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The History wars are an ongoing public debate over the interpretation of the history of the white colonisation of Australia and its influence on responses to the current situation of the original inhabitants of the land. Similar debates have also occurred in the USA (the culture war) and Canada.
The term in particular has been applied to the debate on whether settlement occurred largely peacefully or through violent conflict with Indigenous Australians. It has a basis in methodological questions about the value and reliability of written records (of the authorities and settlers) and the oral tradition (of the Indigenous Australians). There are systematic issues of bias and perspective in both sources.
So, was Australia's history of settlement since 1788:
A) humane, with the country being peacefully settled, with specific instances of mistreatment being aberrations;
B) marred by both official and unofficial imperialism, exploitation, ill treatment, colonial dispossession and cultural genocide of its Indigenous people; or
C) somewhere in between?
Conservative scholars, intellectuals and politicians have challenged historians and others who interpreted Australian settlement as having included extensive violent conflict between the white settlers and the Indigenous Australian inhabitants of the land and labelled them as holding the Black armband view of history.
Background
The "Great Australian Silence"
Prof W. E. H. "Bill" Stanner, an anthropologist coined the term the "Great Australian Silence" in the 1968 Boyer Lectures titled "After the Dreaming" (1979, pp. 198-248). He argued Australian history was incomplete. European history to 1968 was well documented and positive but post white settlement Indigenous Australians were represented as a "melancholy footnote" (1979, p. 214). He saw this as structural (1979, p. 214) and deliberate. It was a 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" (1979, p. 214).The Black armband view of history
The black armband view of history was a phrase coined by Australian historian Professor Geoffrey Blainey in his 1993 Sir John Latham Memorial Lecture. He contrasted this view to the Three Cheers view of history. The phrase is used pejoratively by some right-wing and conservative Australian social scientists, politicians, commentators and intellectuals about historians who are seen to be writing critical Australian history 'while wearing a black arm band' of mourning and grieving, or shame.
Keith Windschuttle and the response to The Fabrication of Aboriginal History
In 2002 historian and journalist, Keith Windschuttle, in his book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847, disputed whether the colonial settlers of Australia committed widespread genocide against Indigenous Australians, especially focusing on the Black War in Tasmania, and denied 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 but also elsewhere in Australia. Windschuttle's claims are based upon the arguemt that the 'orthodox' view of Australian history were founded on hearsay or the misleading use of evidence by historians.
Windschuttle's claims and research have been argued against by other historians, in Whitewash. On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History, an anthology edited and introduced by Robert Manne, professor of politics at La Trobe University.
This anthology has itself been the subject of examination by author, John Dawson, in Washout: On the academic response to The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, which minutely dissects "Whitewash" and argues that "Whitewash" leaves Windschuttle's claims and research unrefuted.
See also
- Indigenous Australian
- Tasmanian Aborigine
- Black War - a period of conflict between the British colonists and Aborigines in Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) in the early years of the 1800s
- Tasmanian Aborigine
- Black armband view of history
- List of Australian Aboriginal massacres
- Stolen generation
Protagonists
In the USA
References
Articles
- Contra Windschuttle, S.G. Foster Quadrant, March 2003, 47:3 *
- The Whole Truth...?, P. Francis, The Journal of GEOS, 2000 *
Books
- The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847, Keith Windschuttle, 2002, ISBN 1876492058
- The History Wars, Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, 2003, ISBN 052285091X
- Whitewash. On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Robert Manne (ed), 2003 ISBN 0975076906
- Washout: On the academic response to The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, John Dawson, 2004 ISBN 1876492120
- Telling The Truth About Aboriginal History , Bain Attwood, 2005 ISBN 1741145775
- "After the Dreaming" in White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays 1938-1973, W.E.H. Stanner, 1979, pp. 198-248, ed. W.E.H. Stanner, ISBN 070811802X
External links
- History Wars Special in the Sydney Morning Herald
- Who plays Stalin in our History Wars? Stuart Macintyre
- Henry Reynolds, From armband to blindfold, The Australian’s Review of Books, April 2001 at Ingarnendi: The Australian Aboriginal Cultures Gallery at the South Australian Museum
History of Australia | Indigenous peoples of Australia | Issues in the culture wars
"History wars"