Keith Windschuttle facts for kids

Keith Windschuttle (born 1942) is an Australian historian. He was appointed to the board of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2006. He was editor of Quadrant from 2007 to 2015 when he became chair of the board and editor-in-chief. He was the publisher of Macleay Press, which operated from 1994 to 2010.

Major published items include Unemployment (1979), which analysed the economic causes and social consequences of unemployment in Australia and advocated a socialist response; The Media: a New Analysis of the Press, Television, Radio and Advertising in Australia (1984), on the political economy and content of the news and entertainment media; The Killing of History (1994), a critique of postmodernism in the study of history; The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803–1847 (2002), which accuses a number of Australian historians of falsifying and inventing the degree of violence in the past; The White Australia Policy (2004), a history of that policy which argues that academic historians have exaggerated the degree of racism in Australian history; and The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume Three: The Stolen Generations 1881–2008, which argues the story of the "stolen generations" of Aboriginal children is a myth.

Biography

He attended at Canterbury Boys' High School (where he was a contemporary of Liberal Australian prime minister John Howard).

Windschuttle was a journalist on newspapers and magazines in Sydney. He completed a BA (first class honours in history) at the University of Sydney in 1969, and an MA (honours in politics) at Macquarie University in 1978. He enrolled as a PhD student but did not submit a thesis; instead he published it under the title The Media with Penguin Books. In 1973, he became a tutor in Australian history at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). Between 1977 and 1981, Windschuttle was lecturer in Australian history and in journalism at the New South Wales Institute of Technology (now the University of Technology, Sydney) before returning to UNSW in 1983 as lecturer/senior lecturer in social policy. He resigned from UNSW in 1993 and founded Macleay Press, a small-press publishing company. Published authors besides Windschuttle include Leonie Kramer and Michael Connor. He has been a regular visiting and guest lecturer on history and historiography at American universities.

In June 2006, he was appointed to the board of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Australia's non-commercial public broadcaster.

Political evolution

An adherent of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s, Windschuttle later moved to the political right. This process is first evident in his 1984 book The Media, which took inspiration from the empirical perspective of the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson, especially his The Poverty of Theory, to make a highly critical review of the Marxist theories of Louis Althusser and Stuart Hall. While the first edition attacked "the political program of the New Right" and set out a case for both favouring "government restrictions and regulation" and condemning "private enterprise and free markets", the third edition four years later (1988) took a different view: "Overall, the major economic reforms of the last five years, the deregulation of the finance sector, and the imposition of wage restraint through the social contract of The Accord, have worked to expand employment and internationalise the Australian economy in more positive ways than I thought possible at the time."

In The Killing of History, Windschuttle defended the practices and methods of traditional empirical history against postmodernism and praised historians such as Henry Reynolds, but he now argues that some of those he praised for their empirically-grounded work fail to adhere to the principle. In the same book, Windschuttle maintains that historians on both sides of the political spectrum have misrepresented and distorted history to further their respective political causes or ideological positions.

In The Fabrication of Aboriginal History and other writings on Australian Aboriginal history, Windschuttle criticises historians who, he claims, have extensively misrepresented and fabricated historical evidence to support a political agenda. He argues that Aboriginal rights, including land rights and the need for reparations for past abuses of Aboriginal people, have been adopted as a left-wing 'cause' and that those he perceives as left-wing historians distort the historical record to support that cause. For Windschuttle, the task of the historian is to provide readers with an empirical history as close to the objective truth as possible, based on an analysis of documentary, or preferably eyewitness, evidence. He questions the value of oral history. His "view is that Aboriginal oral history, when uncorroborated by original documents, is completely unreliable, just like the oral history of white people". A historian has no responsibility for the political implications of an objective, empirical history. One's political beliefs should not influence one's evaluation of archival evidence.

For some of his critics, "historians don't just interpret the evidence: they compose stories about these meanings, or in the words of Hayden White, they 'emplot' the past. This is itself a cultural process".

Windschuttle's research in the early 2000s disputed the idea that the colonial settlers of Australia committed genocide against the Indigenous Australians. He also disputed the widespread view that there was a campaign of guerrilla warfare against British settlement. Extensive debate on his work has come to be called the "history wars". He dismissed assertions, which he imputed to the current generation of academic historians, that there was any resemblance between racial attitudes in Australia and those of South Africa under apartheid and Germany under the Nazis. He has been a frequent contributor to conservative magazines, such as Quadrant in Australia, of which he became editor in 2007, and The New Criterion in the United States.

2009 Quadrant hoax

In January 2009, Windschuttle was hoaxed into publishing an article in Quadrant. The stated aim of the hoax was to expose Windschuttle's purported right-wing bias by proving he would publish an inaccurate article and not check its footnotes or authenticity if it met his preconceptions. An author using the pseudonym "biotechnologist Dr Sharon Gould" submitted an article claiming that CSIRO had planned to produce food crops engineered with human genes. However, "Gould" revealed that she had regarded the article as an Alan Sokal style hoax, referring to an instance in which writings described as obvious scientific nonsense were submitted to and accepted by an academic journal. Based on the reporter's intimate knowledge of the hoax and what he described as her "triumphant" tone when disclosing the hoax to him, Windschuttle accused the online publication Crikey of being involved in the hoax, a claim Crikey denied. Two days later, Crikey revealed that "Gould" was in fact the writer, editor and activist Katherine Wilson. Wilson agreed to being named by Crikey, as her name had already appeared in online speculation and it seemed likely that her identity was about to be revealed by other journalists.

Reporters Kelly Burke and Julie Robotham note that "the projects cited by 'Gould' as having been dumped by the organisation [CSIRO] are not in themselves implausible, and similar technologies are in active development. Human vaccines against diseases including hepatitis B, respiratory syncytial virus and Norwalk virus have been genetically engineered into crops as diverse as lettuce, potato and corn, and shown to provoke an immune response in humans." Gould also suggests the CSIRO abandoned research into the creation of dairy cattle capable of producing non-allergenic milk for lactose-intolerant infants and a genetically engineered mosquito that could stimulate antibodies against malaria in humans who were bitten, mitigating against (sic) the spread of the disease. Both ideas are under serious scientific study by research groups around the world.

The hoax elements of the article published in Quadrant were that the CSIRO had planned such research, that they had abandoned it because of perceived public moral or ethical objections and that evidence of this was "buried" in footnotes to an article in a scientific journal and in two annual reports of the CSIRO, the relevant report years being unspecified. Windschuttle states: "A real hoax, like that of Alan Sokal and Ern Malley, is designed to expose editors who are pretentious, ignorant or at least over-enthusiastic about certain subjects. The technique is to submit obvious nonsense for publication in order to expose the editor's ignorance of the topic. A real hoax defeats its purpose if it largely relies upon real issues, real people and real publications for its content. All of the latter is true of what "Sharon Gould" wrote. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of the content of her article is both factually true and well-based on the sources she cites."

Major publications

• Unemployment: a Social and Political Analysis of the Economic Crisis in Australia, Penguin, (1979)
• Fixing the News, Cassell, (1981)
• The Media: a New Analysis of the Press, Television, Radio and Advertising in Australia, Penguin, (1984, 3rd edn. 1988)
• Working in the Arts, University of Queensland Press, (1986)
• Local Employment Initiatives: Integrating Social Labour Market and Economic Objectives for Innovative Job Creation, Australian Government Publishing Service, (1987)
• Writing, Researching Communicating, McGraw-Hill, (1988, 3rd edn. 1999)
• The Killing of History: How a Discipline is being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists, Macleay Press, Sydney (1994); Macleay Press, Michigan (1996); Free Press, New York (1997); Encounter Books, San Francisco (2000) online edition
• The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803–1847, Macleay Press, (2002)
• The White Australia Policy, Macleay Press, (2004)
• The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume Three: The Stolen Generations 1881–2008, Macleay Press, (2009)
• The Breakup of Australia: The Real Agenda Behind Aboriginal Recognition, Quadrant Books, (2016)
• The Persecution of George Pell, Quadrant Books, (2020)

See also

• American Indian Wars
• Aboriginal Tasmanians and the Black War
• Australian frontier wars
• Historikerstreit
• History wars
• Indian removal (United States)
• New Historians (comparable Israeli phenomenon)
• Stolen Generations (Australia)
• Vergangenheitsbewältigung