Keith Windschuttle
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Keith Windschuttle (born 1942) is an Australian writer who is the author of several books, including Unemployment (1979) which criticises media treatments of unemployment and advocates a socialist response, The Media: a New Analysis of the Press, Television, Radio and Advertising in Australia, a critical analysis of the media from a largely Marxist perspective, The Killing of History (1994), which is a critique of postmodernism in history, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002) which accuses a number of Australian historians of falsifying and inventing the degree of violence in the past, and The White Australia Policy (2004), which argues that left-wing academic historians have exaggerated the degree of racism in Australian history.
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[edit] Biography
After education at Canterbury Boys High School (where he was a contemporary of conservative politician John Howard), Windschuttle was a journalist on newspapers and magazines in Sydney. He completed a BA (first class honours in history) at the University of Sydney in 1969, and an MA (honours in politics) at Macquarie University in 1978. In 1973, he became tutor in Australian history at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). Between 1977 and 1981, Windschuttle was lecturer in Australian history and in journalism at the New South Wales Institute of Technology, now University of Technology, Sydney before returning to UNSW in 1983 as lecturer/senior lecturer in social policy. He resigned from UNSW in 1993. Since then he has been publisher of Macleay Press and a regular visiting and guest lecturer on history and historiography at American universities. In June 2006 he was appointed to the Board of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Australia's non-commercial public broadcaster.
[edit] Political evolution
A Marxist until the 1980s, Windschuttle has moved sharply to the right. His personal website carries advertisements only for his more recent, right-wing books. However, he does not appear to have repudiated his earlier work in general, or to have indicated which parts, if any, he stands by.
This political evolution has continued since the early 1990s. In The Killing of History, Windschuttle defended the of practices and methods of traditional empirical history against postmodernism, and praised historians such as Henry Reynolds. He currently argues that although at the time he believed that those "left-wing" historians whom he praised relied on traditional empirically-oriented approaches, he has subsequently discovered that some did not. Subsequently, he has adopted an overtly polemical position, attacking Reynolds and others and freely mixing political and empirical arguments.
His primary "political argument", evident in The Killing of History and his later work, is that some historians, both on the left and the right of the political spectrum, have manipulated, misrepresented and sometimes fabricated the historical evidence in order to produce versions of "history" that support various political "causes".
Windschuttle argues that the task of the historian is to attempt to provide the reader with an "empirical history", as near to the "objective truth" as possible, based on analysis of all the available evidence. The political implications of an objective, empirical history are not the empirical historian's responsibility. A historian may have his or her own political beliefs but they should never lead them to falsifying the historical evidence.
However, critics such as the contributors to Whitewash, have argued that Windschuttle does not follow his own criteria as, in their view, his work invariably produces findings consistent with his political views. The contributors to Whitewash include historians whom Windschuttle has directly criticised for "fabricating" history. The key issue of the "History Wars" is whether the historical evidence, viewed objectively, supports the historical arguments made by Keith Windschuttle or those made by the historians whom he has criticised.
A frequent contributor to right wing magazines Quadrant and The New Criterion, Windschuttle's recent research disputes whether the colonial settlers of Australia committed widespread genocide against the Indigenous Australians and denies the claims by some left-wing historians that there was a campaign of guerrilla warfare against British settlement. Extensive debate on his claims has come to be called the History Wars. He rebuts assertions, which he imputes to the current generation of academic historians, that there was any resemblance between racial attitudes in Australia and those of South Africa under apartheid and Germany under the Nazis.
[edit] The Fabrication of Aboriginal History
- See also: History Wars
The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847 is a review of published research on the history of violence between indigenous Australians and white colonists. The book focuses primarily on Tasmanian history and the massacres and violence reported there. Windschuttle denies many of the claims made by historians such as Henry Reynolds and Professor Lyndall Ryan. In reviewing the citations made by historians, he claims that many of these citations were inaccurate, misleading, or falsified, and that their claims were primarily based on hearsay. He argues that the colonial settlers of Australia did not commit widespread massacres against Indigenous Australians, and that there was not a campaign of guerrilla warfare against British settlement. His review focuses in large part on the Black War against the Aborigines of Tasmania.
Windschuttle's claims and research have been the subject of a series of rebuttals and counter-rebuttals. The best known is Whitewash. On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History, an anthology edited and introduced by Robert Manne, professor of politics at La Trobe University, with contributions from many Australian historians. Another book, Washout: On the academic response to The Fabrication of Aboriginal History by Melbourne freelance writer John Dawson, argues that Whitewash leaves Windschuttle's claims and research unrefuted.
[edit] Major publications
- Unemployment: a Social and Political Analysis of the Economic Crisis in Australia, Penguin, (1979)
- Fixing the News, Cassell, (1981)
- The Media: a New Analysis of the Press, Television, Radio and Advertising in Australia, Penguin, (1984, 3rd edn. 1988)
- Working in the Arts, University of Queensland Press, (1986)
- Local Employment Initiatives: Integrating Social Labour Market and Economic Objectives for Innovative Job Creation, Australian Government Publishing Service, (1987)
- Writing, Researching Communicating, McGraw-Hill, (1988, 3rd edn. 1999)
- The Killing of History: How a Discipline is being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists, Macleay Press, Sydney (1994); Macleay Press, Michigan (1996); Free Press, New York (1997); Encounter Books, San Francisco (2000)
- The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847, Macleay Press, (2002)
- The White Australia Policy, Macleay Press, (2004)
[edit] References
[edit] Articles
- Contra Windschuttle, S.G. Foster Quadrant, March 2003, 47:3 [1]
- The Whole Truth...?, P. Francis, The Journal of GEOS, 2000
[edit] See also
- David Horowitz like Windschuttle, an intellectual who was formerly an active left-winger and is now an active right-winger.
[edit] External links
- SydneyLine website - recent articles and lectures by Sydney author and publisher, Keith Windschuttle, plus other works and links that pursue similar interests and are conceived within the same tradition
- ABC Board bio
