Macleay Press

If any scholar has written anything worthwhile on Australia’s early colonial history, it is unlikely to be mentioned in this book. In Michael Connor’s depiction, things have become so bad that all the historians, lawyers, anthropologists, sociologists and health experts, and everyone else who has written or spoken publicly about our history over the last thirty years, should be sacked immediately. So too should staff in the departments of education, in the Australian Research Council, and all their national and international academic peer reviewers. Recent PhD graduates should be asked to give back their degrees, as they have not been properly trained. Many historical research assistants should never be given jobs again. The appellations ‘associate professor’ or ‘professor’ should be removed from office doors. Historians of the Australian academy do not deserve them. The first targets should be the most prolific and popular historians. And finally, tenure and terra nullius should be banned.

In 2003, I edited a book called Whitewash, a critique of Keith Windschuttle’s revisionist account of the destruction of the Tasmanian Aborigines, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002). Even before Whitewash was published, Windschuttle told a journalist at The Australian, D.D. McNicoll, that he was preparing a book-length reply. Nothing came of this promise. Rather than answer his critics directly, what Windschuttle seems eventually to have decided to do was to finance, through the Press he owns, Macleay, the publication of John Dawson’s Washout. By its publication, Windschuttle hopes, presumably, to have saved face.

These eleven papers are the product of the most recent of the Boston, Melbourne, Oxford Conversazione on Culture and Society, which, Leonie Kramer tells us in her brief introduction, has succeeded in attracting ‘leading scholars and experts in their fields’ and in remaining distinguished by ‘freedom from political restraints and the narrow debates that these engender’. However, there’s not much sign here of the ‘informal intensive and extended probing of issues’, or of ‘interaction with speakers over two days’. None of the discussion (one presumes there was discussion) is reproduced, and I counted only two cross-references.

Socrates was executed in 399 BC, charged with refusing to recognise the state gods, introducing new divinities and corrupting the youth. The indictment was probably politically motivated. The philosopher was closely associated with the recently deposed oligarchy led by the murderous Critias, and he had taught Alcibiades, who betrayed the state. Later, Aeschines rebuked the Athenians: ‘You put Socrates the Sophist to death because he was shown to have educated Critias.’

Keith Windschuttle seeks to undermine a ‘mindset’ among historians of Tasmania that started in Henry Melville’s History of Van Diemen’s Land (1835) and continues in Henry Reynolds’s An Indelible Stain (2001). Mindsets, or ‘interpretive frameworks’, sensitise historians to ‘evidence’ that fits their ‘assumptions’ ...