I just learned today that Keith Windschuttle, the writer, historian and former editor of Australia’s Quadrant Magazine died early in April of this year. That I didn’t learn this until over a month later tells me that I don’t pay much attention to the media and also that the media didn’t pay much attention to his death. Were the latter wrong, I would have certainly learned of it before now if only by word of mouth. It was only when looking up a book I was recommended that I discovered he had died on Quadrant’s website. I have previously mentioned him twice on this blog which really understates how important he was to my intellectual formation during my university years.
When I was studying the obviously distorted and politicised version of what passes for Australian History in university, discovering his and related works was like a cold beer after a hard day’s labour on a hot summer’s day. To say it was refreshing is then something of an understatement. I have come to rethink a lot of my assumptions and beliefs over my adult life but the work he did on Australian history has for the most part, stood up and I still highly recommend it.
His now sadly unfinished Fabrication of Aboriginal History series was the most influential. I expect that the planned but unreleased Volume II was some way along and will be finished by someone else. The reason for them being unfinished seems totally down to other projects taking over including his The White Australia Policy, The Break-Up of Australia and most recently with his The Persecution of George Pell. Of all his works, it is perhaps more than a little ironic that the last should be the first to be vindicated in its very short publication history. The other two works could certainly be re-published within the unfinished series as they are relevant to his overall thesis.
I didn’t agree with everything he wrote (does one ever?) and I would probably take the most issue with The White Australia Policy but as I’ve not read it for twenty years, I will reserve judgement. And I wouldn’t expect Windschuttle would agree with a great deal of what I’ve written on this blog either. What is more important is he was one of very few figures in Australia that actually challenged the entrenched radicals in Australian government and academia. That this has only gotten worse is more down to spineless politicians and an apathetic population than any effort on Windschuttle’s part.
I could write more but I couldn’t help but notice what appeared second after the link to Wikipedia when searching his name in my search engine which as of writing is also exactly where it is found on Google. I thought it might be more fitting to show the kind of people Windschuttle was dealing with as it really demonstrates how important his work was.
This is all taken from an article in Overland by Sam Ryan a week or so after his death. Though I am sure I’ve heard the name, I was not immediately familiar with Overland which is described as, ‘Australia’s oldest radical literary magazine.’ So I can at least praise the publication for making their bias plain. The publication can also be partly forgiven as their ‘About’ page also states that ‘Overland accepts unsolicited writing’ and the author had only had one piece published before this. That they claim writers should allow up to six months for publication does suggest he’s more of an insider than not though.
I will be fisking each paragraph but there will be little effort required as the opening should well indicate:
On the morning of Saturday, 12 April in this 2025th horrible year of our lord, I rolled over to face my slowly waking partner to remark, “Keith Windschuttle is dead.” He had died days earlier, but I had only then been able to gather myself to the extent that I could voice the news.
So already, the author is making it about himself.
She is across most of the right-wing nuttery I follow obsessively, but Quadrant is the usual stand-in for Mr Windschuttle, so she answered, “Who the f*** is that? What a stupid name.” She was right on both accounts — who is (was) this bespectacled hatemonger? And imagine giving a child with an already ridiculous last name the very awkward first name “Keith”. Keith. Keith Windschuttle.
The information we have so far is that Keith Windschuttle was presumably right-wing and wore glasses. I have censored the vulgarity which the author also has featured in the title of his previous published piece. I don’t care to read it but I assume is about the lack of funding for what passed for the “Arts” in Australia these days.
Keith Windschuttle fancied himself an historian and was the editor of Australia’s favourite right-wing “literary” magazine, Quadrant. A CIA-funded cold war relic, Quadrant found a new champion for one of its many reactionary causes when Windschuttle joined as editor in 2008. He left in 2015 but was pulled back in for one more run in 2017. He stepped down at the end of 2024 to begin the rituals performed by all right-wing goblins as they prepare to die.
The first insult falls flat as the author’s bio tells us he is “writing a thesis” and Windschuttle worked in and was published in academia before becoming an independent writer. So even if you accept him only on “credentials” — he passes. It is actually true that Quadrant received funding from the CIA as it was a prominent anti-Communist publication during the cold war. This would be a strike against the magazine were it the main source of funding (even back then), but it wasn’t and never was where most of the funding came from. One could give Overland the same criticism if they’ve ever received money from the Australian tax payer as by their own standards, the Australian government is occupying land that was never ceded by Australian Aboriginals and is thus both evil and illegitimate. I need not respond to the rest as it is merely heaping insults.
Keith’s cause was against Aboriginal Australia — a thorn in the side of every white-skinned, healthily-foreheaded G8 graduate since invasion. By the time Keith blessed Australia with his birth, in 1942, movements were forming to grant rights to Aboriginal people. And then by 1969, when he earned his undergraduate degree, Aboriginal people were no longer classed as flora or fauna. Even in these early years, Keith surely sensed the threat of the very existence of this country’s first people, his rights eroding as theirs’ increased.
Keith’s cause (to the extent that it was one), was mostly against white-skinned academics who were a mixture of dishonest, incompetent and ideologically driven with plenty of overlap across all three. Were Henry Reynolds and the late (as I also just learned), Lyndall Ryan aboriginals? That Aboriginals were ever classed as “fauna” has been as progressives like to say “debunked”. No “source” is therefore required though I note that someone in the mostly negative comments section has already got to that part. So far, this has been nothing but assertions which would have got me into trouble when I was in “G8”.
Nevertheless, he persisted.
As, for some reason, do I.
He published a few books between 1979 and 1996, notably The Killing of History, a polemic against what he saw as the degradation of knowledge at the hands of postmodernism. He was like a more anti-charismatic progenitor of fad-diet proponents and self-help authors such as Jordan Peterson. Unfortunately, he didn’t sound like Kermit. He sounded more like John Howard, who sounds like the kangaroo from Blinky Bill. One of the few reliefs in the modern West is that our worst thinkers have the funniest voices.
Quite a few more books than I expect that the author ever will. I would bet a steak dinner that he didn’t do more than Google The Killing of History and has not even so much as read the sample pages on Amazon. In a rare but easy ‘W’ he correctly points out that Jordan Peterson sounds like Kermit the Frog. As for John Howard, it really depends which version of Blinky Bill. I’m much less familiar with the cartoon so I’ll take his word for it.
I will stop here briefly because I don’t actually know if Sam is a ‘Samuel’ or a ‘Samantha’. “Sam Ryan” is a pretty common name as far as the ‘white-skinned’ go so it is not a name I can easily Google for further information. Though the catty tone suggests a female, I am going to continue to assume Sam is male or at the very least, dresses up like one.
In 2002, he published his magnum opus The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen’s Land 1803 — 1847. Readers can probably assume its contents from the title, but they’d be wrong. It is, in fact, not a deconstruction of colonial fabrications of Aboriginal cultural development. It is actually a repudiation of historians such as Henry Reynolds, who illuminated the bloody founding of Australia’s now-least-literate state. It acts as a colonial document that is as historically illiterate as the state it describes became.
More assertions and sarcasm and I very much doubt the author has read the work at all. I remember being surprised at how bad the responses by academics were to this work at the time. John Dawson’s sadly out of print Washout: On the Academic Response to the Fabrication of Aboriginal History was a frequently amusing book-length response by someone who as far as I know, wasn’t even a trained historian. He managed to pick most of it a part with little effort at all and the tone suggests he motivated more by personal amusement. Yet, even by the lowest Internet journalist standards, this is very poor writing. Do keep in mind that the author of this article really does believe they’re intelligent too.
In The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, Windschuttle makes many arguments that minimise the violent impact of colonialisation and excuse the actions of the genocidal settlers while describing Aboriginal Australians as culturally backwards and primitive. He downplays the role of very real colonialist violence in the genocide by attributing it instead to the introduction of diseases by the unwashed Anglos who flooded the shores of the apple isle. Readers will be familiar with the deployment of this kind of excuse in discussions of the conquistadors’ genocide of the Americas. This view conveniently erases intent. For Keith, Aboriginal people simply got sick and died. The various Mcs and Macs who infected them knew not what they were doing.
Now I definitely know he hasn’t read it and whatever he may claim, reading without comprehension doesn’t count. I’ve not read the work for two decades but I do know that what he actually does is respond to various Australian academics by going to the primary sources they used. This is a short summary but he mainly argues that there was no “genocide” in Tasmania. No less a historian than John Hirst agreed with this though being no supporter or Windschuttle or his book. At the time, many academics even backed away from making such loaded claims as they couldn’t support them. This is all from memory but it is still better supported than anything the author has written thus far.
Alongside the germ-blaming, Windschuttle generally minimises the numbers by arguing that the population of pre-colonial Tasmania was as low as two thousand. Many historians and genetic studies suggest that the number was much, much higher. But Keith trotted out this claim alongside his much kinder portrayal of the colonisers who, according to him, were invigorated with enlightenment principles and were thus incapable of committing genocide, especially on these “noble savages”. This idea of enlightened colonisers accidently genociding a small band of island-dwelling primitives is the result of mental gymnastics that can only be performed by a USyd graduate with a thorn in their side.
I’m willing to bet that the author, while quick to dismiss how deadly introduced diseases can be to populations with no experience of them, was nonetheless all for masks and lockdowns; when what was quickly established as a generally mild respiratory illness began to spread in late 2019. This is the closest the author gets to backing up his assertions so far but he resorts to the old “studies” method. “Studies have suggested” all sorts of wild and wonderful things and the author hasn’t so much has linked to even one. If he can link me to any population records kept by Aboriginal Tasmanians prior to 1788, I’d be glad to peruse these records but I expect he’ll come up short.
To address this more seriously, while I can freely admit that Windschuttle certainly had a bias to minimise the actual population of Aboriginal Tasmanians at the time, the people he was responding to had every incentive to maximise it. The only thing we can reasonably do is look at the kind of society that lived there, the way they lived, the resources available and make estimates based on this information. I don’t think even the author is stupid enough to claim there was any high-yield farming going on prior to the 1800s in Van Diemen’s Land.
His next notable output on his favourite subject was published in 2009. Titled The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume Three, The Stolen Generations 1881–2008, it outright denies that the well-documented cultural genocide which has been acknowledged by both sides of politics ever happened. In this book, Keith calls the stolen generations a myth.
He didn’t read this either. The claims are not well documented. I don’t recall if Windschuttle ever called it a ‘myth’ but I would agree it is not a myth. In any case, “The Stolen Generations” doesn’t even rise to the level of myth. It is a lie.
I’m only disappointed he didn’t make fun of Keith here for publishing Volume III before Volume II.
He deploys many of the same techniques in denying the idea of the stolen generations as he did denying the Tasmanian genocide: the number of children taken were nowhere near as high as claimed, Aboriginal people were too primitive and wretched to take care of their children, and Australia’s national character, then as during early invasion, was incapable of genocide.
I don’t encourage people to give too much thought to this for what should be obvious reasons but committing genocide is actually pretty difficult work. Those who have made the effort will inevitably leave a lot of evidence. Consider as a simple example how often murderers are caught despite only having to get rid of a single body. I will allow it was easier in the past but then you also have less lethal methods available to do the deed as well as less effective means of disposing of bodies. Unlike Aboriginals, the British were also much better at record keeping and much like the Germans, would have likely documented all of it given how righteous we’re told they believed their cause was.
On the subject of Aboriginal parenting, anyone could make a simple inference based on contemporary observations about how it might have been a generation or two earlier. But this again, is spending too much time on the unsupported assertions of the author.
He of course completely ignores the lived experience of people affected both directly and indirectly, as well as the 1997 Bringing them Home report which was the result of almost 800 submissions and conservatively-estimated tens of thousands affected children. The report was acknowledged and its findings led to apologies by premiers and government representatives from both sides of politics at or soon after its release. The Howard government notably objected to portions of the report and did not include the word “sorry” in its response.
Actual evidence for his assertions have been presented! The only problem is that Windschuttle addresses all of this in the work the author is dismissing.
And let’s not forget Windschuttle’s elevation of an idealised frontier nation. Rather than seeing the racial and cultural erasure at the core of Australia’s colonial mission expressed in the forceful removal of children from Aboriginal families, he writes about an enlightened state providing welfare to the most wretched sections of its society.
The first sentence doesn’t make sense. The idea of a “frontier” was found in United States history where it was very real and there were other powers competing for pieces of the same land including many warrior tribes who posed a genuine threat to the advancing frontier. This was never the case for Australia as no regional or European power ever made a serious move to claim a piece and however much people like Ryan wants to “idealise” the Aboriginals — they were never a threat to British settlement. And as much as he might want to dismiss it, the British were “enlightened” if only by the worldly standards of the time. As a quck example, how many of the wretched “Indigenous communities” we have today were once much more functional missions?
I’d like to think that I’m hesitant to p*** on any grave, but at the dawn of the Second Trump Imperium it is important to drench some deserving gravestones. Windschuttle should not be remembered as a great thinker or historian, or even an uppity rabble rouser advocating for the devil in the interests of intellectual vibrance. He was an historically illiterate quack whose work provided talking points for hateful luminaries such as Miranda Devine, John Howard and Tony Abbot — all of whom have written obituaries on Quadrant’s website. I’m sure Peter Dutton would have contributed if it wasn’t for the election.
Another rare ‘W’ in his acknowledgement of the Second Trump Imperium. Following this are yet more tiresome insults and assertions. I will repeat that strictly by the standards of Windschuttle’s numerous detractors, he has more right to be described as a historian and academic than the author.
It is telling that Windschuttle was able to publish tomes that deny this country’s founding genocide and its “clean up” genocide of the stolen generations. In both Gaza and Australia, genocide only happens to white people. The rest are either collateral damage or painted as liars — Windschuttle helped make sure of that.
As Windschuttle’s most notorious works were published outside of academia and mainstream publishers, the author must be criticising independent/private publishers. That, or he just doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I’m not sure what he is saying about “white people” in the second sentence but with the reference to Gaza, he must be talking about Jewish people who also have white skin. I don’t know but this might be anti-Semitic.
Much can and should be written about Windschuttle’s rotten legacy, which exceeds the bounds of his attacks on Aboriginal Australia. Instead of the comprehensive intellectual thrashing he deserves, this antibiturary is a modest commemoration of the passing of one of our worst thinkers. Vale Keith Windschuttle.
There is not much to add here. I will only say that as bad as things already were when the Windschuttle first became an academic pariah, there was at least the appearance of effort to engage with the actual substance of his claims on television and within the pages of many major newspapers. Now someone who claims to be working on a thesis (I do at least believe this), can’t even string together a competent appraisal of his life and works in an online magazine. I don’t mean that it should be positive just that it should have some genuine criticisms that rises above insults and assertions. I’d be interested to see if they actually publish this in their quarterly.
As for Keith Windschuttle himself, I have no idea what his religious beliefs were but I will pray he was right with God before he died. His robust defence of Cardinal George Pell as well as what I believe was a genuine commitment to truth throughout his life, should give him some merit in the afterlife.