Customer Reviews

Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Agenda Melbourne, Vic.)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is a book that needs to be read carefully, with Keith Windschuttle's: The Fabrication of Aboriginal History close at hand. An attentive reader will find that while Whitewash is full of rhetoric and ideological condemnation of Windschuttle's work, it lacks the crucial element: evidence. It condemns his supposed political motivation but does not do what was promised; prove Windschuttle wrong. Contributors repeatedly accuse Windschuttle of ignoring evidence, yet then fail to provide us with evidence of more extensive violence in colonial Tasmania than Windschuttle does.
Reading closely, you find that Whitewash provides evidence of an account of the death of only one Tasmanian aboriginal that Windschuttle hadn't analysed (by the 2nd edition of Fabrication). Everything else is speculation.
Whitewash was an opportunity for a generation of historians accused by Windschuttle of misrepresenting and fabricating evidence, to provide the evidence that they hadn't done so. Their failure in Whitewash to do so is telling.
The term `revisionism' has acquired a taint. We think of people denying evidence, of revising history to edit out the truth. We need to remember that revision can also mean correcting past mistakes.

After reading both this and Windschuttle original piece, the message from Robert Manne is clear: If you stray from the farm, we will ruin you. But don't take my word for it, read them both and compare and see if facts (Windschuttle) do make better arguments that empty rhetoric (Manne).