Paul Christensen's Blog - Posts Tagged "indigenous"

The Fabrication Of Aboriginal History: Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847 by Keith Windschuttle

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Windschuttle’s book demolishes the fiction of ‘Aboriginal resistance’ in colonial VDL. There was no ‘guerrilla war’; lightning raids were only carried out against civilians, and when soldiers were present the Aborigines didn’t show. What hostilities there were occurred over processed food like flour.

Governor Arthur wanted to protect and preserve the Aboriginal race, and worried that if conflicts with settlers continued the Aborigines would be extirpated. The infamous Black Line was intended to herd two troublesome tribes away from the settled districts; there was no genocidal intent behind it; it was a success, because the Aborigines thereafter took the whites seriously, and largely stopped their violent assaults.

By means of logic and careful argument, Windschuttle demolishes the ‘Cape Grim massacre’ story as an invention of George Augustus Robinson. Robinson also covered up murders by Aborigines in order to swell his followers’ numbers and enhance his reputation.

As far as the treatment of Aborigines on Flinders Island went, even far left ‘historian’ Henry Reynolds admits they received 2.5 times as much as white orphans, and had stylish brick huts better than those of Irish peasants.

In chapter nine, ‘Settler Opinion and the Extirpation Thesis’, Windschuttle lays many of Reynolds’ lies and distortions bare. Full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigines died out from a combination of respiratory illnesses like influenza, and venereal diseases (contracted from Bass Strait sealers) which left them infertile.

Many of their women fled voluntarily to those same Bass Strait sealers, who while rough, treated them less brutally than their own menfolk. Furthermore, the Aboriginal males would often sell their own women for seal meat, flour or potatoes.

Their deaths from disease were not the fault of colonial authorities, who provided them with first rate medical care (again, far better than that of poor whites). Inter-tribal warfare took the lives of twice as many blacks as white-on-black deaths in the same period.

This book caused a panic when it came out in 2002, and a volume called ‘Whitewash’ was rushed out for damage control, itself rebutted in John Dawson’s book ‘Washout’.

No one giving Windschuttle’s book one star on Goodreads appears to have read a word of it!



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