists and colonial administrators. He never argued that every colonist, everywhere, at all times, lived up to those standards, though some have attempted to ‘belittle’ him by suggesting that he did.

Is the accusation of ‘belittling’ aboriginals founded in some of the descriptions of Tasmanian aboriginal society in Fabrication including use of the terms ‘primitive’ and ‘dysfunctional’? Windschuttle used these descriptions, not as a gratuitous slur upon Tasmanian aboriginals, but as a small part of an accurate explanation for the demise of the full-blooded Tasmanian aboriginal. The term ‘primitive’ in this context is a technical one, a dispassionate assessment of their level of development. There is an obvious correlation between their ‘primitive’ society with its lack of luxuries and comforts and the desire of Tasmanian aboriginals to acquire Western luxuries and comforts (such as clothing, blankets, ‘exotic’ foods, alcohol, tobacco, metal tools, etc). This resulted in them engaging in conduct that, arguably, hastened their own demise. This conduct included attacking remote settlers’ huts to steal goods and also ‘selling’ aboriginal women and girls (be they members of their own tribes or captives from other tribes) to white men in return for such goods. The first invited the colonisers to respond with violence and the last, of course, removed these women from the full-blood gene pool, which was small to start with. The apparently common practice of aboriginal men allowing white men to sleep with their women in return for ‘presents’ sometimes as trifling as a loaf or two of bread (an exotic, luxury food to aborigines) provided multiple gateways into the aboriginal population for venereal diseases that had devastating effects, particularly on reproductive health and capacity, in a non-resistant population. Windschuttle was called racist for daring to use the word ‘prostitution’ for this ‘cultural practice’ but a rose by any other name…..

Even ordinary contact between aboriginals and settlers resulting from the desire to obtain goods as outright gifts or in return for labour, animal skins, game-meat or other kinds of trade was an opportunity for the isolated, non-resistant aboriginal population to catch diseases from the settlers. It was inadvertently introduced diseases for which they had little or no resistance that were the main culprits in the demise of the full-blooded Tasmanian aboriginals. Here, too, some of the critics pounce; what difference is there between deliberate genocide by violence and the extinction of a race by introduced diseases? The answer is, of course, a great deal of difference; the differences between ‘deliberate’, ‘inadvertent’ and ‘accidental’, especially when you consider that at the time the Western world had very little idea about the true nature of disease and its transmission or of immunity and resistance. The notion of disease being caused by ‘noxious vapours’ was still prevalent at the time. Bloodletting was still a popular remedy for all ills. They had no idea that a race isolated from the rest of humanity for perhaps 10,000 years would die in large numbers due to diseases that were much less harmful to the British settlers.

The so-called straw man argument at the “Great Debate” that so offended Catherine Keenan is apparently that Windschuttle made use of his limited time at the podium to go after the most extreme practitioners and forms of post-modernism rather than letting them off the hook by concentrating on somewhat less extreme examples offered up earlier. In other words, he didn’t allow himself to be lead astray by a red herring.

I suppose that insisting historians actually do the work and try to get it right could be considered by some as pedantic.

Which replies by Lyndall Ryan should be considered? The ones I’ve seen have basically consisted of her arguing that the reason the documents that she refers to in her footnotes don’t say what she said they say is that the correct documents were ‘accidentally’ left out or misplaced. When you look at the ‘new’ documents, however, you find that they don’t support what she says either. For example, in her book The Aboriginal Tasmanians, Lyndall Ryan claimed the diaries of a Reverend Knopwood as evidence for the deaths of 100 aborigines and 20 Europeans. When Windschuttle pointed out that the diaries don’t contain any mention of the deaths of 100 aborigines and 20 Europeans, Ryan responded that a footnote to another paragraph about kangaroo hunting contain references to reports by John Oxley, the explorer and these were meant to support the death toll. So, this is where the ‘missing’ footnote disappeared to, attached to the wrong paragraph in her book? Except these reports don’t contain the required death toll either. When asked by a reporter about the fact that her new reference doesn’t support her claim either and whether she had made up the figures, Ryan claimed, “Historians are always making up figures.” Should be “bad historians are always making up figures”.

T. A. Yates

Hitchens and Horowitz
User recently added the following lines to the article, which I've moved here for further discussion:


 * ==See also==
 * Christopher Hitchens
 * David Horowitz
 * Both former leftists, who like Windschuttle have active right-wingers.

Some comments: What do other people think? CWC (talk) 14:19, 19 August 2006 (UTC)
 * It would help if that fragment had a verb ;-).
 * As discussed above, Hitchens says he is still 'of the left', and should not be included in a list like this.
 * Horowitz has certainly moved from left to right.
 * "See also" is probably not the right heading. Perhaps "Other writers who have moved from left to right"?
 * It might be possible to write up a good Wikipedia article on people who have moved from left to right politically.

I've changed it in light of the comments above. --Apeloverage 14:54, 19 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Good stuff! CWC (talk) 16:53, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

Ben Kiernan citation
The Ben Kiernan citation may more properly belong on the History wars article. Note that Kiernan changed his mind on the Cambodian genocide, so using his early opinion to discredit Kiernan is poor logic. Paul foord 08:52, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

The original Ben Kiernan citation included a reference to Kiernan's 'credentials' as head of the Yale University Genocide Project and basically was citing his 'opinion' as a 'genocide expert', i.e. Wikipedia implies that Kiernan's opinion on Windschuttle can be trusted by readers because of Kiernan's expertise and his work on genocide. If people are supposed to rely on Wikipedia as a credible encyclopaedia, there needs to be a full disclosure of the 'credentials' of such sources; either that or don't use the citation. The credibility of a source is an important issue and their past history of extreme bad judgment or wilful, ideological blindness on issues such as the crimes of the Khmer Rouge is extremely relevant to their current day credibility. The fact that Kiernan was denying Khmer Rouge crimes at a time that there were multiple accounts of Khmer Rouge atrocities coming out of Cambodia and when it was overwhelmingly obvious that they were homicidal monsters bears directly on his credibility.

It was as inappropriate to use Kiernan as a source of criticism of Keith Windschuttle's work without giving readers all the relevant information with which to judge Kiernan's credibility as it was for another user to cite the contributors to 'Whitewash' as critics of Windschuttle without revealing that those contributors included the very historians whom Windschuttle had directly accused of misrepresenting and fabricating history. T.A. Yates


 * The above exemplifies the reasoning of a demagogic mentality. Kiernan acknowledged his misjudgements about Pol Pot over 28 years ago, and since then has consistently opposed and condemned the Khmer Rouge, even at times when Western governments were supporting Pol Pot. So the question is what weighs more? The misjudgements of a young historian, or 28 years of careful historical study that speaks for itself? The demagogues seem to be implying that the young historian had some sort of inherent character flaw that could never be atoned for. The demagogues are an extreme minority. Many of the most serious Cambodia scholars from all sides of the political spectrum, including conservatively inclined senior historians such as Milton Osborne and David Chandler, defended Kiernan's credibility when he was attacked by an ideologue who happens to have striking similarities to Windschuttle.


 * "We have full confidence in Prof. Kiernan's integrity, professional scholarship, and ability to carry out the important work of the Cambodian Genocide Program. He is a first-rate historian and an excellent choice for the State Department grant." (Phnom Penh Post, June 30 - July 13,1995. See also The Wall Street Journal, 13 July 1995.)


 * Kiernan presented arguments against Windschuttle related to what he believes is important material that Windschuttle ignored and misrepresentation of evidence. Instead of dealing with the arguments at hand Windschuttle's supporters attempted to change the subject. Gee now, I wonder why? - L'Ecuirreil

Hmmm, the reasoning of 'a demagogic mentality'? As opposed to someone who just accepts the pronouncements of someone like Ben Kiernan as true without considering his track record or the merits of his arguments?

The 'arguments' Kiernan presented against Windschuttle were largely a sad rehash of the ideologically driven reasoning that got the study of history in this country into such a dire state in the first place. Along with the ideology, Kiernan led in with discussion of writers who had denied atrocities we know really did occur in East Timor and then moved on to Windschuttle. Robert Manne did something similar by referring to David Irving (the Holocaust denier) and Helen Darville (literary hoaxer) in his commentary on Windschuttle. It's a kind of guilt by association; mention someone in the same context as those we know produced false or fraudulent work and some people will find it easier to believe that your target is in the same category. The rest of Kiernan's commentary on Windschuttle amounted to simply restating claims made by Reynolds, Rowley and others (including himself) without offering any kind of detailed examination as to whether the evidence for those claims stands up under close scrutiny. It's a statement of faith, Kiernan chooses to believe what Reynolds and others have claimed; evidence is irrelevant to faith.

Kiernan also used what has been a standard tactic against Windschuttle; misrepresent what Windschuttle has written and then criticise him on the misrepresented material. For example, Kiernan suggested that Windschuttle's 'honesty' can be judged from the 'fact' that Windschuttle had claimed that Kiernan had 'noted' hundreds of massacres that took place in the 20th century when Kiernan had really 'noted' hundreds of massacres from the 19th century. If you actually read the article by Windschuttle that Kiernan is referring to (entitled "The fabrication of Aboriginal history" in The New Criterion Vol. 20, No. 1, September 2001), you find that Windschuttle wrote "Kiernan wrote of British colonists in the nineteenth century mounting “punitive expeditions” and committing “hundreds of massacres.” " and later Windschuttle refers to Kiernan's writings on one (1) alleged 20th century massacre. Whose honesty should be suspect here?

The black armband historians have convinced themselves and the gullible that exaggerated tales of genocide, massacre and general bad behaviour on the part of white settlers are necessary or desirable in order to somehow provide ‘support’ for claims for aboriginal land rights and for reparations for past wrongs. Windschuttle’s work is perceived to ‘undercut’ the work of the black armband historians, therefore he must be wrong. Does any rational person actually believe that aboriginal land rights are dependent upon genocide and hundreds of massacres having occurred?

That Kiernan finally acknowledged his misjudgements about Pol Pot was commendable. It would be great if acknowledging that he made a mistake about Pol Pot guaranteed that Kiernan had been cured of the bad judgment or ideological blindness that caused it but I don’t think that we can just assume that it did. In the past, I’ve had to acknowledge a personal tendancy to sarcasm but acknowledging it hasn’t cured me of the habit.

Continuing to support the Khmer Rouge for years after evidence of atrocities began to emerge was no minor mistake or youthful indiscretion. It is the sort of track record that will, and should, be remembered because it raises serious questions about Kiernan’s judgment and credibility. If this level of either misjudgement or ideological blindness is, or may be, a lifelong character trait then how can anyone rely on his assessment of Windschuttle’s work? L’Ecuirreil writes of “28 years of careful historical study that speaks for itself”. Does everything that Kiernan has done over the past 28 years stand up to scrutiny? Who knows, for sure, aside from L’Ecuirreil, of course? I’ve certainly not made an intensive study of Kiernan’s work and am not inclined to do so, given what I’ve seen of it so far. We should bear in mind the fact that, although not as well known as Reynolds, Ryan and some others, Kiernan is one of the historians who have published work claiming that the aborigines were subject to genocide. (Ben Kiernan, “Australia’s Aboriginal Genocide.” Yale Journal of Human Rights 1, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 49-56.) That puts him squarely in the ranks of black armband historians whose work is under suspicion as a result of Windschuttle’s revelations of widespread misrepresentation, exaggeration and fabrication of the evidence in this field. Is Kiernan’s assessment of Windschuttle’s work based on an objective assessment of the evidence, on protecting his own professional reputation or on his ideological and social preferences? How can we know if someone is a reliable source if we don’t look at his or her history? Once you know something of Kiernan's history, of his early denial of Khmer Rouge genocide, followed by an extremely late acknowledgement of it and of his much more recent claims of aboriginal genocide in Australia, it becomes pretty obvious that he is not a source that you can place a great deal of reliance on if you want an unbiased assessment of Windschuttle's work.

This is perhaps the main reason why it is inappropriate to include mere opinion from rivals, critics or from supporters in an encyclopaedia article. An encyclopaedia article is generally not the appropriate place for such opinions because it simply raises the question of the credentials and credibility of the source. The fact that L’Ecuirreil can cite some other historians who say that Kiernan is OK by them merely brings up the question of those historians’ judgment and whether their opinion, which may be based on familiarity with a very limited range of Kiernan’s work, is relevant to Kiernan’s assessment of Windschuttle’s work. It may well be that Kiernan is dead on target with his more recent work on genocide in Cambodia but still wearing ideological blinkers with respect to aboriginal history. It becomes a debate and an encyclopaedia article isn’t a debate. It should be as neutral in an area of controversy as possible. So I fully support the removal of the Kiernan citation from the article.

Kiernan’s attack on Windschuttle, excerpts from which were included in the citation, clearly indicates that Kiernan’s criticism is based on the effect that Windschuttle’s work may have on Aboriginal land rights claims and how ‘denial’ of genocide “undercuts Aboriginal claims based on justice”. For a historian, this shouldn’t be a professional concern. The current day consequences of the historical evidence aren’t within the historian’s purview. Once you start thinking that a historian is responsible for how the evidence and arguments that he presents may affect current day land rights or reparations claims, you open the door to acceptance of the practice of misrepresenting and fabricating the evidence to support such claims, i.e. to get the ‘right’ result. History becomes meaningless except as a tool to manipulate public opinion.

If the evidence indicates that genocide or some alleged massacres didn’t happen, then that is what the historical record should reflect. Historians shouldn’t consider the effect of their work on any claim for reparations or apology. How society deals with the consequences of history isn’t up to the historian. If an objective examination of the history of Aboriginal cultural attitudes to land and their ‘ownership’ and use of it, were to make it difficult in the 21st century for a tribal group to establish a land rights claim (perhaps because they may not be able to establish that they ever ‘owned’ that land in terms of exclusive, or reasonably exclusive, possession and use of it, i.e. because other tribes shared or used it), that is not the historian’s responsibility. It is not the role of historians to make land rights claims easy and if the effect of the historical evidence makes them more difficult, then that’s just how it is.

T.A. Yates

Windschuttle's work is historical revisionism
Historical revisionism is NPOV, to say it is historical revisionism (negationism) would be WP:POV, to state he was the latter would require verification. If editors find such and provide WP:Reliable sources for that then it would be appropriate to state in the article. Paul foord (talk) 13:12, 10 February 2008 (UTC)


 * While the term "historical revision" does have "both a legitimate academic use and a pejorative meaning", today it is used almost entirely in the negative sense. Virtually no-one uses it in a positive way anymore and therefore using it without making a full explanation in the article that you aren't implying the negative does offend against Wikipedia principles of NPOV. It's rather like saying "he's a gay fellow" and then saying that you simply meant he's happy. Frankly, people aren't going to assume that that is what you meant. It risks suspicion of simply being a sly way of creating a negative impression in the minds of readers of the article.

PhD
Did Windschuttle submit a PhD thesis, or did he withdraw without submitting? If he submitted and it was rejected fails is probably accurate, "did not complete" would then be a whitewash of the situation. Paul foord (talk) 07:56, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Unless there's evidence one way or another, "fails" or "failed" is inappropriate because it does imply academic failure such as a rejected thesis. There are lots of reasons that people choose not to complete degrees, including career, family and financial issues. Webley442 (talk) 14:12, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Self-published
Similarly the term "self-published" is misleading. The common implication in the use of that term is that an author couldn't get anyone to publish it and so had to pay for the printing himself. Being an author who also owns his own publishing house is a very different situation. Why would you have another publishing house publish your book when you own your own publishing house and can thus retain full creative control (and the publisher's share of any profits)? Once again, using the term without explaining that Windschuttle owns a publishing house risks suspicion of simply being a sly way of creating a negative impression in the minds of readers of the article. Webley442 (talk) 13:56, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Why someone might not self publish when they already own a small publishing house. (Macleay Press appears to be very much a niche publisher). Using an independant, and particularly a university press would add credibility to the propositions Windschuttle puts forward. I would assume being published by Melbourne University Press or University of Queensland Press, particularly given the resources they commit to works published would add something. Paul foord (talk) 09:42, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Authors of books and articles that contradict an established academic position often have difficulties getting a publisher and especially in getting an academic publisher like a university press to take them on. For one thing, a university press will almost invariably have its own ‘stable’ of authors who have published on the established academic position. If the university press then published a work which effectively accuses its own authors of fabricating and exaggerating, it could certainly argue that it was simply being ‘fair’ or ‘even-handed’ by publishing a ‘contrarian’ view but it is still likely to find itself accused of repudiating the work of the other authors. It may offend those authors with the result that they take their next work to other publishers. Secondly, publishers can be as much 'captives' of a particular view as anyone else and therefore may reject something they don’t personally agree with. I can think of a book on a controversial ‘crackpot’ scientific theory regarding the forces that created certain geological features in Washington State, USA that was rejected by academic publishers for about 40 years. The publishers stuck with the conventional theories even though they were themselves just theories with little or no evidence to support them. It wasn’t until after further scientific developments proved the ‘crackpot’ theory correct and the conventional theories incorrect, that the academic publishers were willing to touch it. The ‘crackpot’ scientific theory is now the generally accepted theory. Certainly Windschuttle could have shopped around to find some independent publisher to publish the book; presumably one that had not published anything previously on Aboriginal history and so didn’t have any 'conflict of interest' to discourage it from taking the book on. To what point? Critics would then use the fact that his publisher hadn’t published anything before on Aboriginal history as a basis of criticism. Webley442 (talk) 13:35, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

W fails to understand
You know, some people, though intellectually capable in some areas, cant do architecture as they have problems with abstract thought. Some of these then deny this level of thought process exists or that if it does, that it is credible, usually because its stuff they dont understand. I wouldnt ever consider what Windschuttle says re massacres in Oz, as being anything I could take much notice of. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 203.54.9.128 (talk • contribs) 15:57, 18 June 2006   (UTC+10 hours)


 * Re the preceding comment: I think that we all (even Keith Windschuttle) can understand the kind of abstract thought that goes into the sort of history that Windschuttle criticises. A branch of 'history' where you don't need evidence for your claims about what happened and why. You simply make up a colourful story that suits whatever political or social agenda you want to push, attach footnotes that supposedly lead readers back to the source evidence for your claims and hope that no-one checks them and exposes your deceit. That is what post-modernist history was all about and unfortunately it is a world-wide problem. History is not supposed to based on an author's imagination. There actually is a difference between history and historical fiction. There may be a certain amount of creativity involved in making what you are writing about readable, even entertaining at times, but basically it is a matter of collecting and analysing the evidence and then presenting your conclusions (with footnotes that really lead somewhere). Unfortunately a lot of people fell for the line the post-modernists have pushed: "Windschuttle is right-wing...... he's against aboriginal rights...... he wants to overturn Mabo." I'm sure they would have suggested that he eats babies if they thought they would be believed. Try looking at the evidence presented by both sides and weighing it up. The evidence that Windschuttle presented about massacres and the level of violence in colonial Australia stands up to scrutiny. The documents referred to in his footnotes actually exist and they say what he says they do, unlike many of those of the other side of the debate. I am fairly certain I wouldn't want to have the kind of 'intellectual capability' that means not believing that there is any difference between the truth and a politically or ideologically convenient fiction. T.A.Yates.


 * If you genuinely belive that postmodernism is that way, I think you should go to the wiki article on it and explain to everyone how postmodernists are liars. I think that such an edit would be removed for being unsubstantiated and POV. 152.91.9.219 (talk) 02:53, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

If I did get around to writing something there, I’d think it would only be removed for being unsubstantiated and POV if I failed to substantiate it with reference to the work of post-modernist historians around the world. And why would I do that when there are so many examples available to me that do substantiate it? Such as the American post-modernist historian, Professor (now ex-Professor) Bellesiles who tried to rewrite the history of gun ownership in pre-Civil War America. According to his award-winning ‘history’ book, practically no private citizen in colonial America and in the pre-Civil War USA owned a gun. His motive was apparently to provide support for the political position of the gun-control lobby that their 2nd Amendment didn’t relate to an individual right to own guns. If nobody owned a private gun back at the time the 2nd Amendment was passed, how could have it have been intended to protect an individual right? Unfortunately for him, critics over there did a “Windschuttle” on him and checked his footnotes and found that they didn’t match up to what he claimed. For example, he’d claimed to have examined and drawn valuable data for his thesis from San Francisco probate records. These records had all been destroyed in the Great Fire of 1901, so how’d he manage to examine them? Perhaps he has a time machine. Most of the other records he claimed to have drawn supporting evidence from turned out to tell a very different story when examined by others. He wound up losing his professorship when his fraud was exposed.

Closer to home we have Lyndall Ryan whose footnotes cited as evidence documents that had never existed (such as editions of newspapers which were supposedly printed before the newspaper actually began operation), documents which had disappeared before she was born (perhaps she leased Bellesiles’ time machine) and also documents which when independently examined are found to say things completely different to what she claimed that they did.

Let’s not forget the contributors to that great work of postmodernist history, Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History. They triumphantly claimed that they had proved KW’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847 wrong. Imagine my surprise when I laid down good money, bought Whitewash and found that when you boiled it all on down, they had produced evidence of the death of a single Tasmanian Aborigine that KW hadn’t examined in his book (by the 2nd edition). Man, proving that KW hadn’t discussed that extra death just made all the difference, didn’t it?

I can go on and on with this but I don’t want to take up too much space. There are just too many examples; I’m spoiled for choice. The postmodernists who see “truth as socially constructed” as opposed to “the scientific-rational in which truth is 'found' through methodical, disciplined inquiry” shouldn’t be concerned if I call them liars when their ‘truth’ varies from that established by hard work, solid research and logical examination of the evidence. So long as there are people out there who prefer their socially constructed ‘truth’ to reality and fail to recognise the absurdity of their position, there’ll be a market for the twaddle they write. T.A. Yates —Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.208.162.66 (talk) 09:20, 18 February 2008 (UTC)


 * You can't discredit an entire field based on the stupidity or deliberate deception of a number of people within that field. I don't wish to attack any of your examples, but they do not represent the field as a whole - they are anecdotes. I don't wish to fully engage with your problems with postmodernism, because you clearly have a well-formed and justified opinion on the subject, and such a discussion would either end up lengthy or heated, but simply put, I don't believe that postmodernism necessarily equates to doing away with methodical study. To me it is more rooted in an awareness that as humans, we necessarily occupy subjective experience, and our attempts at objective history and fact still take place within a particular historical and social context. I don't take this to mean that history is fiction, it is more akin to an extension of 'history is written by the winners' - at each stage, the things that are deemed notable of research, study, etc, are determined by proximate factors, by who is in power and what is valued. I can't guarentee that postmodernists in general take that view so your criticisms may be valid towards them, but I've always believed that a skepticism towards and awareness of metanarrative did not necessarily mean rejection. Things like logic, the socratic method, the scientific method, are all tools, not ends, and the results they produce can vary depending on who is using the tools and what they're looking for. That doesn't mean 'don't use the tools' or 'don't trust the tools' and it does not in any way mean that postmodernism can be used as an excuse for lazy or dishonest research. I guess I would just like you to blame the authors in question, not the field. Certainly if the people you've mentioned are liars, I am not going to defend them, but I do not believe the field is a field of liars. 152.91.9.219 (talk) 04:01, 29 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Actually, it occured to me just after I posted, and I then checked, and I couldn't find any source in which Lyndall Ryan is considered or identifies herself as a postmodernist. I went on to search the other authors and Henry Reynolds was the only one who I could see was taking part in any substantial discourse about postmodernism, and he seemed to be arguing that it should be less prominent in schools. Can you explain to me what your source is for considering Whitewash a "great work of postmodernist history"? It certainly never came up in any of my reading on the subject, though my knowledge of postmodernist thought is more centred in Europe (growing out of the critical theory of people like Adorno and then Foucault and Lyotard's work, particularly) 152.91.9.219 (talk) 04:48, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

What do you mean by postmodernism? If you are referring to post-modernist art or architecture, I suppose that may be considered a matter of taste but even then there are pretty big issues. The postmodernist puts a urinal on public display, hang some tinsel left over from last Christmas off it, and calls it ‘art’. Of course, there are a lot of people who look at it and say: “That’s not art” or “Gee, isn’t he clever. He took a $20 second-hand urinal and 10c worth of tinsel, put it on a stand in an art gallery, called it ‘art’ and got some fool of a collector to pay him thousands for it. I wonder if the collector would be interested in buying my toe-nail clippings if I piled them in a heap and called them ‘art’?”

The reality is, of course, that the collector doesn’t really understand anything about art. He just buys this kind of junk because otherwise he’d have to admit that he doesn’t understand it. He buys it to fit in with everyone else who pretends to understand it.

I'm not a fan of Noam Chomsky but his remarks on postmodernism, which you can find in the Wikipedia article on Postmodernism, are particularly apt.

The ‘truth’ about postmodernism is that most people don’t understand it because there is nothing to understand. It IS intellectually vacant. But some people think, because of the convoluted, complicated language its practitioners use, that it must be very clever and that they’d better pretend to understand and agree with it or seem stupid.

Others have simply found it a convenient way of justifying applying their personal preferences or prejudices to everything without regard to objective evidence or objective truth.

If anything defines postmodernism as it applies to history and other fact-based fields, it seems to be the rejection of the concept of ‘objective truth’ either outright or by saying that it is impossible to achieve. Having rejected that, however, postmodernists continue to use the word ‘truth’ in their own fashion. Postmodernist ‘truth’ can be achieved by consensus. Their ‘truth’ is ‘socially constructed’. If we get enough people to believe that white troops massacred 60 Aborigines on this spot way back when, that becomes our ‘truth’. So what if there is good evidence is that the troops never got near to the Aborigines and wound up shooting just a couple of their dogs instead? Evidence means nothing, we have our socially constructed ‘truth’; in other words by claiming that something happened when in reality it didn’t, they have convinced people that it did happen. A lie becomes the ‘truth’. It’s a sham.

The notion that ‘truth’ does not exist in an objective sense is a convenient one for some people. It means that they can reject all evidence that contradicts their personal preferences or prejudices, accept any ‘evidence’ no matter how thin, unreliable or distorted if it supports their preferences or prejudices and claim to recognise a ‘truth’ that only they see. As a person who sees himself on the centre left of the political spectrum, it really ticks me off that the worst practitioners of this seem to be on the Left, the loony Left true, but it just makes the rest of us look bad.

Reynolds has been trying to define himself as an empirical historian and is desperate to distance himself from postmodernism. But if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and acts like a duck, I’m going to call it a duck even if it hasn’t hung a sign saying ‘duck’ around its neck. Reynolds has adopted the practices of postmodernist historians. He misrepresented and distorted the evidence to make it fit in with his ‘world-view’ regarding Aborigines vs. white colonist conflict.

Lyndall Ryan did a pretty good job of labelling herself as a postmodernist with her (in)famous statement "Two truths are told. Is only one 'truth' correct?" comparing her account of the demise of the full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigine (deliberate genocide by means of warfare and violence) with that of Windschuttle (some violence but the principal cause of the demise of the Tasmanian Aborigine was introduced disease – which does NOT fit the internationally accepted meaning of genocide, much as some would like to expand that definition).

Well, yes, only one truth is correct. It’s pretty certain that only one truth can be correct where you have two contradictory theories. See also her other famous comment when caught out making up figures: “Historians are always making up figures.” And the duck analogy also applies.

As for Whitewash, the same duck analogy applies. It may not say ‘postmodernist’ in the title but virtually every essay within has adopted some aspect of the practice of postmodernist historians. If you behave like you’re a postmodernist, who’s to blame if you get called one?

Of course, people who are considered to be traditional empirical historians have had failings. Sometimes they make mistakes, sometimes other evidence emerges that proves them wrong, and sometimes they just do it badly and let their personal biases intrude. But at least they are held to a standard where if they are proved wrong they are expected to acknowledge that fact and, if possible, issue a revised edition or further article with corrections in it. ‘Two truths’ isn’t considered to be an acceptable response to being proved wrong.

As for ‘history is written by the winners’, the goal of traditional empirical historians has always been to be accurate. Of course some will have their own opinions on political and social issues and their own biases (some towards their own ‘people’, some against). If you read a history of the British Empire written by a good empirical historian who was also a loyal and proud British subject, you’ll generally find that you can separate his/her personal bias on matters of opinion such as whether British rule of India was a good thing for the people there, from the facts and the evidence he/she presents about what happened on particular dates and why. You can make your own judgment on matters of opinion based on the evidence and your own personal biases. But the facts and the evidence presented, if he/she was a good empirical historian, will be as complete and as accurate as the evidence available to him/her allowed.

With a postmodernist historian, you can’t rely on the facts or the evidence presented. Since objective ‘truth’ is unimportant, non-existent or unachievable, they seem to feel free to misrepresent and distort as much as they have to in order to make their ‘truth’ believable. Of course, it all falls apart if people who believed in the postmodernist ‘truth’ are prepared to look at the evidence and be persuaded by it rather than cling to their beliefs. Which is why many of the postmodernists have adopted the tactics of vilifying and demonising Windschuttle and of misrepresenting and distorting what he has written. They need to dissuade people from actually reading what Windschuttle has written and then making their own judgments. Unfortunately they have been successful to a certain degree. Webley442 (talk) 04:11, 8 March 2008 (UTC)


 * As a general point, it's important to use the discussion to focus on improving the article, not on debating the topic at hand. Coming to the point, given Windschuttle's strong support for the position you've described, one of strict adherence to the facts wherever they may lead, it would be helpful to point to instances where he has discovered and pointed out facts that go against his general position (at the time, since his political position has evolved). To give an obvious example, it seems unlikely that every single report of conflict between whites and Aborigines underestimated the Aboriginal death toll. The article would be improved if we could locate cases where W has gone for a higher estimate than the one previously accepted.JQ (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 05:13, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Briefly (yeah, I know, me, brief?) I see a couple of problems with the proposition that W going with a higher death toll would prove that he is being objective. One, it's a pretty well known rule of thumb that in any shooting fight, estimates of the death toll tend to be higher than the actual figure. Why? People shoot and are inclined think that they've hit their target more often than they actually did. Having assumed that they did hit the target they tend to assume that it was a fatal wound. Also people like to brag about their fighting prowess, not admit that they missed. If you look at the ratios of ammunition expended to actual casualties where such records do exist, you find that there are often scores, hundreds, even thousands of shots fired to each recorded death. In colonial Tasmania the weapons being used are known to be pretty inaccurate; you have virtually no chance of hitting a particular man-sized target at much over 100 metres using the principal weapon available, the Brown Bess musket. It's also slow to reload and fire. So, statistically speaking, a lower estimate is almost always going to be more reliable than a high one. The really big problem though is that to support their contention of genocide, the postmodernists have used the highest death tolls that they can come up with in every conflict situation. It seems that they never say that the death toll in any particular conflict was likely to be lower than the claims made by any of the colonists involved. If two witnesses say 2 or 3 dead and 1, with a motive to lie, many years later says 50, they go with the figure of 50. Given that, what opportunity is there likely to be for W to find even a single example of a conflict situation where the 'previously accepted' figure was too low? Webley442 (talk) 06:07, 8 March 2008 (UTC)


 * "So, statistically speaking, a lower estimate is almost always going to be more reliable than a high one." In which case, it follows immediately that the best estimate is zero. Unfortunately, this is WP:OR. Can you quote W saying something along these lines? JQ (talk) 07:42, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Actually, statistically speaking, zero isn't the best estimate. Since you can't have negative deaths in a fight, i.e. you can't have more people surviving a fight than were there in the first place, zero is at one extreme end of the range of possibilities. It is certainly one possible estimate because there have been fights involving guns and spears in which no-one died (i.e. lousy shots, everybody missed) but not the 'best estimate'. It might be WP:OR and thus in breach of Wikipedia policy if it was included in the article. This isn't the article. I could dig up some calculations of kill ratios that came out of various conflicts including WW11, Korea and Vietnam, if you really want a source but that would not be improving the article and frankly it's not an argument that W has made that I'm aware of. I was making my own argument in addressing your suggestion that if W had included an instance where the previous estimate was too low, that would somehow prove something. Not addressing anything in the article, just your suggestion. My impression of W's approach is that it is to gather all the accounts of a particular event that he can find and analyse them in terms of the information contained and their credibility given the circumstances, the terrain and the people involved. It's not really statistics based. Webley442 (talk) 08:44, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

The extinction of the Australian pygmies, (2002), Quadrant
In the Quadrant Keith Windschuttle and Tim Gillin, (June 2002), 'The extinction of the Australian pygmies' Windschuttle argues for the fringe theory of multiple waves of Aboriginal settlement (see the discussion at Talk:Indigenous Australians/Archive 6 and Talk:Indigenous Australians/Archive 6 for background) and notes the disappearance of a pygmy people in the 20th century (extinction is the word he uses however genocide would also fit), he explains they were assimilated into the broader Aboriginal community stating in the postscript that 'The missionaries deliberately disrupted traditional tribal betrothals so that a fair amount of inter-marriage took place.' This is out of sync with his other writings on Aboriginal history. -- Paul foord (talk) 12:15, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Not really. (a) Windschuttle doesn't argue that no-one, anywhere in Australia, did any kind of harm to Aboriginal people, just that it wasn't as widespread as some like to pretend; and (b) he argues that a lot of the harm that was done to them was not by evil white settlers out to exterminate them but rather by "well-meaning" do-gooders who tried to force Aboriginal people to conform to the do-gooders' perception of how life should be for them. Christian missionaries who disrupted traditional religious and social practices in order to "civilise" them are one example as are those in the 19th and early 20th centuries who encouraged Aboriginal separation and isolation from the evil influences of white society ...alcohol, opium, exploitation, etc and wound up confining them to missions and reserves where there was no economic or social progress.

Does the disappearance of distinct physical features as a result of voluntary inter-marriage (remember no-one said anything about forced inter-marriage) count as genocide? Webley442 (talk) 13:12, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Length of "Hoax"
The "Hoax" section is too long. It's longer than the section on the history wars. It's worth a mention, but it's being given undue weight at the moment, both in trying to make Windschuttle look good and in trying to make him look bad. 59.167.49.42 (talk) 09:26, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

My personal opinion is that the "hoax" doesn't belong in the article at all. It was not a significant event in the career of the subject of the article any more than someone throwing a pie in the face of a politician is worth mentioning in an article on that politician. Fairly obviously it is a matter of dispute as to the 'validity' and success of the hoax. If it's worth a mention at all, then some commentary on what the hoax was supposed to 'prove' plus comments made about it's success or failure in achieving those aims need to be retained, otherwise there's no context. If someone can trim it and retain a reasonable balance there, go ahead. Otherwise chop it all out. The article will read just fine without it. Webley442 (talk) 13:26, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

"Preponderance" of Australian historians
Changing "Windschuttle has exclusively criticised left-wing historians" to "Windschuttle has exclusively criticised the preponderance of Australian historians" creates a possibly/probably unintended meaning. It can be read as though Windschuttle criticised all Australian historians, even those not engaged in writing Aboriginal History, eg including those whose speciality may be the Australian involvement in World War I & II, etc, etc. The previous wording makes it reasonably clear that he argues that what is known as Aboriginal History has, since the 1970's, been predominantly written by a group of historians with left-wing ideological leanings and he clearly identifies those who he accuses of misrepresenting and fabricating historical evidence to support a political agenda with respect to Aboriginal History. Webley442 (talk) 11:34, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

A brief comment
I recently read Windschuttle's The Killing of History. He made some interesting points, and I enjoyed reading it, although in my view he was mainly demolishing strawmen, distorting many of his opponents' positions to the point of absurdity. Right now I'm reading an article of his in Quadrant, "The Struggle for Australian Values in an Age of Deceit". Not because I agree with his views, but because I want to know what's being said on both sides of the History Wars. In his article, Windschuttle writes:
 * "Britain and its colonial offshoots have always subscribed to civic nationalism rather than the racist nationalism that prevailed on much of the Continent. Civic nationalism meant that Britons owed their loyalties not to an organic whole based on their race, language or physiognomy, but to the political institutions they had created for themselves. Racist nationalism, the political theory and political appeal that was used to unify Germany and Italy in the nineteenth century, was of a qualitatively different kind. It is historically inaccurate to identify British and Continental nationalism as the same thing. The countries of British descent accept outsiders who agree to abide by the rules. A person of any race or ethnicity can become an American, or an Australian or a New Zealander. [...] [T]o argue Australia is a fundamentally racist country, you need better evidence than a few examples of folk racism expressed by individuals; you have to find substantial racist institutions, and these Australia has never had."

Note how he tries to blur past and present? In essence: Australia is not racist now, so clearly it never has been; those who criticise Australia's past policies should look at its present to see they're mistaken. A fairly crude and ineffective trick, which I would have thought would be beneath a historian. More importantly, however, what Windschuttle writes here is blatantly and utterly incorrect. Circa 1901 (Federation and the beginning of the official White Australia policy), and for several decades still after that, many Australians, including most leading politicians on all sides of the spectrum, did espouse racial nationalism, made many references to their pride in being part of the "British race", and advocated keeping out "racial foreigners" on the grounds of racial prejudice. People's self-definition as British/Australian, at the time of Federation and beyond, was grounded in concepts of "race". There was racially discriminatory legislation in the fields of immigration and employment, primarily targeting the Chinese. Mainstream politicians stirred up and encouraged anti-Chinese feelings. Pacific Islanders were deported from Queensland on racial grounds. There's such a plenitude of sources to back up these facts that I'm astounded Windschuttle could try to deny it. I'm not mentioning this in the article itself, in case it's construed as original research, but I did want to point it out. Windschuttle lacks credibility. Aridd (talk) 21:12, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Aridd, firstly, Windschuttle 'tries to blur past and present'?? History is a continuum, the past influences the present. His argument is not that there were no racist attitudes in the Australian past, but rather that they were very different to those held in places where there was serious interest in nationalism based on blood and race, like Germany leading up to the Nazis and the Deep South of the USA, and that the nature of this difference made it much easier for Australians to let go of them as attitudes progressed though the 20 Century. The pride in the 'British race' thing was based on what was considered the self-evident superiority of its accomplishments: the technology, the culture, the democratic institutions, the building of a vast Empire, rather than on some supposed genetic superiority. Incidentally, the British considered themselves superior to the French, the Belgians, the Dutch, etc, etc all of whom were 'racially' identical in terms of appearance to the Brits.

I recommend you read, calmly, Windschuttle's book: The White Australia Policy. It is quite eye-opening as to how much opposition there was in Australia (and Britain, for that matter) to the WAP right from the very beginning, including from leading politicians, how accepting of different races Australia had been right from colonisation (although in a more paternalistic way than we'd find acceptable today) and on the primary motive driving the WAP, which was to protect the conditions of the 'working man' in Australia, which were recognised as the best in the world, from being 'undermined' by the importation of cheap, exploited labour from India, China and the Pacific Islands, i.e. it was to prevent large landowners, farmers, factory owners from bringing shiploads of contract workers from say China, housing them in slums, paying them a pittance (which however translated to relatively good money when sent back to China) and thus replacing the higher paid 'white' employees. He also brings out a lot of interesting data on the Pacific Islanders and their role in the sugar industry. Webley442 (talk) 05:07, 16 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Apologies for the very late response, but I've only started looking into the WAP again recently. If you look at the excerpt from Windschuttle which I quote above, it's factually incorrect. He says "The countries of British descent accept outsiders who agree to abide by the rules", and very strongly implies that this has always been the case ; that's what I meant by his trying to blur or equate past and present. When he says "Britons owed their loyalties not to an organic whole based on their race, language or physiognomy", it's simply not true in Australia's case. Yes, "non-whites" were objected to on economic grounds, to a large extent. But not only, or even primarily. If you look at the primary sources, what people were saying at the time, here are a few examples I have:
 * “It has been a great comfort to Australia of late to find wider understanding in Great Britain and all the world that her policy is based […] on as noble an ideal as any that moves man. […] Racial purity is the sacred object, far more sacred to the new generation of Australians than any other worldly tie.” (Keith Murdoch (Australian journalist), “Australia Day: 133 years of progress”, The Times, January 26, 1921, p.11.)
 * "The most serious objection to the coloured races is, of course, the ethnical; the economic objection might perhaps be waived were the other non-existent. In all Australian cities there are large communities of non-British Europeans who are greatly objected to on economic grounds, but whose presence is tolerated because they belong to the races with whom Australians may intemarry, and who may thus ultimately become absorbed into the general population. With coloured races it is different." (The Agent-General for NSW, "The White Australia Policy", The Times, February 17, 1908, p.8.)
 * "In the first Federal Parliament, one of the earliest measures framed with a view to a national policy for Australia was an Immigration Restriction Act. It had for its aim an Australia peopled by the white man, not merely because of the economic danger of coloured races, but because the possibility of a continent racially pure had grown to be a matter of universal national pride. It is still that, and it will remain that." (M.L. Shepherd, Australian High Commissionner in Britain, “White Australia: An Enduring Ideal”, letter to the editor of The Times, January 7, 1922, p.6.)
 * Those are examples I found easily by myself. Either Windschuttle's research was incredibly sloppy, or he's deliberately distorting the truth, or he's delusional. The views expressed by Australians in positions of authority and influence at the time are easy to find in archives. I have many other references, primary sources. Australian leaders expressed a pride in racial identity, and presented "racial purity" as a national ideal - in itself, not just for economic reasons. Alfred Deakin's views in 1901, supporting the implementing of the policy, were that Australia should consist in “one people, and remain one people, without the admixture of other races” and that “The unity of Australia is nothing if that does not imply a united race.” (quoted in Frank Welsh, Great Southern Land, p.341, and Paul Kelly, The End of Certainty: Power, Politics & Business in Australia, p.3). That's not the "civic nationalism" that Australia has "always subscribed to" in Windschuttle's claim. What he claims is quite simply nonsense. He seems to be implying that, because economic objections were voiced to "coloured" immigration, they were the only reason for such objections. It's rubbish. It's a lie. The facts don't back it up. Aridd (talk) 21:07, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Aridd, you could have saved yourself time looking for your own ‘examples’. If you’d followed my advice and just read Windschuttle’s The White Australia Policy, you’d know that, in his research (apparently more thorough than yours), Windschuttle had found, reproduced in the book and commented on the same or similar extracts from various documents (and quite a few more than you found). You might also know that Windschuttle goes to considerable lengths showing that one of the favourite tactics of those anxious to ‘prove’ what an irredeemably racist country Australia was (and is), is to selectively quote only from such documents without revealing the other side of the story, ie the people who expressed very different views to those extreme racist views that some want to pretend were universally accepted in Australia.

You can ‘prove’ to some gullible people’s satisfaction that 21st Century Australia is a hotbed of neo-Nazi thought and action, if you selectively quote from that tiny minority and don’t reveal that most Australians have no truck with them.

If you’d read the book you’d know that Windschuttle deals with the history of the radical nationalist minority who were decidedly racist but he points out that this was a small self-appointed cultural 'elite'; a tiny minority acting as such self-appointed elites do in claiming that they are somehow representative of either the majority or are the leading thinkers in the country; that we all hang on their every word when, in fact, we usually ignore them completely.

If you’d read the book you’d know that Windschuttle shows that while there were racists who loved the idea of a White Australia Policy, supported the Immigration Restrictions Act for racist reasons and claimed that racial purity was the motivation behind the Act, the impetus that drove the Act through Parliament developed out of the anti-transportation movement, the anti-coolie movement and primarily the trade union movement, all of which were primarily concerned with economic and humanitarian reasons for preventing the importation of cheap or unpaid (as in the case of convicts) labour.

Since you obviously haven’t read the book, you are hardly in a position to criticise his conclusions or claim that his research was ‘sloppy’, or that he deliberately distorted the truth, or that he's delusional. If you'd read the book, you'd know he presented the facts to back up his case. Webley442 (talk) 10:14, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

Note that Aridd was speaking of early 20th century Australia and never said that 21st century Australia is a "hotbed of Neo-Nazi thought and action". Your overreaction quite deftly betrays your emotional investment in presenting a pro-Windschuttle view, Webley.


 * Note: if you had paid attention to what I’d written, you should have realised that I never claimed that Aridd had said anything of the kind. My remark was simply to illustrate a point: that you can ‘prove’ anything if you are willing to selectively quote from a minority and don’t reveal the full picture. As for my ‘emotional investment’, it is in accuracy. I am pro-evidence, pro-verifiability, pro-honest argument . One of the main reasons that I became involved in editing this and related articles was that I observed that much of what was being put into the article misrepresented the situation and in particular, there were significant misrepresentations of what Windschuttle had written. I’d be equally concerned with correcting misrepresented arguments about, or versions of, what other historians had written but they don’t seem to have been made as much a target for such deceptive behaviour as Windschuttle has.Webley442 (talk) 03:14, 1 August 2010 (UTC)