A war of words about Australia’s frontier has been declared. Historians are exhuming bodies from the archives and counting them. What was the nature of the violence between Aborigines and settlers? How many Aboriginal people were shot or poisoned during the European occupation of the continent?
Over the last few years Keith Windschuttle has accused a generation of historians, in particular Henry Reynolds, of grossly exaggerating the number of Aborigines killed by Europeans in the occupation of the continent. He has been especially critical of the historiography of massacres and of Reynolds’ estimate that 20,000 Aboriginal people died in frontier conflict.1
I believe Reynolds’ estimate is conservative, and a reasonable and intelligent quantification that will continue to be revised but can never be definitive. Windschuttle’s challenge—to count the dead with scepticism—has elicited detailed responses from other scholars, including Reynolds himself.2
I am interested here in the politics, psychology and language of his scepticism. Debates about the number of dead, I shall argue, continually founder on fundamental disagreements about the nature of history and memory, and also the language and idea of ‘war’.
The killing of history
Windschuttle’s 1994 book, The Killing of History: How a Discipline is Being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists, expressed his anxiety and anger over the impact of postmodernism, deconstructionism and other forms of ‘critical theory’ on the discipline of history. His concern—a common one since the 1980s—was that the distinctions between history and fiction were being dissolved and the past had been deemed unknowable. More fundamentally, Windschuttle’s book was a defence of the idea of history as an objective science and a privileged product of western society. A number of those scholars he chose to attack—Greg Dening, Inga Clendinnen, Paul Carter and Anne Salmond—were among those who have tried to step outside the imperial, European view of the past in order to embrace a cross-cultural history.
Windschuttle was unsettled by the relativism that discarded the notion of unilinear, directional time and placed Indigenous perspectives on equal terms with Western ones. He affirmed his belief that there is such a thing as History and not a multiplicity of histories. History was not just written by the winners; it helped put Western culture at the top of the social evolutionary ladder; it was one of the gifts of civilisation and one of the tools of colonisation. The substitution of history for myth was one of the triumphs of European