I missed the recently raised arguments regarding Henry Reynolds lying
about colonial authorities using "terra nullius" as the basis for
European settlement when in fact they did not do this.

Like most people, apparently including High Court judges, I assumed
that there was some truth to Reynold's assertion.

What a disgusting liar Reynolds is being exposed as when there is no
evidence whatsoever that colonial authorities ever used this principle
as the basis for settlement or that this principle even existed in
British Law.

Apparently the first juridicial analysis exposing the fraudulant
nature of Reynold's proposition was published recently in the
Australian Financial Review. Another analysis was subsequently
published in the Bulletin

How incredible that the left-wing looney media such as the ABC do not
even mention this momentous disclosure. Instead. it continues to be
taught in schools and universities as the basis of all that was wrong
with European settlement.

These corrupt insitutions are beyond contempt that they would
fabricate history in this way. If they want to destroy the concept of
truth and argue that reality is negotiable according to the objectives
that are to be achieved, they should not then complain when this
argument is also used by their opponents. Socialism and Fascism are
two sides of the one coin, indistiguishable in their application.

Here is the link to the Bulletin article:

http://bulletin.ninemsn.com.au/bulletin/EdDesk.nsf/0/2821c32417fab1d6ca256d6e00203509?OpenDocument

here is the link to where I found out about this in the Australian:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,9952267%255E7583,00.html

Here is the Australian article, post if you can't reach the Bulletin
article.


Christopher Pearson: Shifting war on terra nullius

June 26, 2004
SINCE The Other Side of the Frontier was published in 1981, Henry
Reynolds has been a leading figure in the little world of Aboriginal
history. It was the first of a trilogy, culminating in 1990 in With
the White People. Since then he has preferred more overtly activist
publishing endeavours such as The Law of the Land, which John Mulvaney
described as "a tract for these times".

Polemical histories always have a use-by date and somehow I expected
that a methodical demolition from the Right, probably by Keith
Windschuttle, would announce that Reynolds's time had expired.
Instead, the call has come from out of left field, from Monash
University's Bain Attwood, in a long article a fortnight ago in The
Financial Review.

It was as deftly executed as these things ever are. Attwood praised
with faint damn Reynolds's oeuvre and the fruits of his politicking.
Then he offered a revisionist account of the Mabo judgment, calling
into question Reynolds's deployment of the doctrine of terra nullius
and his professional integrity. What he was announcing, with a minimum
of fanfare, was a huge paradigm shift in Australian historiography.

Attwood may have been hoping in part to avoid being overtaken by
events. Last year a Tasmanian scholar, Michael Connor, published an
essay in The Bulletin that most other historians studiously ignored.
In it he demonstrated that Reynolds had conjured up an obscure term,
terra nullius, to which he gave three contradictory definitions, as
the official rationale for settlement without compensation. Connor
showed that it was a notion unknown to Australian colonists or the
common law, but one that had gained currency in the 1970s, mostly as a
result of Reynolds's writings, and that confusion about its meaning
was common among High Court judges.

Connor's views in his Bulletin essay and as set forth in a recent
speech to the Samuel Griffith Society (a group that concentrates on
constitutional law questions) are certainly more trenchantly expressed
than Attwood's. Even so, the latter are more significant as markers of
the collapse of the dominant tradition in historiography. It has
plainly become too close to mythography for even its own practitioners
to bear.

How does Attwood manage the pea and thimble trick of affirming the
activist labours that led to Mabo, while casting doubts on Reynolds's
example as a historian?

The devices he chooses are to identify The Law of the Land as bearing
"a striking resemblance to myth" and being "a work of juridical
history rather than a work of academic history".

Juridical history, he tells us, is "a way of representing the past so
as to make it available to legal judgment". Readers of academic
history "bring to it different expectations to those they take to
works of juridical history and myth narratives".

Again, "with works of history, the author undertakes to represent the
past as truthfully to that time as he or she can ... authors of
historical fiction and myth give no such undertaking". Reynolds's
error is that "he does not make clear what he was doing".

The Law of the Land, then, "is an instrumentally political work in
which its author primarily tries to construct a past rather than
reconstruct one".

Attwood even invokes the innovation that gained so much attention
during the Hindmarsh Island affair of "inventing tradition".

Reynolds "sought to make a history in order to help the judiciary
remake the law". In common with many a postmodern narrative before it,
"the story of terra nullius, like myth generally, was not an arbitrary
invention but was in some senses true". But because its relation to
academic history is so tenuous, "in these terms it can be regarded as
a lie".

Terra nullius was "a brilliant stroke in both legal and political
terms. However, it is unsatisfactory as a historical argument
regarding the process and events that caused dispossession and the
law's role in that."

Attwood quotes historian David Ritter's description of terra nullius
as "a stage edifice". It was, he says, "accepted so it could be
demolished by a High Court intent on redeeming the good name of the
Australian legal system ... a necessary myth for a nation-state
seeking to confront the nature of its origins so belatedly in its
history".

Judicial reformers were invited to overturn a phantom doctrine so that
they could discover the inhering native title Reynolds had assured
them the Whig reformers in London had intended. Attwood notes that "in
making this argument Reynolds drew selectively on international
jurists and the common law. At the same time he overlooked or
downplayed the main reason why indigenous rights to land had been
acknowledged ... namely that it was necessary or advantageous for the
imperial power to do so."

Attwood ultimately concludes that Reynolds's juridical history is
"simplistic" and says of its black-and-white oppositional account of
humane Colonial Office v racist settlers that "most academic
historians have rejected this argument". He looks forward to a new
kind of scholarly enterprise, which "needs to conceive of history and
the relationship between past and present in a more sophisticated and
rigorous manner".

Lest anyone imagine that this might be a post-instrumentalist history,
he makes it clear that it will not, but will just be rather less
transparent. "By excavating the complex messiness of the past in the
present rather than evading it, one can produce histories that might
have more useful social and political outcomes than ones that try to
use the past in the service of simplistic contemporary political and
legal narratives."

It does not seem too much to hope that, when people reflect on what
Reynolds's generation of historians believed were useful social and
political outcomes, they might decide to view both them and their
intellectual heirs with habitual scepticism and distrust.

Unfortunately, the discipline of economic history is so unfashionable
that we are not likely any time soon to get a sober reckoning of what
Mabo, Wik and the native title legislation all told cost the gross
national product.

Nor are we likely to learn how much was diverted from productive
investment into the pockets of lawyers or anthropologists and
historian expert witnesses in countless land claims.

There is some comfort, though, in the thought that the legal jacks in
office and ornaments of the academy who prattled so confidently about
terra nullius and its implications will have to confront the
uncomfortable fact that they didn't know what they were talking about.
Some of the more egregious of them are named and cited in Connor's
Error Nullius Revisited on the web.

Connor's view of The Law of the Land is lapidary: "This sad book,
tedious but tragically influential, is still in print, updated by its
author. It offered the definitions of terra nullius which have
influenced subsequent dictionary-makers and textbook writers. Here
rests the conscience of our nation. The whole magnificent edifice of a
generation's history-writing is based on this. Law-making has been
influenced by it. What a muddle, what a mass of eloquence has sprung
from it. Books, articles, sermons, passions, bitterness,
self-righteousness, HSC courses, university courses: all from 10 1/2
lines in a Penguin paperback."

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