A killer myth

Wednesday, 3rd March 2010

The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume Three, the Stolen Generations 1881-2008
by Keith Windschuttle
Macleay Press, $59.95,
pp. 656, ISBN 9781876492199

I blame myself for Keith Windschuttle having perhaps wasted the last few years writing what is his most important book. It was 2003, and I believed then that mere truth would triumph over the ‘stolen generations’ myth.

So when I saw Windschuttle monster ‘stolen generations’ propagandist Professor Robert Manne at a Melbourne Writers Festival debate, I thought, ‘Aha!’ The man for the job. He was then flogging the first volume of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, on the alleged massacres of Tasmanian Aborigines. Or, rather, he was dodging a flogging by academics for having dared to expose their invention of massacres that had never happened, citing references that didn’t mention them happening.

Now, I bow to no one in my admiration for that first volume, but I felt it was, well, target practice. A sighter. ‘Great book, Keith,’ I said afterward. ‘But why not write about the “stolen generations”?’ A much bigger lie. He brushed me off, and it took some years, he admits, for my appeal to bulls-eye in his sense of duty. The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume Three, The Stolen Generations is the compelling result.

But at the time I was deflated by his refusal. I was sure a great fraud had been committed: the preaching of a racist crime that never occurred. That crime, as every schoolchild has been taught for a decade, is that Australian officials stole up to 100,000 children between 1910 and 1970 just because they were Aboriginal. Or, as Manne puts it: ‘It was not from harm that the mixed-descent children were rescued but from their Aboriginality,’ by authorities who ‘wished… to help keep White Australia pure’.

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