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Historian dismisses Tasmanian aboriginal genocide "myth"


PM - Thursday, 12 December , 2002  00:00:00


MARK COLVIN: A Sydney historian is trying to overturn the conventional thinking on what's been is widely-accepted as one of the darkest moments in Australian history, the genocide of Tasmanian Aborigines.

In a book launched this week, Keith Windschuttle argues that the genocide was a myth, which began as a vendetta against Van Diemen Land's Governor George Arthur, and has been perpetuated by historians ever since.

Volume One of Keith Windschuttle's "Fabrication of Aboriginal History" claims to be the most exhaustive analysis yet undertaken of relations between settlers and Aborigines in early 19th century Tasmania, and concludes there's no evidence of systematic Aboriginal resistance and frontier warfare.

But not everyone is convinced, as Peter McCutcheon reports.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: Keith Windschuttle has, for a number of years, questioned reports of widespread violence between Aborigines and 19th Century settlers, claiming the violence had been exaggerated by left-leaning quasi Marxist academics, including one of the most prominent historians in the field, Henry Reynolds.

Recently, Keith Windschuttle has turned his attention to one of the most infamous periods of Australian history; the extermination of most of the Indigenous population of Tasmania.

After wading through 17 volumes of archives, Keith Windschuttle concludes the evidence for frontier warfare and massacres in early 19th Century Tasmania simply isn't there.

He argues only 118 Tasmanian Aborigines were killed directly by the British. The rest died from a lethal cocktail of introduced diseases.

The most notorious cases of conflict, according to Keith Windschuttle, did not involve Aborigines fighting for their homeland, but rather what he described as "detribalised black bushrangers".

KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE: The first and the principle Aborigine who committed violence and killed and robbed a number of settlers in Tasmania, in fact he wasn't a local Aborigine at all, he was a man named Mosquito, he was from Sydney, he wasn't defending his tribal land, he'd been thoroughly integrated with white society, he'd worked in Hobart for 10 years, he'd even visited Mauritius with his employer, Edward Law, in order to buy cattle.

He was really a white man with black skin, and that's been pretended, it's been kind of manufactured into a myth of an outbreak of patriotic defence of tribal lands.

It just doesn't make sense.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: Conflict between Aborigines and the British mostly occurred in remote areas, with few witnesses, so by the very nature evidence of these sorts of conflicts, is often going to be sketchy. If the evidence of massacres has some gaps, can you really jump to the conclusion that they didn't happen?

KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE: Well, in Tasmania that's a hard argument to sustain.

We have terrific records; Governor Arthur knew that his regime would be controversial, he knew this would be an issue which people might try to blacken his name, and so he kept all the records in his possession.

There's a couple of cases where we've been given a story that they killed large numbers of Aborigines, there's a number of reasons why those stories are just unbelievable.

One of the main ones is the guns at the time; there were single shot muscats, once one bullet had been fired the Aborigines had time to either run off out of range, or they had time to kill the person who was holding the gun.

The other reason is that the Aborigines were no slouches when it came to going through the bush themselves.

No-one could sneak up on them, they had a large number of dogs, no-one could ambush them.

So the idea that there are large massacres committed by isolated shepherds on remote outstations is so implausible that it doesn't warrant belief.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: If then, as you argue, there was no genocide of Tasmanian Aborigines, why have other historians got it so wrong through most of the 20th Century?

KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE: Well, in fact, the story began in the early 19th Century that the first person who perpetrated was Henry Melville, the editor of the Colonial Times, in Hobart.

Governor Arthur actually jailed him on criminal libel, a case which has nothing to do with the Aborigines, but in order to get revenge, while in jail, Melville wrote an indictment of Arthur's administration, which focussed primarily on his Aboriginal policy.

Now, from him, other historians have taken up the similar sort of story, and it's been self-perpetuating.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: Well, Henry Reynolds has in the past accused you as acting as a type of defence council for settlers and the Government, that is, selectively quoting only the evidence of people who cast doubt on the massacres; what's your response to that?

KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE: Yeah, well, with this Tasmanian book, I have done the most exhaustive study that anyone's ever done of violence in Victoria.

It's not a selective quotation at all; Henry's the one who does all the selective quotations, as I've already shown.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: Keith Windschuttle.

Historian Henry Reynolds agrees the term "genocide" may not be appropriate to describe the plight of Tasmanian Aborigines; but apart from that, he agrees with little else of Keith Windschuttle's latest work.

Henry Reynolds says there is abundant evidence of frontier warfare.

HENRY REYNOLDS: The idea that it was warfare has been there from the time itself, and almost every historian that's written over the last 170 years, because the history of Tasmania goes back that far, the written history, has talked about it as war.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: Well, according to Keith Windschuttle, most of the reported conflicts in Tasmania were sporadic and limited, usually involving detribalised black bushrangers, such as Mosquito and Black Tom, rather than people fighting for their homelands; would you describe these conflicts as frontier warfare?

HENRY REYNOLDS: Ah, yes indeed, I would, and that' s the way they were talked about at the time, from everyone from the Governor, to the officials in Britain, to the people out in the field, the military officers, and to the settlers themselves.

I know Keith Windschuttle says they didn't really mean real war, but one can only look at what they said, and they talked about it as war. It was called the Black War at the time.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: Keith Windschuttle notes that the Indigenous rates of death before and after the declaration of martial law in 1828 remained constant. He said the British, with single shot muscats, simply didn't have the technology, or knowledge, of the bush to commit widespread murder.

HENRY REYNOLDS: Well, both of those are true. Um, they didn't, they didn't, they weren't able to ever find, or very rarely, to get large numbers of Aborigines in one place so they could sort of shoot them at a large scale, but nonetheless, there was constant conflict throughout the settled districts of Tasmania over a long period of time, and in that period, over that period of time, a lot of people got killed.

I mean, and that's scarcely surprising.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: Keith Windschuttle says most of the reported massacres reported in Tasmania have been myth piled upon myth; he cites a case, for example, where Aborigines were supposedly murdered for killing sheep at Oyster Bay, yet there were no sheep in the area at the time; do you accept he's been able to find some holes in what were widely accepted stories?

HENRY REYNOLDS: Oh, without a doubt. I mean, in such, when we're talking about events of such a long time ago, and contentious, and events of conflict, there are stories which accentuate and exaggerate the numbers killed, but on the other hand, there were clearly a lot of killing that wasn't reported, that didn't get into the newspapers, that people didn't write to the Government about.

You can't argue that it all runs in one direction.

PETER MCCUTCHEON: I guess a lot of lay people might be asking how can two historians come to such remarkably different conclusions?

HENRY REYNOLDS: Oh, I'm sure, I'm sure that's true.

And what I've said about this is they should read my book, "Fade of a Free People", Penguin Books, with Keith's book, and make up their own mind.

MARK COLVIN: Historian Henry Reynolds, managing to sneak a book plug onto "PM", and talking there to Peter McCutcheon.