Keith Windschuttle ( 1942-2025) by Ross Fitzgerald

Australian historian and polemist Keith Windschuttle was editor and then editor-in-chief of the nation’s leading conservative magazine, Quadrant, from 2007 until 2023.

For a while a supporter of the New Left, in the late 1970s Windschuttle moved to the political right. Intellectually, this involved a spirited attack on the then prevailing postmodernism in Australian universities, and defending the need for historians to be as empirically objective as possible.

As an historian, Dr Windshuttle is best known for his controversial, multi-volume, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History.

Published in 2002, volume one, Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847 ,denied claims about the extent of racial violence in colonial Tasmania. Because this struck home to many citizens concerned about what was regarded as an attack on Australia’s British heritage, Windshuttle’s history was given massive media coverage.

In Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847 Windshuttle argued that, to support their own political and ideological agendas, some Australian historians had either invented or falsified the amount of racial violence that occurred in colonial times. In this regard, Windschuttle extended the claims of pioneer Australian historian, Professor Geoffrey Blainey, by focusing on what he regarded as false statements about the extent of racial violence in early 19th Van Diemen’s Land.

Unsurprisingly, Windschuttle’s claims that Aboriginal genocide in colonial Tasmania was untrue, and that Aborigines primarily died from disease and the abuse and neglect of women provoked outrage among other Australian historians.

This spirited negative response gathered steam in late 2003 with the publication of Whitewash: on Keith Windschuttle’s fabrication of Aboriginal history, a collection of essays, edited by Robert Manne.
In it, historians who had written about Van Diemen’s Land argued that Windschuttle “seemed to have read few primary sources other than the Colonial Secretary’s Office papers, had almost no evidence for his principal claims about the cause of Aboriginal deaths or motivation for their resistance, and misunderstood or ignored the frontier context”. “

The Companion to Tasmanian History, published by the Centre for Tasmanian Historical Studies at the University of Tasmania rightly argues that ” Fabrication’s broader cultural and political impact remained profound. A more local concern was whether Tasmanian history had been misrepresented to serve a national political cause.”

Keith Windschuttle’s detailed response to Whitewash was published in the October 2003 issue of Quadrant.
In “Whitewash confirms the fabrication of Aboriginal history”, Windschuttle defends all the claims he made in Volume One of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History.

Neither Volume 2 nor Volume 4 of Keith Windschuttle’s major historical work has been published.
But Volume Three: The Stolen Generations 1881–2008, argues even more controversially that the narrative of the “stolen generations”of Aboriginal children is a myth.

Especially following the defeat of the referendum about an indigenous Voice to federal parliament, this remains a matter of huge and justifiable debate throughout Australia.

Ross Fitzgerald AM is Emeritus Professor History of Politics and History at Griffith University