"Why weren't we told?" asked Henry Reynolds.

"Because there was nothing to be told," seems to be the combined message
from the first three articles in October's edition of Quadrant, now on
sale at major newsagents throughout Australia. This 400th edition of
Quadrant contains a number of articles which, between them, put the lie
to the idea that anything like 'genocide' ever occurred in Tasmania -
and looks increasingly improbable for the rest of Australia. Another
article in the same issue offers a clue to the motivations of those who
appear to need such a myth as a foil for the defining trait of their
psychological profiles.

Taking pride of place is Keith Windschuttle who previously threw down
the gauntlet with his 2002 book, 'The Fabrication of Aboriginal
History', Vol. 1. Had it remained uncorroborated or un-debated, some
readers might have been prone to suspect it was just another author with
a penchant for controversy. However the requisite peer review debate has
not only since occurred, but much of it publicly in the mainstream
press. A momento of that debate is a recent book of articles called
'Whitewash', edited by Robert Manne (by coincidence a former editor of
Quadrant), during which a number of historians have responded to
Windschuttle's claims regarding the lax standards of historical research
he accused some of them of practicing in Australia. Manne's book is
partly a record of those live debates, including one at the University
of Tasmania in May this year. Keith Windschuttle summarises:

"...one of the senior figures of Australian historiography, Geoffrey
Bolton, who is no supporter of mine, said in his summarising remarks
that historians should stop using the term "genocide" in Australian
history because the evidence is not there to support the charge. I
would hope that, despite all our differences, Robert Manne would
agree with me on this one. Nowhere does his own book ['Whitewash']
attempt to make a case for the genocide of the Tasmanian Aborigines.
So, despite all the sound and fury raised by this debate since last
November, we have actually made some progress. The case for genocide
in Tasmania has not been sustained. Indeed its principal advocates
have walked away from the topic, unwilling to defend it. So, my
first thesis, there was no genocide in Tasmania, I now take as proven
by default." - Keith Windschuttle (Quadrant, Oct 2000), p. 12.

"Despite what Reynolds claims, my point in all of this has not been
made to undermine land rights or to advocate the return of 'terra
nullius', an anachronistic term that was never used in colonial
Australia anyway." - Keith Windschuttle, p. 13.

Also in that same issue, Robert Murray contributes a review of an
important book 'Invisible invaders: Smallpox and Other Diseases in
Aboriginal Australia 1780-1880' by Judy Campbell (Melbourne University
Press, 2002).

"[this book] is the result of more than twenty years of research and
has an approving foreword from Professor Frank Fenner, the former
Australian National University microbiologist and Director of its
John Curtin School of Medical Research - virtually a guarantee of
scientific soundness.
Campbell, a former ANU historian, makes a strong case that the
great killer was smallpox, killing up to half and then half again of
the Aboriginal population in two cataclysmic epidemics, in the 1780s
and again during 1824-31, and then a third comparable epidemic
through much of the tropics and remote outback in the 1860s.
More controversially, she amasses a great deal of evidence to
argue that all the epidemics came south with visiting fishermen from
Macassar, on the now Indonesian island of Sulawesi, and not from the
Sydney settlement, as some have claimed. In other words, whites had
no hand - not even through negligence - in the great disasters that
depopulated the continent, even though the first came at about the
same time as British colonisers arrived and the second just as they
began to spread with their livestock into the interior.
It has never been seriously argued, except for one possibility
discussed below, that the First Fleet brought smallpox. It was not
recorded on the ships, which had closely observing medicos aboard,
and any infection could not, anyway, have survived that long a
voyage. This makes Australia different from the Americas, where early
ships on the shorter Atlantic voyage often brought smallpox from
Europe and Africa, killing millions of unprepared Indians." - Robert
Murray, p. 17.

"A result of the second epidemic was that the squatters who drove
their stock into most of Australia below the tropics over the
subsequent twenty years moved in on a depleted, disrupted and
presumably demoralised indigenous population. In some districts along
the Murrumbidgee there appeared to be no people at all, though a few
other districts seemed to escape the disease for one reason or
another. There were only about 300 left in a large part of northern
Victoria. Over much of the country, age-old small bands of fifty or
so people in which Aborigines had lived from day to day could no
longer survive and had to merge. In many other ways the tribal
structure broke down.
Campbell suggests that this could be a reason the Aborigines did
not 'resist' the squatters, though she also points to indications
that some may have thought the whites caused the epidemic. They were
more likely, however, to lay the blame on either enemy tribes or evil
spirits, since they knew the disease came from the north and west,
where there were still no whites." - Robert Murray, p. 19.

"Re-reading some popular works on the subject - all in my local
library and well-thumbed - after reading Campbell, I was struck by
how vague, guess-prone and loosely worded they were. There also
seemed no sense of proportion. A smallpox epidemic which may have
wiped out half the population, and is well covered in the printed
records of the time, is usually treated as just one more of the ills
the whites brought or might have brought.
Manning Clark, despite his eagle eye for official weakness, does
not mention it. David Day in 'Claiming a Continent' suggests that
Butlin is probably right, but that there is a weak case for the
Macassar theory. I thought on first reading Robert Hughes's 'The
Fatal Shore' (1987) years ago that it was over the top about
Aborigines, convicts, women and the environment as victims, brilliant
work of literary showmanship though it is. This is probably the
world's best known and best read book on Australian history, and the
only international best-seller. It is probably the only one many,
even in Australia, will read. And it is at the top of Diamond's
further readings list. - Robert Murray, pp. 120-21.

The third non-editorial article in that same edition, 'Bias at the
National Museum', follows up Windschuttle's complaints about bias in the
galleries of the National Museum of Australia (NMA) in 2001, which
resulted in a review of the museum's exhibits by a panel of experts. In
consequence, the more blatantly offensive exhibits appear to have been
toned down or replaced. That article's author, Rob Foot, recently
inspected the museum's galleries and concluded:

"The review panel found that the problem of ideological bias was
confined to 'pockets' and was not institutional or systemic. If one
takes bias to mean outright statements of support for a specific
political position, the panel is no doubt right ... [however]
On a deeper excavation, a different level of bias becomes appar-
ent. A careful sub-textual reading uncovers a highly politicised -
and negative - reading of Australia's past and present that should be
deeply disturbing to the community that funded the construction of
the museum and the filling of its galleries. On its surface, the
museum presents as a bewildering compilation of largely dissociated
artefacts, voice-overs and sound effects. But, appearances to the
contrary notwithstanding, there are clear connecting threads that
identify the underlying ideological presumptions. The clues are to be
found in the arrangements of the artefacts and the captions that
accompany them." - Rob Foot, p. 22.

"...Nothing good came, then, from over 200 years of European
settlement, other than this latter-day ascension of the Greens. There
is hardly a single exhibit in the first exhibitions of Tangled
Destinies that does not have a negative connotation where the
Europeans are concerned. If this strikes readers as an extreme view,
consider the following quotations from the captions featured in the
various Tangled Destinies displays.
'The result [of European arrival] was biological invasion on an
unmatched scale and extinction of many native animals and plants.'
This is among the very first statements made by the NMA - it is from
the first panel in the gallery - and it sets the general tone.
'This futile barrier [the rabbit-proof fence] is a reminder that
more than one species colonised Australia after 1788.' That is,
rabbits and European humans; both species were similarly
uncontrollable.
'Australians share more than half their history since 1788 with
buffalo, rabbits, cane toads and other invaders. Invasions are often
accomplished quickly. Successful invaders become fellow residents.'
The implication that Europeans were an invading pest species could
hardly be clearer." - Rob Foot, p. 23.

The way Rob Foot describes some of its galleries, the National Museum of
Australia comes across like a theme park implementation of a certain
Little Red (or should that be Green) Book. I'll skip most of the obvious
similarities, without trying to figure out how much the NMA's themes owe
to Cuban and other overseas 'freedom fighters' as opposed to the
natively Australian.

[Re the North Head Quarantine Station, c. 1940s] "...a pair of
manacles is prominently displayed. The caption reads: 'These manacles
were used to restrain inmates not willing to comply with quarantine
regulations.' This again has a nice 1970s feel about it - the old
'resistance' motif. But there is no acknowledgment of the reasons for
a strict quarantine police or of the disastrous consequences of
diseases like typhoid, smallpox, cholera or tuberculosis spreading
through the community, as might happen if an infected person escaped
custody. Medical science, which attracts no mention in these
galleries, has successfully eradicated these diseases today, but they
were then a potent threat. It is as if the museum cannot comprehend
that things were not always as they are now." - Rob Foot, p. 25.

Ah, but now we go on see the reason why certain living cargoes being
turned loose on the continent without question or restraint is a cert to
be represented as GOOD rather than BAD:

"In 'Exile', it catalogues an Italian, Illario Cappeluti, who was
interned in Australia 'as war raged in Europe in the 1940s'. While
the NMA acknowledges that Australia was then at war with 'his'
(Cappeluti's) country, it does not mention that Italy was one of the
Axis powers, along with Germany and Japan, which had joined together
in a fascist war of world conquest; or that most of continental
Europe - where 'war raged', supposedly - was then, save for neutral
powers, in the hands of the Nazis and their Italian allies. The
historical context for internment of aliens in Australia is almost
wholly suppressed in the museum's account." - Rob Foot, p. 25.

Having not seen the museum displays myself, I cannot say whether I would
share the author's assessment. So it is hard to know whether it would
make me angry, or laugh, if the propaganda is as transparent as he
paints for us. Indeed Foot himself admits he laughed immoderately on
more than one occasion while viewing the NMA's exhibits. Maybe that's
the appropriate spirit to view them in? If tour guides conducted 'Spot
the Subliminal Message' tours, maybe even I could get a laugh or two out
of such a place.

But, back to someone who has actually seen it:

"It is feasible, in considering Nation [one of the galleries], to
conclude that ideological bias, as such, is not the primary issue.
Rather, what is discernable is a generational worldview based on the
experience, once again, of the radicalised generation of the 1970s.
The principal target is not a political system, or compendium of
ideas, but rather the values, lifestyles and pre-occupations of that
generation's parents." - Rob Foot, p. 25.

Or, as Freud might have put it, they STILL hate their fathers?

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