This is the full text of the speech prepared for the debate with Keith Windschuttle at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival. It draws on some of the contributions found in Robert Manne’s (ed), Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Black Inc, 2003).
The first British troops and settlers arrived on Van Diemen’s Land almost exactly 200 years ago. At the time, it is thought by scholars, there were about 4000 to 5000 Indigenous people on the island. By the early 1830s the number of these people had been reduced to 200 or so. These survivors either surrendered or were captured and transported to Flinders Island. By the end of the 1870s not one of the ‘full blood’ Indigenous inhabitants, of a people who had lived on the island of Tasmania for perhaps 35,000 years, remained alive. Ever since the 1830s what had happened in Tasmania has been considered by civilised opinion as one of the most terrible tragedies in the history of British colonisation.
This is not Keith Windschuttle’s view. According to the dust jacket of his book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, Van Diemen’s Land 1803-1847, the British settlement of Australia was ‘the least violent of all Europe’s encounters with the New World’, while according to its concluding chapter, Van Diemen’s Land was ‘probably the site where the least indigenous blood of all was deliberately shed’. Between 1803 and the removal of the Aborigines to Flinders Island, 30 years later, Windschuttle continues, ‘the British were responsible for killing 118 of the original inhabitants—less than four deaths a year.’ In a different section of his book he claims that it is ‘clear’ that ‘the number of Aborigines killed by colonists was far fewer than the colonists who died at Aboriginal hands’. Windschuttle regards Aboriginal killings of the British as mere criminal acts: robbery and murder. He blames Aboriginal criminality, Aboriginal callousness towards their own women and the dysfunctionality of their society, as well as the introduction of European diseases, for the total collapse of Tasmanian Aboriginal society.
As is well known, Windschuttle’s book has been hailed by conservatives with overwhelming enthusiasm. Geoffrey Blainey described it as ‘one of the most important and devastating written on Australian history in recent decades’. Professor Claudio Veliz went further. He described Fabrication as ‘one of the most important books of our time’. My view is different. I regard Fabrication as one of the most