21 December, 2002

Australia's "black armband" controversy about history

Americans might be able to understand Australia's current "Black Armband" controversy but I doubt that many others would. I have some difficulty understanding it myself.

The controversy is about the fact that the Commonwealth of Australia (like the United States of America) is the result of conquest by the British. Unlike the USA, however, the early British settlers of Australia met only feeble and sporadic resistance from the indigenous population (Aborigines). And many white Australians take comfort from the fact that their ancestors met only feeble resistance.

Australian Leftist historians, however, do the usual disruptive thing that one expects from Leftists and try to undermine that comfort by claiming that Aboriginal resistance was in fact fierce and that the slaughter of them was great. They also claim that white Australians owe black Australians an "apology" for the suffering inflicted on their ancestors -- with "reparations" being the obvious next step after that.

Our Prime Minister has dismissed what he calls the "black armband" version of Australian history put forward by Leftists and resolutely rejects the need for an "apology".

The Leftist version of Australian settlement has not however gone unchallenged and Keith Windschuttle, a reformed Marxist, has just published a large scholarly book called The fabrication of Aboriginal history in which he points out all the distortions in Leftist histories of the events concerned. Some of his arguments are given here

This has raised quite a storm in the Australian press with "get Windschuttle" being the agenda. Some of the criticisms are pretty desperate -- e.g. that he wrote his book "too quickly" and that he did not get it published through a conventional Left-leaning academic publisher -- but he has also been accused of "plagiarism", even though it is only a similarity to another author that has been paraded rather than true plagiarism (i.e. outright copying). But this too is nonsense as both Windschuttle and the author he supposedly semi-copied were in fact both paraphrasing yet an earlier source and both footnoted that fact.

So why are the Leftists so frantic to get Windschuttle? An unspoken reason is that the Leftist historians are afraid of Windschuttle's really BIG challenge to them. Windschuttle has also publicized the now generally forgotten fact that the Aborigines are NOT Australia's original inhabitants. They too were invaders and wiped out or absorbed most of their predecessors. And pictorial evidence of that is freely available!

One of the predecessor groups was a pygmy race -- a pocket of whom survived into modern times by living in Australia's densest rainforest. And striking early photographs of them are still available and were once widely circulated. Despite the photographs and extensive early Anthropological descriptions of them, however, Australia's pygmies have been unmentioned in the textbooks and popular histories of Aboriginal Australia for roughly the last 30 years! And Windschuttle has broken the silence! So if THAT gets widely known, the Leftist case for apologies and reparations will get completely wiped out!



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