The last thing I expected Keith Windschuttle to say was that he regretted ever writing about Aboriginal history. But the man who ignited the so-called “history wars”, the most bitter Australian academic row in years, talks wistfully of what might have been if his 2002 book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History had not turned him into a national figure.
It is not the friends he has lost or the hatred he has aroused that seem to bother him most. It is that he has been sucked into what he says is a relatively parochial, Australian issue when he would much rather be writing about the history of western civilisation and the Enlightenment.
Before Fabrication appeared, Windschuttle was a little-known publisher and historian who planned to write books for the American market from Sydney. “The trouble is this damned Aboriginal issue came up,” he says. “I thought, ‘I’ll write a couple of articles on this,’ but it’s taken control of my life. The last thing I wanted to do was spend what’s going to be six to 10 years writing four huge volumes.”
For our lunch he has chosen one of Sydney’s smartest restaurants, the Pier, not far from his home in the fashionable suburb of Paddington. “Most of my guests are American. I like bringing them here to give them the impression that we live like this all the time,” he chuckles, as we look out at the yachts bobbing in the harbour.
He skims the menu, clearly familiar with what’s on offer (he and his wife, Elizabeth, a successful businesswoman, eat out at least five nights a week). A small, slightly stout man in his sixties, he settles on two starters - oysters followed by a raw kingfish salad. I opt for blue-eyed cod. We both stick to mineral water. “Two glasses of wine and my day would end,” says Windschuttle, who does much of his writing in the middle of the night.
He looks like a docile academic with his gold-rimmed glasses, tweed jacket and casual shirt. Indeed, it is hard to reconcile the chatty, unthreatening Windschuttle with the rancour he has stirred with The Fabrication of Aboriginal History.
In the book, he argues that some of the country’s eminent historians had grossly exaggerated white colonial massacres of Australia’s indigenous Aborigines to promote their leftwing agendas.
Like other conservatives, Windschuttle was angered by what he saw as leftist historians’ overly negative interpretation of the country’s past - what Australia’s prime minister, John Howard, has called the “black armband” view of history. (Howard’s critics retort that this view is preferable to the “white blindfold” version.)
Windschuttle’s book - and a subsequent one on the white Australia immigration policy - lambasts the historical establishment, accusing it of bias, deliberate misrepresentation, warped judgment and sloppy research.
As Henry Reynolds, one of the academics targeted by Windschuttle, has put it: “Disdain drips from the point of his pen.” Reynolds is one of the contributors to the book Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, a collection of essays published in response to Windschuttle.
This is all a long way from where Windschuttle seemed to be heading when he left school at 17 and began flirting with Marxism. He went into journalism initially, becoming editor of Australia’s first computer magazine. That was abandoned for university, where he received a first-class degree in history at Sydney University, then joined academia to teach social policy and history.
By the 1980s he had moved well to the right and clearly still resents the grip the left has on Australia’s universities and intellectual elite.
”Academia didn’t live up to my expectations,” he says, eating the first of his oysters. “I got tired of leftwing theories and very tired of leftwing people, quite frankly, and, at the same time, the universities filled up with leftwing people. By the 1980s, to teach humanities you had to be on the leftwing or no one would even consider you. People say the politics of academia are the worst in the world apart from the church. People literally hate each other. I thought, why am I wasting my time?”
So, in the early 1990s, he left and set up a printing house, Macleay Press, to publish his own work and those of fellow conservatives. The American market was an obvious target: “Conservatism is much more institutionalised and a lot richer in the US than in Australia,” he says.
”I knew [Fabrication] would be unpopular in Australia. The issue has been a big one because it has been the issue of the moral foundation of the colony of Australia. Are we a legitimate society or not? The people who argue that we need to do something about the Aboriginals argue that this won’t be a legitimate society until we have reconciliation. I don’t believe that. Nonetheless, that’s been the accepted view, so coming out with an argument that there isn’t all that much to apologise for is bound to be unpopular.
”The problem with Australian history for Australian historians,” he continues, “is that it has really been a pretty dull society - we’ve had no foreign invasions, no civil wars, no revolutions. The worst constitutional crisis we had was when the governor-general [in 1975] dismissed the prime minister and called an election. I mean ‘shock horror’.
”So, to make their story interesting, historians have had to invent some drama, and the great drama in Australia has become relations between blacks and whites.”
To say his book was “unpopular” is an understatement. At its launch, demonstrators waved placards calling Windschuttle a racist. Critics such as the Melbourne academic Robert Manne, editor of Whitewash, described it as “implausible” and “ignorant”.
The book was published at the end of a largely unsuccessful 10-year process aimed at achieving reconciliation between black and white Australia (scotched partly by the prime minister’s refusal to issue a formal apology) and hit a nerve in a society already deeply divided over the issue. The historical establishment and the intellectual elite saw Windschuttle as another manifestation of the conservative ascendancy encouraged by John Howard’s political success. They closed ranks, suggesting among other things that, because he was not a professional academic, he was not a “proper historian”.
Windschuttle clearly relishes a fight and is obsessive in his determination to set the record straight, as he sees it.
He got sidetracked again last year when what was initially intended as a review of Henry Reynolds’ latest work - on racism in 19th-century northern Australia - turned into another book, The White Australia Policy. In it, Windschuttle argues that the policy, aimed at keeping non-whites out of Australia, arose more from economic and political concerns than from racist notions of white superiority.
So, would Windschuttle describe himself as a political writer? “Oh yes. Definitely. That’s something that’s arisen out of my research in history,” he replies when I ask if he seeks to influence politics and contemporary debate.
He has spoken out against the philosophies of self-determination and self-management that shaped official Aboriginal policy since the 1970s until the Howard government began to reframe them. He thinks Aborigines would be much better off assimilating with the mostly white mainstream, rather than living in remote settlements on traditional lands, propped up by substantial government funds.
”Most Aboriginals have voted with their feet and already integrated with white Australia, and my argument is that that was the best policy all along,” he says. “The thing I’ve realised is that the real crime against Aboriginals was incarceration [on missionary and later government-run reserves]. Remote Aboriginal communities are a direct legacy of those reserves and it’s there where the fourth-world problems are rife - alcoholism, petrol sniffing, child abuse.”
Coffee has arrived and the sun is sinking in Sydney’s winter sky. We turn to Windschuttle’s current projects. Although he hopes to complete the second instalment of his Aboriginal history this year, writing is not his priority for now. As a publisher, he is working on a couple of other authors’ books. We talk about publishing and Windschuttle again returns to his hopes for the American market. He has plans for “two big books” that he believes would do very well in the US.
”If you have a reasonably big hit in America you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he says. “That’s my aim - to have a couple of big sellers and have a leisurely life.” But the chances of Windschuttle, 63 this year, ever allowing himself to take it easy seem remote. And future works sound as if they will be as controversial as his forays into Australian history.
”Western civilisation needs a lot of defence these days from its enemies, from the [Noam] Chomskys, [John] Pilgers and Robert Fisks of this world,” he says, as we get ready to leave. “All the big ideas from human beings living together in big groups have come from the west. Morals, politics, all of it. So I want to do something on that.”
Virginia Marsh is an FT correspondent based in Sydney.
Pier Restaurant, Rose Bay, Sydney
1 x tomato juice
2 x mineral water
1 x half dozen oysters
1 x kingfish salad
1 x blue-eye cod
1 x green salad
1 x cafe latte
1 x white coffee
Total A$139
