| History of Australia | |
|---|---|
This article is part of a series |
|
| Chronological | |
| Prehistory | |
| 1606–1787 | |
| 1788–1850 | |
| 1851–1900 | |
| 1901–1945 | |
| Since 1945 | |
| Timeline | |
| Topical | |
| Monarchy · Exploration | |
| Constitution · Federation | |
| Economic · Railway | |
| Immigration · Indigenous | |
| Military · Diplomatic | |
| States, Territories and cities | |
| New South Wales · Sydney | |
| Victoria · Melbourne | |
| Queensland · Brisbane | |
| Western Australia · Perth | |
| South Australia · Adelaide | |
| Tasmania · Hobart | |
| Australian Capital Territory · Canberra | |
| Northern Territory · Darwin | |
|
Australia Portal |
The history wars in Australia are an ongoing public debate over the interpretation of the history of the British colonisation of Australia and development of contemporary Australian society (particularly with regard to the impact on Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders). It has resemblances to debates in other countries.[1]
The Australian debate often concerns the extent to which the history of European colonisation post-1788 and government administration since Federation in 1901 may be characterised as having been:
a. marked by little or no conflict between 'Colonists' and Indigenous peoples, and by generally humane intent by government authorities; with damage to indigenous people mainly attributable to unintended factors (such as the spread of new diseases) rather than to malicious policy;
b. marred by both official and unofficial imperialism, exploitation, ill treatment, colonial dispossession, whether or not Australia was invaded, marked by violent conflict, guerrilla or other forms of warfare between Europeans and Aboriginal people at the frontier, and whether or not massacres on indigenous people, and perhaps genocide or cultural genocide took place.
The History Wars also relates to broader themes concerning national identity, as well as methodological questions concerning the value and reliability of written records (of the authorities and settlers) and the oral tradition (of the Indigenous Australians), along with the ideological biases of those who interpret them.
In 1968 Professor W. E. H. "Bill" Stanner, an Australian anthropologist, coined the term the "Great Australian Silence" in a Boyer Lecture entitled "After the Dreaming",[2] where he argued that the writing of Australian history was incomplete. He asserted that Australian national history as documented up to that point had largely been presented in a positive light, but that Indigenous Australians had been virtually ignored. He saw this as a structural and deliberate process to omit "several hundred thousand Aborigines who lived and died between 1788 and 1938… (who were but) … negative facts of history and … were in no way consequential for the modern period".[3] A new strand of Australian historiography subsequently emerged which gave much greater attention to the negative experiences of Indigenous Australians during the British settlement of Australia. In the 1970s and 1980s, historians such as Manning Clark and Henry Reynolds published work which they saw as correcting a selective historiography that had misrepresented or ignored Indigenous Australian history. The historian Geoffrey Blainey argued in the literary and political journal Quadrant in 1993 that the telling of Australian history had moved from an unduly positive rendition (the "Three Cheers View") to an unduly negative view (The "'black armband'") and Australian commentators and politicians have continued to debate this subject.
Interpretations of Aboriginal history became part of the wider political debate sometimes called the 'culture wars' during the tenure of the Coalition government from 1996–2007, with the Prime Minister of Australia John Howard publicly championing the views of some of those associated with Quadrant.[4] This debate extended into a controversy over the way history was presented in the National Museum of Australia and in high school history curricula.[5][6] It also migrated into the general Australian media, with regular opinion pieces being published in major broadsheets such as The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Marcia Langton has referred to much of this wider debate as 'war porn'[7] and an 'intellectual dead end'[8]
Two major participants in the "wars" have been Prime Ministers Keating and Howard. According to the analysis for the Australian Parliamentary Library of Dr Mark McKenna,[9] Paul Keating (1991–1996) was believed by John Howard (1996–2007) to portray Australia pre-Whitlam in an unduly negative light; while Keating sought to distance the modern Labor movement from its historical support for the Monarchy and the White Australia Policy by arguing that it was the Conservative Australian Parties who had been barriers to national progress and excessively loyal to the British Empire. He accused Britain of having abandoned Australia during World War II. Keating was a staunch advocate of a symbolic apology to indigenous people for the misdeeds of past governments, and outlined his view of the origins and potential solutions to contemporary Aboriginal disadvantage in his Redfern Park Speech (drafted with the assistance of historian Don Watson). In 1999, following the release of the 1998 Bringing Them Home Report, Howard passed a Parliamentary Motion of Reconciliation describing treatment of Aborigines as the "most blemished chapter" in Australian history, but he did not make a Parliamentary apology.[10] Howard argued that an apology was inappropriate as it would imply "intergeneration guilt" and said that "practical" measures were a better response to contemporary Aboriginal disadvantage. Keating has argued for the eradication of remaining symbols linked to British origins: including deference for ANZAC Day, the Australian Flag and the Monarchy in Australia, while Howard was a supporter of these institutions. Unlike fellow Labor leaders and contemporaries, Bob Hawke and Kim Beazley, Keating never traveled to Gallipoli for ANZAC Day ceremonies. In 2008 he described those who gathered there as "misguided".[11]
In 2006, John Howard said in a speech to mark the 50th anniversary of Quadrant that "Political Correctness" was dead in Australia but: "we should not underestimate the degree to which the soft-left still holds sway, even dominance, especially in Australia's universities"; and in 2006, Sydney Morning Herald Political Editor Peter Hartcher reported that Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd was entering the philosophical debate by arguing in response that "John Howard, is guilty of perpetrating 'a fraud' in his so-called culture wars... designed not to make real change but to mask the damage inflicted by the Government's economic policies".[12]
The defeat of the Howard government in the Australian Federal election of 2007, and its replacement by the Rudd Labor government has altered the dynamic of the debate. Rudd made an official apology to the Stolen Generation[13] with bi-partisan support.[14] Like Keating, Rudd supports an Australian Republic, but in contrast to Keating, Rudd has declared support for the Australian flag and supports the commemoration of ANZAC Day and expressed admiration for Liberal Party founder Robert Menzies.[15][16]
Since the change of government, and the passage, with support from all parties, of a Parliamentary apology to indigenous Australians, Professor of Australian Studies Richard Nile has argued: "the culture and history wars are over and with them should also go the adversarial nature of intellectual debate",[17] a view contested by others, including commentator Janet Albrechtsen.[18]
The black armband debate concerns whether or not accounts of Australian history gravitate towards an overly negative or an overly positive point of view. The black armband view of history was a phrase first used by Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey in his 1993 Sir John Latham Memorial Lecture to describe views of history which, he believed, posited that "much of [pre-multicultural] Australian history had been a disgrace" and which focused mainly on the treatment of minority groups (especially Aborigines). This he contrasted with the 'Three Cheers' view, according to which: "nearly everything that came after [the convict era] was believed to be pretty good". Blainey argued that both such accounts of Australian history were inaccurate: "The Black Armband view of history might well represent the swing of the pendulum from a position that had been too favourable, too self congratulatory, to an opposite extreme that is even more unreal and decidedly jaundiced.".[19]
The lecture was subsequently published in the political and literary journal, Quadrant,[20] which at the time was edited by Robert Manne and is now edited by Keith Windschuttle, two of the leading "history warriors", albeit on opposing sides of the debate. The phrase then began to be used by some commentators pejoratively to describe historians viewed as writing excessively critical Australian history 'while wearing a black armband' of "mourning and grieving, or shame". New interpretations of Australia's history since 1788 were contested for focussing almost exclusively on official and unofficial imperialism, exploitation, ill treatment, colonial dispossession and cultural genocide and ignoring positive aspects of Australia's history.[9] Manning Clark was named by Blainey in his 1993 speech as having "done much to spread the gloomy view and also the compassionate view with his powerful prose and Old Testament phrases."[20]
The Howard Government's responses to the question of how to recount Australian history were initially formulated in the context of Paul Keating's characterisation of the subject. John Howard argued in a 1996 Sir Robert Menzies Lecture that the "balance sheet of Australian history" had come to be misrepresented:
| “ | The 'black armband' view of our history reflects a belief that most Australian history since 1788 has been little more than a disgraceful story of imperialism, exploitation, racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination. [...] I believe that the balance sheet of our history is one of heroic achievement and that we have achieved much more as a nation of which we can be proud than of which we should be ashamed. In saying that I do not exclude or ignore specific aspects of our past where we are rightly held to account. Injustices were done in Australia and no-one should obscure or minimise them. [...] But [...] our priority should [...] [be] to commit to a practical program of action that will remove the enduring legacies of disadvantage.[21] | ” |
In 2009, Howard's successor Kevin Rudd also called for moving away from a black-arm view:
| “ | "Time to leave behind us the polarisation that began to infect our every discussion of our nation's past. To go beyond the so-called "black arm" view that refused to confront some hard truths about our past, as if our forebears were all men and women of absolute nobility, without spot or blemish. But time, too, to go beyond the view that we should only celebrate the reformers, the renegades and revolutionaries, thus neglecting or even deriding the great stories of our explorers, of our pioneers, and of our entrepreneurs. Any truthful reflection of our nation's past is that these are all part of the rich fabric of our remarkable story...[22] | ” |
Stephen Muecke, currently Professor of Writing at the University of New South Wales, contributed to the debate by arguing that black armband events bring people together in common remembrance and cited Anzac Day as an example; while Aboriginal lawyer Noel Pearson argued that whilst there was much that is worth preserving in the cultural heritage of non-Aboriginal Australia, "To say that ordinary Australians who are part of the national community today do not have any connection with the shameful aspects of our past is at odds with our exhortations that they have connections to the prideful bits"[23]
The notion of the 'white blindfold' view of history entered the debate as a pejorative counter-response to the notion of the "blackarmband school".[24][25][26]
In his book Why Weren't We Told? in 1999, Henry Reynolds referred to Stanner's "Great Australian Silence", and to "a 'mental block' which prevented Australians from coming to terms with the past".[27] He argued that the silence about Australia's history of frontier violence in much of the twentieth century stands in stark contrast with the openness with which violence was admitted and discussed in the nineteenth. Reynolds quotes many excerpts from the press, including an article written in the Townsville Herald in Queensland as late as 1907, by a "pioneer" who described his part in a massacre. Reynolds commented that violence against Aboriginals, far from being hushed up or denied, was openly talked about.
The nature of the debate began to change in 1999 with the publication of a book 'Massacre Myth' by journalist, Rod Moran, who examined the 1926 Forrest River massacre in Western Australia. Moran concluded that the massacre was a myth inspired by the false claims of a missionary (possibly as a result of mental health issues).[28] The principal historian of the Forrest River massacre, Neville Green, describes the massacre as probable but not able to be proven in court.[29] Keith Windschuttle, an Australian historian, said that reviewing Moran's book inspired his own examination of the wider historical record.[30] Windschuttle argues that much of Australian Aboriginal history, particularly as written since the late 1970s, was based on the use of questionable or unreliable evidence and on deliberate misrepresentation and fabrication of historical evidence. He based his conclusions on his examination of the evidence cited in previous historical accounts and reported incidences of non-existent documents being cited, misquoting and misleadingly selective quoting from documents and of documents being cited as evidence that certain events took place when his examination concluded that they do not support those claims. Windschuttle reported his conclusions in a number of articles published in Quadrant and in 2002, he published a book, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume 1, Van Diemen’s Land 1803 - 1847, which focussed on Tasmanian colonial history.
Historian Geoffrey Blainey argued in a 2003 book review of Fabrication,[31] that the number of instances when the source documents do not support the claims made and the fact that the divergences overwhelmingly tend to support claims of violent conflict and massacres indicates that this is not a matter of mere error but bias.
The debate had therefore changed from an argument over whether there was an excessive focus on negative aspects of Australian history to one over to what extent, if at all, Australian Aboriginal history had been based on questionable evidence or had been falsified or fabricated and whether this had exaggerated the extent of violence against Aborigines. Particular historians and histories that are challenged include Lyndall Ryan and Henry Reynolds and the histories of massacres, particularly in Tasmania but also elsewhere in Australia. Windschuttle's naming of historians whom he accused of misrepresentation and fabrication of the historical evidence, created considerable controversy and produced a range of responses including condemnation of as well as support for his work.[32][33][34][35][36]
After the introduction of the word genocide in the 1940s by Raphael Lemkin, Lemkin himself and most comparative scholars of genocide and many general historians, such as Robert Hughes, Ward Churchill, Leo Kuper and Jared Diamond, basing their analysis on previously published histories, present the extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines as a text book example of a genocide.[37] The Australian historian of genocide, Ben Kiernan, in his recent history of the concept and practice, Blood and soil: a world history of genocide and extermination from Sparta to Darfur, (2007) treats the Australian evidence over the first century of colonization as an example of genocide.[38]
Among scholars specializing in Australian history much recent debate has focused on whether indeed what happened to groups of Aborigines, and especially the Tasmanian Aborigines during the European colonisation of Australia can be classified as genocide. According to Mark Levene, most Australian experts are now "considerably more circumspect".[39] In the specific instance of the Tasmanian Aborigines Henry Reynolds, who takes events in other regions of colonial Australia as marked by "genocidal moments",[40] argues that the records show that British administrative policy in Tasmania was explicitly concerned to avoid extermination, however practices the events on the ground that lead to the virtual extinction worked out.[41] Tony Barta, John Docker and Anne Curthoys however emphasize Lemkin's linkage between colonization and genocide.[42] Barta, an Australian expert in German history, argued from Lemkin that, "there is no dispute that the basic fact of Australian history is the appropriation of the continent by an invading people and the dispossession, with ruthless destructiveness, of another".[43] Docker argues that, "(w)e ignore Lemkin's wide-ranging definition of genocide, inherently linked with colonialism, at our peril".[44] Curthoys argues that the separation between international and local Australian approaches has been deleterious. While calling for "a more robust exchange between genocide and Tasmanian historical scholarship",[45] her own view is that the Tasmanian instance constitutes a "case for genocide, though not of state planning, mass killing, or extinction".[46]
Much of the debate on whether European colonisation of Australia resulted in genocide, centres on whether "the term 'genocide' only applies to cases of deliberate mass killings of Aborigines by European settlers, or ... might also apply to instances in which many Aboriginal people were killed by the reckless or unintended actions and omissions of settlers".[47] Historians such as Tony Barta argue that for the victim group it matters little if they were wiped out as part of a planned attack. If a group is decimated as a result of smallpox introduced to Australia by British settlers, or introduced European farming methods causing a group of Aborigines to starve to death, the result is in his opinion genocide.[48]
Henry Reynolds points out that European colonists and their descendants frequently use expressions that included "extermination", "extinction", and "extirpation" when discussing the treatment of Aborigines during the colonial period, and as in his opinion genocide "can take many forms, not all of them violent"[49] this is an indicator of genocide.
The political scientist Kenneth Minogue and other historians such as Keith Windschuttle disagree and think that no genocide took place.[50][51] Minogue does not try to define genocide but argues that its use is an extreme manifestation of the guilt felt by modern Australian society about the past misconduct of their society to Aborigines. In his opinion its use reflects the process by which Australian society is trying to come to terms with its past wrongs and in doing this Australians are stretching the meaning of genocide to fit within this internal debate.[52]
While there had been inconclusive speculation as early as 1789 as to the source of smallpox amongst the Australian Aborigines on the Australian mainland, more recently Professor Noel Butlin, an economic historian, in 1983 speculated: "it is possible and, in 1789, likely, that infection of the Aborigines was a deliberate extermination act". Historians David Day and Henry Reynolds repeated Butlin’s claims and in 2001 Reynolds wrote "one possibility is that the epidemic was deliberately or accidentally let loose by someone in the settlement at Sydney Cove. Not surprisingly this is a highly contentious proposition. If true, it would clearly fall within the ambit of the Genocide Convention".[53]
Australian virologist Frank Fenner, an authority on smallpox and principal author of the 1988 World Health Organisation report, Smallpox and its Eradication, felt that it is not possible for live smallpox to have survived the long voyage out from England or the next fifteen months before the first cases were seen amongst Aborigines near the settlement but did not address the literature relevant to the variolous material in bottles brought from England. This material was carried by First Fleet surgeons for inoculation purposes and it has been shown conclusively by Christopher Warren (2007)[54] that this material, though degraded, could still infect highly susceptible people with smallpox. Smallpox spread by the inhalation of airborne droplets of virus in situations of personal contact or by contact with blankets that an infected person had recently used.[55]
Medical scientists Sir Edward Stirling and Sir John Cleland published a number of books and articles between 1911 and 1966 suggesting that smallpox arrived in Northern Australia from an Asian source.[56]
In her 2002 book, historian Judy Campbell reviewed reports of disease amongst Aboriginal people from 1780–1880, particularly the smallpox epidemics of 1789-90, 1830s, and 1860s. She argues that the evidence, including that contained in these reports shows that, while many diseases such as tuberculosis were introduced by British colonists, this was not so for smallpox and that the speculations of British responsibility made by other historians were based on tenuous evidence, largely on the mere coincidence that the 1789-90 epidemic was first observed afflicting the Aborigines not long after the establishment of the first British settlement. Campbell argues instead that the north-south route of transmission of the 1860s epidemics (which is generally agreed), also applied in the earlier ones. The hypothesis that the introduction of smallpox to Australia in the far north, via long-standing trading contacts between Aboriginal people and Makassar fishermen from what is now Indonesia.[57] has been challenged by historian Craig Mear in relation to the Sydney epidemic of 1789-90.[58]
In the April 2008 edition of The Monthly, David Day wrote further on the topic of genocide. He wrote that Lemkin considered genocide to encompass more than mass killings but also acts like "driv[ing] the original inhabitants off the land... confin[ing] them in reserves, where policies of deliberate neglect may be used to reduce their numbers... Tak[ing] indigenous children to absorb them within their own midst... assimilation to detach the people from their culture, language and religion, and often their names."[59]
Despite the lengthy and detailed findings set out in the 1997 Bringing Them Home report into the Stolen Generation, which documented the removal of Aboriginal children from their families by Australian State and Federal government agencies and church missions, the nature and extent of the removals have been disputed within Australia, with some commentators questioning the findings contained in the report and asserting that the Stolen Generation has been exaggerated. Sir Ronald Wilson, former President of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission and a Commissioner on the Inquiry, has stated that none of the more than 500 witnesses who appeared before the Inquiry were cross-examined. This has been the basis of criticism by the Coalition Government[60] and by the anthropologist Ron Brunton in a booklet[61] published by the Institute of Public Affairs that was criticised in turn by the lawyer Hal Wootten.[62] An Australian Federal Government submission has questioned the conduct of the Commission which produced the report, arguing that the Commission failed to critically appraise or test the claims on which it based the report and failed to distinguish between those separated from their families "with and without consent, and with and without good reason". Not only has the number of children removed from their parents been questioned, but also the intent and effects of the government policy.[63]
Some critics, such as Andrew Bolt, have questioned the very existence of the Stolen Generation. Bolt stated that it is a "preposterous and obscene" myth and that there was actually no policy in any state or territory at any time for the systematic removal of "half-caste" Aboriginal children. Robert Manne responded that Bolt did not address the documentary evidence demonstrating the existence of the Stolen Generations and that this is a clear case of historical denialism.[64] Bolt then challenged Manne to produce ten cases in which the evidence justified the claim that children were "stolen" as opposed to having been removed for reasons such as neglect, abuse, abandonment, etc. He argued that Manne did not respond and that this was an indication of unreliability of the claim that there was policy of systematic removal.[65] In reply, Manne stated that he supplied a documented list of 250 names[66][67] Bolt stated that prior to a debate, Manne provided him with a list of 12 names that he was able to show during the debate was “a list of people abandoned, saved from abuse or voluntarily given up by their parents”; and that during the actual debate, Manne produced a list of 250 names without any details or documentation as to their circumstances. Bolt also stated that he was subsequently able to identify and ascertain the history of some of those on the list and was unable to find a case where there was evidence to justify the term ‘stolen’. He stated that one of the names on the list of allegedly stolen children was 13 year old Dolly, taken into the care of the State after being "found seven months pregnant and penniless, working for nothing on a station".[68]
The Bolt/Manne debate is a fair sample of the adversarial debating style in the area. There is focus on individual examples as evidence for or against the existence of a policy, and little or no analysis of other documentary evidence such as legislative databases showing how the legal basis for removal varied over time and between jurisdictions,[69] or testimony from those who were called on to implement the policies,[70] which was also recorded in the Bringing Them Home report. A recent review of legal cases claims it is difficult for Stolen Generation claimants to challenge what was written about their situation at the time of removal.[71]
The report also identified instances of official misrepresentation and deception, such as when caring and able parents were incorrectly described by Aboriginal Protection Officers as not being able to properly provide for their children, or when parents were told by government officials that their children had died, even though this was not the case.
The new Australian Government elected in 2007 issued an Apology similar to those that State Governments had issued at or about the time of the [Bringing Them Home] report ten years earlier. On 13 February 2008, Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister of Australia moved a formal apology in the House of Representatives,[72] which was moved concurrently by the Leader of the Government in the Senate.[73] It passed unanimously in the House of Representatives on 13 March 2008.[74] In the Senate the Australian Greens moved an amendment seeking to add compensation to the apology, against which all other parties voted, after which the motion was passed unanimously.[75]
In 2002, historian Keith Windschuttle, in his book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847, questions the historical evidence used to identify the number of Aborigines deliberately killed during European colonisation, especially focusing on the Black War in Tasmania. He argues that there is credible evidence for the violent deaths of only 118 Tasmanian Aborigines, as having been directly killed by the British, although there were undoubtedly an unquantifiable number of other deaths for which no evidence exists. He argues that the Tasmanian Aboriginal population was devastated by a lethal cocktail of introduced diseases to which they had little or no resistance due to their isolation from the mainland and the rest of humanity for thousands of years. The deaths and infertility caused by these introduced diseases, combined with the deaths from what violent conflict there was, rapidly decimated the relatively small Aboriginal population. Windschuttle also examined the nature of those violent episodes that did occur and concluded that there is no credible evidence of warfare over territory. Windschuttle argues that the primary source of conflict between the British and the Aborigines was raids by Aborigines, often involving violent attacks on settlers, to acquire goods (such as blankets, metal implements and 'exotic' foods) from the British. With this and with a detailed examination of footnotes in and evidence cited by the earlier historical works, he criticises the claims by historians such as Henry Reynolds and Professor Lyndall Ryan that there was a campaign of guerrilla warfare against British settlement. Particular historians and histories that are challenged include Henry Reynolds and the histories of massacres, particularly in Tasmania (such as in the Cape Grim massacre) but also elsewhere in Australia. Windschuttle's claims are based upon the argument that the 'orthodox' view of Australian history were founded on hearsay or the misleading use of evidence by historians.
Windschuttle argues that, in order to advance the ‘deliberate genocide’ argument, Reynolds has misused source documentation, including that from British colonist sources, by quoting out of context. In particular, he accuses Reynolds of selectively quoting from responses to an 1830 survey in Tasmania in that Reynolds quoted only from those responses that could be construed as advocating "extermination", "extinction", and "extirpation" and failed to mention other responses to the survey, which indicated that a majority of respondents rejected genocide, were sympathetic to the plight of the Aborigines, feared that conflict arising from Aboriginal attacks upon settlers would result in the extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines and advocated the adoption of courses of action to prevent this happening.[76]
Windschuttle's claims and research have been disputed by some historians, in Whitewash. On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History, an anthology including contributions from Henry Reynolds and Professor Lyndall Ryan, edited and introduced by Robert Manne, professor of politics at La Trobe University. This anthology, has itself been the subject of examination by Melbourne businessman, freelance writer and Objectivist John Dawson, in Washout: On the academic response to The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, which argues that "Whitewash" leaves Windschuttle's claims and research unrefuted.[77]
In "Contra Windschuttle", an article published in the conservative publication Quadrant, S.G. Foster examined some of the evidence that Windschuttle presented on one issue, Stanner's notion of the "Great Australian Silence". In Foster’s opinion, the evidence produced by Windschuttle did not prove his case that the "Great Australian Silence" was largely a myth. Windschuttle argues that, in the years prior to Stanner’s 1968 Boyer lecture, Australian historians had not been silent on the Aborigines although, in most cases, the historians’ “discussions were not to Stanner’s taste” and the Aborigines “might not have been treated in the way Reynolds and his colleagues would have liked”.[78] Foster argues that Windschuttle is “merciless with those who get their facts wrong” and that the fact that Windschuttle has also made a mistake[79] means that he did not meet the criteria that he used to assess 'orthodox historians' he was arguing against and whom he accused of deliberately and extensively misrepresenting, misquoting, exaggerating and fabricating evidence relating to the level and nature of violent conflict between Aborigines and white settlers.[80]
At the time of the publication of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One it was announced that a second volume, to be published in 2003, would cover claims of frontier violence in New South Wales and Queensland, and a third, in 2004, would cover Western Australia.[81] On 9 February 2008, however, it was announced that the second volume, anticipated to be published later in 2008, would be entitled The Fabrication of Australian History, Volume 2: The "Stolen Generations" and would address the issue of the removal of Aboriginal children (the "stolen generations") from their families in the 20th century.[82]
The new volume was released in January 2010, now listed as Volume 3, with a statement that Volumes 2 and 4 would appear later.[83] Announcing the publication, Windschuttle claimed that the film Rabbit-Proof Fence had misrepresented the child removal at the centre of the story. These claims were subsequently rejected by the makers of the film.[84]
In 2003 Australian historian Stuart Macintyre published The History Wars, written with Anna Clark.[85] This was a study of the background of, and arguments surrounding, recent developments in Australian historiography, and concluded that the History Wars had done damage to the nature of objective Australian history. At the launch of his book, historian Stuart Macintyre emphasised the political dimension of these arguments[86] and said the Australian debate took its cue from the Enola Gay controversy in the United States.[87] The book was launched by former Prime Minister Paul Keating, who took the opportunity to criticise conservative views of Australian history, and those who hold them (such as the then Prime Minister John Howard), saying that they suffered from "a failure of imagination", and said that The History Wars "rolls out the canvas of this debate."[88] Macintyre's critics, such as Greg Melluish (History Lecturer at the University of Wollongong), responded to the book by declaring that Macintyre was a partisan history warrior himself, and that "its primary arguments are derived from the pro-Communist polemics of the Cold War."[89] Keith Windschuttle said that Macintyre attempted to "caricature the history debate."[90] In a foreword to the book, former Chief Justice of Australia Sir Anthony Mason said that the book was "a fascinating study of the recent endeavours to rewrite or reinterpret the history of European settlement in Australia."[91]
In 2001, writing in Quadrant, historian Keith Windshuttle argued that the then-new National Museum of Australia (NMA) was marred by "political correctness" and did not present a balanced view of the nation's history.[92] In 2003 the Howard Government commissioned a review of the NMA. A potentially controversial issue was in assessing how well the NMA met the criterion that displays should: "Cover darker historical episodes, and with a gravity that opens the possibility of collective self-accounting. The role here is in helping the nation to examine fully its own past, and the dynamic of its history—with truthfulness, sobriety and balance. This extends into covering present-day controversial issues."[93] While the report concluded that there was no systemic bias, it recommended that there be more recognition in the exhibits of European achievements.[94].
The report drew the ire of some historians in Australia, who claimed that it was a deliberate attempt on the part of the Government to politicise the museum and move it more towards a position which Geoffrey Blainey called the 'three cheers' view of Australian history, rather than the 'black armband' view.[95] In 2006 columnist Miranda Devine described some of the Braille messages encoded on the external structure of the NMA, including "sorry" and "forgive us our genocide" and how they had been covered over by aluminium discs in 2001, and stated that under the new Director "what he calls the 'black T-shirt' view of Australian culture" is being replaced by "systematically reworking the collections, with attention to 'scrupulous historical accuracy'".[96]
An example of the current approach at the NMA is the Bells Falls Gorge Interactive display, which presents Windshuttles's view of an alleged massacre alongside other views and contemporary documents and displays of weapons relating to colonial conflict around Bathurst in 1824 and invites visitors to make up their own minds.[97].
The "history wars" are widely viewed, by external observers and participants on both sides as an extension of the "culture war" originating in the United States. William D. Rubinstein, writing for the conservative British think tank the Social Affairs Unit, refers to the history wars as "the Culture War down under".[98] Participants in the debate including Keith Windschuttle and Robert Manne are frequently described as "culture warriors" for their respective points of view.[99][100]