Keith Windschuttle facts for kids

Keith Windschuttle (1942 – 8 April 2025) was an Australian historian. He was appointed to the board of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation from 2006 to 2011. 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

Windschuttle was born in 1942. He attended 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 was 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, for a 5-year term which ended on 14 June 2011.

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 later argued that some of those he had praised for their empirically-grounded work fail to adhere to the principle. In the same book, Windschuttle maintained that historians on both sides of the political spectrum had 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 criticised historians who, he claimed, had extensively misrepresented and fabricated historical evidence to support a political agenda.

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".

The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, Van Diemen's Land 1803–1847

In his The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, the first book of a projected multi-volume examination of frontier encounters between white colonisers and Aboriginal people, Windschuttle criticised the last three decades of historical scholarship which had challenged the traditional view of Aboriginal passivity in the face of European colonisation.

Windschuttle challenged the idea that mass killings were commonplace, arguing that the colonial settlers of Australia did not commit widespread massacres against Indigenous Australians; he drastically reduced the figures for the Tasmanian Aboriginal death toll.

Windschuttle argued that encroaching pastoralism did not cause starvation through the loss of native hunting grounds as some historians had proposed, as their numbers were being drastically reduced by introduced disease, and large parts of Tasmania were not then, or now, occupied by white settlers. Windschuttle's estimate of the size of the Tasmanian Aboriginal population at the time of settlement is that it may have been as low as 2,000. Estimates made of the combined population of the Aboriginal people of Tasmania, before European arrival in Tasmania, are generally in the range of 3,000 to 8,000 people. Genetic studies have suggested much higher figures, which is supported by oral traditions that Aboriginal people were "more numerous than the white people were aware of" but that their population had been decimated by a sudden outbreak of disease prior to 1803.

The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume Three, The Stolen Generations 1881–2008

Published in 2009, the argument of this book is that the Stolen Generations is a myth.

Future volumes

In April 2010, Windschuttle announced that the two remaining books in the series, Volume Two on the Colonial Frontier from 1788 onwards, and Volume Four on the History Wars, originally projected for publication in 2003 and 2004, would be published at a date yet to be announced. In December 2013, Windschuttle advised that he hoped to have Volume Two published "in time to take its place in the discussions about our past during the Anzac Centenary in April 2015".

At his death, neither Volume 2 nor Volume 4 had appeared, and no revised publication schedule has been announced. The completion of these projects is now in some doubt.

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)
• 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)