BY PETER BOYLE
In the midst of the concerted public relations exercise, focused around the Sydney Olympics, to present Australia as a multicultural and non-racist society, the federal minister for Aboriginal affairs John Herron denied the existence of a "stolen generation". Around the same time, a once-leftish writer, Keith Windschuttle, attacked the historical consensus that thousands of Aborigines were killed during the European colonisation of Australia.
Denying the brutal and racist history of the colonisation of Australia may seem a curious way of dealing with an issue that has prompted hundreds of thousands of people to join marches for reconciliation but it has its logic. The objective is discredit historians like Henry Reynolds and the studies such as the 1997 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's (HREOC) report on the Aboriginal Stolen Generations.
This sordid historical revisionism has come a long way since the bumbling racist Pauline Hanson made her political debut. Hanson's poorly researched polemics on the "real history" of Australia were summed up in a book called Pauline Hanson — The Truth. It was such an embarrassing jumble of racist lies that there was soon a scramble among the assorted reactionaries clustered in and around One Nation to deny authorship.
Over the last three and a half years, Prime Minister John Howard's government has increasingly displaced Hanson as the source of racist revisionism. First, Howard campaigned against the "political correctness" of the liberal intelligentsia, chiming in with Hanson's "I'm not a racist but" line. Then, he went on the warpath against the "black arm-band view of history" and the need to re-work the school history syllabus to fill it with more dates and names and less analysis. But all this remained pretty vague.
Herron took the first clear step towards denying the real history of race relations in this country by arguing, in a submission to a Senate inquiry, that it could not be said that there was a "stolen generation" because only 10% of Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their parents. Of course, he picked the lowest estimate mentioned in the HREOC report, which said that the actual number could have been as high as "one in three".
When pressed by reporters, Herron conceded that many Aboriginal children were removed from their parents, but questioned the extent of the practice and the degree to which children were taken without consent. He did not refute the basic fact that a terrible injustice had been inflicted on thousands of Aboriginal children and their parents but tried to throw some dirt to discredit the major official report that had exposed the injustice.
Tom Morton, of ABC Radio's Background Briefing program, revealed last July that much of the government's argument in the controversial Senate submission drew upon earlier criticisms of the HREOC report by Dr Ron Brunton of the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), a right-wing think tank.
Brunton's line of attack focused on a charge that the inquiry headed by the then president of the HREOC, Sir Ronald Wilson, did not rigorously cross-examine people appearing before it.
Wilson responded that, while he hadn't cross-examined the many Aboriginal witnesses "with tears running down their faces", their stories were supported by the mountain of evidence provided by the laws, practices and policies of every state government in Australia.
'Benign' colonisation
The "success" of the IPA's attack on the HREOC seems to have encouraged the dogs of reaction. Another extreme right-wing institution, Quadrant magazine, rushed to join the battle by publishing a series of articles by Windschuttle painting European colonisation as benign, humanitarian and civilised.
"Ever since they were founded in 1788, the British colonies in Australia were civilised societies governed by both morality and laws that forbade the killing of the innocent. The notion that the frontier was a place where white men could kill blacks with impunity ignores the powerful cultural and legal prohibitions on such action. For a start, most colonists were Christians to whom such actions were abhorrent. But even those whose consciences would not have been troubled knew it was against the law to murder human beings, Aborigines included, and the penalty was death", wrote Windschuttle.
This outrageous assessment of history was put to the test of argument in a public debate in the Newtown secondhand bookshop owned by left-wing Sydney personality Bob Gould. Windschuttle and Quadrant editor P.P. McGuinness faced Reynolds and Gould. It was a clear victory for Reynolds and Gould before a 200-strong crowd that was mostly unsympathetic to, if remarkably tolerant of, the right-wing speakers.
Windschuttle focussed his attack on Reynolds' estimate that about 20,000 Aborigines were killed by the colonisers before 1901. He argued that Reynolds' "deception" was based on estimating that 8-10,000 Aborigines were killed in Queensland alone by the Europeans and "native police" in a one-sided "war" in which rifles, Gatling guns and poison were deployed against spears and cudgels.
Reynolds explained that his estimate for deaths in Queensland was based on an informed judgement that the ratio of black to white deaths in this grossly uneven military conflict was about 10 to one. The true total figure could be higher, he added.
Windschuttle's argument also rested on a concerted attack on some of the testimonies in the surviving official records of massacres and punitive expeditions. His greatest venom was reserved for a few evangelical Christian missionaries who campaigned against the massacres. This is strange, considering that his case for a benign colonisation rests in part on the"Christian values" of the British settlers.
Clearly, most colonial Christians did not consider Aborigines fellow human beings. They were seen as "savages" and "pests" that could be exterminated or "allowed to die out". This much can be gleaned from the most cursory study of history. It recently even emerged in an officially promoted collection of speeches of the first national parliamentarians, produced to celebrate next year's centenary of Federation.
According to Windschuttle and McGuinness, the Christian missionaries who complained about the brutal treatment of Aborigines were deceivers (like today's "bleeding-heart" liberals) out to advance their own narrow interests (funding for missions) by jumping on the Aboriginal rights bandwagon. By discrediting the testimonies of a couple of the missionaries, Windschuttle sought to convince the audience that the "Christian" capitalist politicians, settlers and police who denied the massacres were telling the truth. The problem is, as Gould reminded those present, some of the latter confessed, or even boasted about, their involvement in the massacres.
Evidence
Another major pillar of Windschuttle's case echoes the IPA criticisms of the stolen generation report. If there were massacres, show us the bodies! "Historians should only accept evidence of violent deaths, Aboriginal or otherwise, where there is a minimum amount of direct evidence. This means that, at the very least, they need some reports by people who were either genuine eyewitnesses or who at least saw the bodies afterwards. Preferably, these reports should be independently corroborated by others who saw the same thing. Admissions of guilt by those concerned, provided they are recorded first-hand and are not hearsay, should also count as credible evidence."
Reynolds and Gould countered that it was ridiculous to insist that historians have to prove beyond reasonable doubt, as in a criminal trial, every Aboriginal casualty before a historical judgement can be made. This approach, said Gould, "loads the historical record totally in favour of conquerors and victors".
After all the squabbling over body counts, in his summary, McGuinness conceded that he had no doubt that many Aborigines suffered violently during colonisation and that there is still a social legacy from that today.
So what's their game?
By focusing a relatively narrow attack on historians like Reynolds, who has done much to popularise the real history of Aboriginal-European relations, Windschuttle and McGuinness hope to legitimise their totally unsubstantiated white-washed and pro-imperialist general assessment of the colonisation of Australia. They seek to win, mainly by implication, the argument that Aboriginal problems today would be addressed best by leaving it to the forces of capitalism. This was given away by McGuinness' aside that if Aboriginal pastoral workers had not been given the right to be paid award wages in 1965, more Aborigines would have jobs today.
As Windschuttle rolled out his arguments (McGuinness barked reactionary abuse in place of arguments, in the style of his regular column in the Sydney Morning Herald), it became clear than Quadrant today is still performing the role it was founded (with CIA funding) to play in the Cold War. Founding editor James McAuley declared it a force to turn intellectual opinion away from "sentimental and neurotic leftism".
In 1959, as Cassandra Pybus records in her book The Devil and James McAuley, Quadrant railed against "breast-beating" intellectuals who concentrate on injustice to Aborigines instead of attacking Communism, the "real evil" . Today, the liberal intellectual do-gooders, chardonnay and caf‚ latte-drinking "new elite" are the real evil. They are the Aborigines' worst enemies pretending to be their friends, said McGuinness.
It is not just the historical assessments of a few liberal intellectuals that have stirred these reactionaries. Many of these assessments were made long ago. The views of hundreds of thousands of Australians dissenting in the streets against the attacks on Aboriginal rights, demanding true reconciliation with indigenous Australians, are the reactionaries' real target.
Howard, Herron, Brunton, Windschuttle and McGuinness want to put history back under lock and key, drive it out of the general education system, banish it to the realm of abstract academic scholarship and prevent working people from discovering the Australian ruling class's brutal treatment of the Aboriginal people, yesterday and today.
[Peter Boyle is a member of the Democratic Socialist Party. Visit the DSP's web site at .]