History wars

The history wars in Australia are an ongoing public debate over the interpretation of the history of the British colonisation of Australia and development of contemporary Australian society (particularly with regard to the impact on Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders). The Australian debate often concerns the extent to which the history of European colonisation post-1788 and government administration since Federation in 1901 may be characterised as having been:
The history wars also relates to broader themes concerning national identity, as well as methodological questions concerning the historian and the craft of researching and writing history, including issues such as the value and reliability of written records (of the authorities and settlers) and the oral tradition (of the Indigenous Australians), along with the political or similar ideological biases of those who interpret them. One theme is how British or multicultural Australian identity has been in history and today. At the same time the history wars were in play, professional history seemed in decline, and popular writers began reclaiming the field.
Outline.
The term "history wars" refers to an ideological conflict over how to perceive Australia as a nation, framed largely by the respective visions of Labor Party Prime Minister Paul Keating (1991–1996), who saw race relations as central to the nation's character and who gave new attention to Indigenous people's issues, and Liberal Prime Minister John Howard (1996–2007), who sought to re-establish a conservative view of Australia that valorised the nation's achievements and was grounded in "Judeo-Christian ethics, the progressive spirit of the enlightenment and the institutions and values of British culture".
The conflict was played out largely in the popular media, books, and think-tank lectures. Commentators on the political left argued that Australia's national identity was linked to its treatment of Indigenous people and advocated making amends for past injustices on moral grounds, while those on the political right argued that the left had exaggerated the harms done to Indigenous Australians, that stories of abuses of Indigenous people were undermining Australia's coherent identity, and that contemporary Australians did not feel responsible for abuses committed in the past. Much of the public controversy was related to the release of the government's report on the Stolen Generations commissioned by Keating but released after Howard took office, titled "Bringing Them Home".
In 1968 Professor W. E. H. "Bill" Stanner, an Australian anthropologist, coined the term the "Great Australian Silence" in a Boyer Lecture titled "After the Dreaming", where he argued that the writing of Australian history was incomplete. He asserted that Australian national history as documented up to that point had largely been presented in a positive light, but that Indigenous Australians had been virtually ignored. He saw this as a structural and deliberate process to omit "several hundred thousand Aboriginal people who lived and died between 1788 and 1938 ... (who were but) ... negative facts of history and ... were in no way consequential for the modern period". A new strand of Australian historiography subsequently emerged which gave much greater attention to the negative experiences of Indigenous Australians during the British settlement of Australia.In the 1970s and 1980s, historians such as Manning Clark and Henry Reynolds published work which they saw as correcting selective historiography that had misrepresented or ignored Indigenous Australian history. The historian Geoffrey Blainey argued in the literary and political journal "Quadrant" in 1993 that the telling of Australian history had moved from an unduly positive rendition (the "Three Cheers View") to an unduly negative view (the "black armband") and Australian commentators and politicians have continued to debate this subject.
Interpretations of Aboriginal history became part of the wider political debate sometimes called the 'culture wars' during the tenure of the Coalition government from 1996 to 2007, with Prime Minister of Australia John Howard publicly championing the views of some of those associated with "Quadrant".<ref name="Manne11/08">Robert Manne (November 2008), "What is Rudd's Agenda?", "The Monthly".</ref> This debate extended into a controversy over the way history was presented in the National Museum of Australia and in high school history curricula. It also migrated into the general Australian media, with regular opinion pieces being published in major broadsheets such as "The Australian", "The Sydney Morning Herald" and "The Age". Marcia Langton has referred to much of this wider debate as "war porn" and an "intellectual dead end".
Two Australian prime ministers, Paul Keating and John Howard, were major participants in the "wars". According to the analysis for the Australian Parliamentary Library of Dr Mark McKenna, Howard believed that Keating portrayed Australia pre-Whitlam in an unduly negative light; while Keating sought to distance the modern Labor movement from its historical support for the Monarchy and the White Australia policy by arguing that it was the Conservative Australian parties who had been barriers to national progress and excessively loyal to the British Empire. He accused Britain of having abandoned Australia during World War II. Keating was a staunch advocate of a symbolic apology to indigenous people for the misdeeds of past governments, and outlined his view of the origins and potential solutions to contemporary Aboriginal disadvantage in his Redfern Park Speech (drafted with the assistance of historian Don Watson). In the aftermath of the 1997 "Bringing Them Home" report and the ensuing debate, which was highly acrimonious, Howard in 1999 passed a Parliamentary Motion of Reconciliation describing treatment of Aboriginal people as the "most blemished chapter" in Australian history, but he did not make a Parliamentary apology. Howard argued that an apology was inappropriate as it would imply "intergeneration guilt" and said that "practical" measures were a better response to contemporary Aboriginal disadvantage. Keating has argued for the eradication of remaining symbols linked to British origins: including deference for ANZAC Day, the Australian Flag and the Monarchy in Australia, while Howard was a supporter of these institutions. Unlike fellow Labor leaders and contemporaries, Bob Hawke and Kim Beazley, Keating never traveled to Gallipoli for ANZAC Day ceremonies. In 2008 he described those who gathered there as "misguided".
In 2006, John Howard said in a speech to mark the 50th anniversary of "Quadrant" that "political correctness" was dead in Australia but: "we should not underestimate the degree to which the soft-left still holds sway, even dominance, especially in Australia's universities"; and in 2006, "The Sydney Morning Herald" Political Editor Peter Hartcher reported that Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd was entering the philosophical debate by arguing in response that "John Howard, is guilty of perpetrating 'a fraud' in his so-called culture wars ... designed not to make real change but to mask the damage inflicted by the Government's economic policies".
The defeat of the Howard government in the Australian Federal election of 2007, and its replacement by the Rudd Labor government altered the dynamic of the debate. Rudd made an official apology to the "Stolen Generation" with bipartisan support. Like Keating, Rudd supported an Australian Republic, but in contrast to Keating, Rudd declared support for the Australian flag and supported the commemoration of ANZAC Day and expressed admiration for Liberal Party founder Robert Menzies.
Following the change of government and the passage, with support from all parties, of a Parliamentary apology to indigenous Australians, Professor of Australian Studies Richard Nile argued: "the culture and history wars are over and with them should also go the adversarial nature of intellectual debate", a view contested by others, including conservative commentator Janet Albrechtsen. However, an intention to re-engage in the history wars was indicated by then-Federal Opposition member Christopher Pyne.
History wars and culture wars.
The "history wars" are widely viewed, by external observers and participants on both sides as similar to the "culture war" underway in the United States. William D. Rubinstein, writing for the conservative British think tank known as the Social Affairs Unit, refers to the history wars as "the Culture War down under". Participants in the debate including Keith Windschuttle and Robert Manne are frequently described as "culture warriors" for their respective points of view.
Topics.
Black armband / white blindfold debate.
The "black armband" debate concerns whether or not accounts of Australian history gravitate towards an overly negative or an overly positive point of view. The "black armband view of history" was a phrase first used by Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey in his 1993 "Sir John Latham Memorial Lecture" to describe views of history which, he believed, posited that "much of [pre-multicultural] Australian history had been a disgrace" and which focused mainly on the treatment of minority groups (especially Aboriginal people). This he contrasted with the "Three Cheers" view, according to which: "nearly everything that came after [the convict era] was believed to be pretty good". Blainey argued that both such accounts of Australian history were inaccurate: "The Black Armband view of history might well represent the swing of the pendulum from a position that had been too favourable, too self-congratulatory, to an opposite extreme that is even more unreal and decidedly jaundiced."
The lecture was subsequently published in the political and literary journal, "Quadrant", which at the time was edited by academic and political scientist Robert Manne and later by writer and historian Keith Windschuttle, two of the leading "history warriors", albeit on opposing sides of the debate. The phrase then began to be used by some commentators pejoratively to describe historians viewed as writing excessively critical Australian history "while wearing a black armband" of "mourning and grieving, or shame". New interpretations of Australia's history since 1788 were contested for focussing almost exclusively on official and unofficial imperialism, exploitation, ill-treatment, colonial dispossession and cultural genocide and ignoring positive aspects of Australia's history. Historian Manning Clark, author of the best-known history of Australia, was named by Blainey in his 1993 speech as having "done much to spread the gloomy view and also the compassionate view with his powerful prose and Old Testament phrases". 
The Howard Government's responses to the question of how to recount Australian history were initially formulated in the context of former Labor prime minister Paul Keating's characterisation of the subject. John Howard argued in a 1996 Sir Robert Menzies Lecture that the "balance sheet of Australian history" had come to be misrepresented:
In 2009, Howard's successor Kevin Rudd also called for moving away from a "black-arm view":
Stephen Muecke, Professor of Ethnography at the University of New South Wales, contributed to the debate by arguing that black armband events bring people together in common remembrance and cited Anzac Day as an example; while Aboriginal lawyer Noel Pearson argued that whilst there was much that is worth preserving in the cultural heritage of non-Aboriginal Australia, "To say that ordinary Australians who are part of the national community today do not have any connection with the shameful aspects of our past is at odds with our exhortations that they have connections to the prideful bits".
The notion of the "white blindfold" view of history entered the debate as a pejorative counter-response to the notion of the "black armband school".
In his book "Why Weren't We Told?" in 1999, Henry Reynolds referred to Stanner's "Great Australian Silence", and to "a 'mental block' which prevented Australians from coming to terms with the past". He argued that the silence about Australia's history of frontier violence in much of the twentieth century stands in stark contrast with the openness with which violence was admitted and discussed in the nineteenth. Reynolds quotes many excerpts from the press, including an article in the "Townsville Herald" in Queensland written as late as 1907, by a "pioneer" who described his part in a massacre. Reynolds commented that violence against Aboriginals, far from being hushed up or denied, was openly talked about.
The nature of the debate began to change in 1999 with the publication of a book "Massacre Myth" by journalist Rod Moran, who examined the 1926 Forrest River massacre in Western Australia. Moran concluded that the massacre was a myth inspired by the false claims of a missionary (possibly as a result of mental health issues). The principal historian of the Forrest River massacre, Neville Green, describes the massacre as probable but not able to be proven in court. Windschuttle said that reviewing Moran's book inspired his own examination of the wider historical record. Windschuttle argues that much of Australian Aboriginal history, particularly as written since the late 1970s, was based on the use of questionable or unreliable evidence and on deliberate misrepresentation and fabrication of historical evidence. He based his conclusions on his examination of the evidence cited in previous historical accounts and reported incidences of non-existent documents being cited, misquoting and misleadingly selective quoting from documents and of documents being cited as evidence that certain events took place when his examination concluded that they do not support those claims. Windschuttle reported his conclusions in a number of articles published in Quadrant and in 2002, he published a book, "The Fabrication of Aboriginal History", Volume 1, Van Diemen's Land 1803–1847, which focussed on Tasmanian colonial history.
Blainey argued in a 2003 book review of "Fabrication", that the number of instances where source documents do not support the claims made, and the fact that the divergences overwhelmingly tend to purport claims of violent conflict and massacres, indicate that this is not a matter of mere error but bias.
The debate had therefore changed from an argument over whether there was an excessive focus on negative aspects of Australian history to one over to what extent, if at all, Australian Aboriginal history had been based on questionable evidence or had been falsified or fabricated and whether this had exaggerated the extent of violence against Aboriginal people. Particular historians and histories that are challenged include Lyndall Ryan and Henry Reynolds and the histories of massacres, particularly in Tasmania but also elsewhere in Australia. Windschuttle's naming of historians whom he accused of misrepresentation and fabrication of the historical evidence, created considerable controversy and produced a range of responses including condemnation of as well as support for his work.
Genocide debate.
The case for using the term "Australian genocide" rests on evidence from various sources that people argue proves some form of genocide. People cite the list of massacres of Indigenous Australians by white settlers, mainly in the 19th century; only a few massacres were documented, and the evidence of massacres was generally covered by secrecy and there are powerful signs that documents had been destroyed. 
Others have pointed to the dramatic reduction in the Tasmanian Aboriginal population in the 19th century and the forced removal of generations of Aboriginal children from their parents during the 20th century as evidence of genocide. The evidence includes documentation of the wish, and sometimes intention, of a significant proportion of late 19th-century and early 20th-century white Australians to see the Aboriginal "race" eliminated. Documents include published letters to the editors of high-circulation newspapers. Certainly this was the case in Queensland, in terms of Indigenous people the most populated section of Australia and certainly the colony with the most violent frontier. In June 1866 Sir Robert Herbert summing up his experience after little more than five years as the first Premier of this colony wrote:
The "system", for which Herbert was among those personally responsible, was the "Native Police system" which typically went about "dispersing" any sign of Indigenous resistance at the frontier by use of deadly early morning attacks on Aboriginal camps. This semi-military force was allowed to go about its business, typically instigating large scale deadly retaliation without prior investigating of alleged crime. They generally took no prisoners at the frontier and there are no signs that they ever enforced any other "law" than "might is right". It was a force designed more in the manner of the recent times phenomenon known as the "death-squad" and the secrecy of its operations was ensured by the remoteness of its operations, added a system that denied the evidence from "blacks" while the force itself was instructed to ensure that there would always be only one white witness, the officer in charge of each detachment. Recently the first ever attempt to scientifically calculate the number of Aboriginal people killed in encounters with the Native Police indicates that numbers may exceed 45,000.
The phrase "useless race" was commonly expressed in Queensland, including in an 1877 editorial in "The Queenslander" (the weekly edition of the colony's main newspaper, the "Brisbane Courier"): "The desire for progressive advancement and substantial prosperity is, after all, stronger than sentimental dislike to the extinction of a savage and useless race". Classifying Aboriginal people as a useless or unimprovable race was common. Debating the native police and the frontier in public in 1880 in the columns of "The Queenslander", a prominent settler wrote: "And being a useless race, what does it matter what they suffer any more than the distinguished philanthropist who writes in this behalf cares for the wounded half dead pigeon he tortures at his shooting matches?".
Remarks which were followed up in October of that years by Boyd Dunlop Morehead, one of the leading landholders, manager of the Scottish Australian Investment Co.'s "Bowen Downs" in 1866–81 and a future Premier, could be heard making the following acknowledgement in a parliamentary speech, saying, yes settlers in the past did go
After the introduction of the word "genocide" in the 1940s by Raphael Lemkin, Lemkin himself and most comparative scholars of genocide and many general historians, such as Robert Hughes, Ward Churchill, Leo Kuper and Jared Diamond, basing their analysis on previously published histories, present the extinction of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people as a text book example of a genocide. The Australian historian of genocide, Ben Kiernan, in his recent history of the concept and practice, "Blood and soil: a world history of genocide and extermination from Sparta to Darfur" (2007), treats the Australian evidence over the first century of colonisation as an example of genocide.
Among scholars specialising in Australian history much recent debate has focused on whether indeed what happened to groups of Indigenous people, and especially the Tasmanian Aboriginal people, during the European colonisation of Australia can be classified as genocide. According to Mark Levene, most Australian experts are now "considerably more circumspect". In the specific instance of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people, Henry Reynolds, who takes events in other regions of colonial Australia as marked by "genocidal moments", argues that the records show that British administrative policy in Tasmania was explicitly concerned to avoid extermination. However, in practice, the activities of British people on the ground led to virtual extinction. Tony Barta, John Docker and Anne Curthoys however emphasize Lemkin's linkage between colonialism and genocide. Barta, an Australian expert in German history, argued from Lemkin that, "there is no dispute that the basic fact of Australian history is the appropriation of the continent by an invading people and the dispossession, with ruthless destructiveness, of another". Docker argues that, "(w)e ignore Lemkin's wide-ranging definition of genocide, inherently linked with colonialism, at our peril". Curthoys argues that the separation between international and local Australian approaches has been deleterious. While calling for "a more robust exchange between genocide and Tasmanian historical scholarship", her own view is that the Tasmanian instance constitutes a "case for genocide, though not of state planning, mass killing, or extinction".
Much of the debate on whether European colonisation of Australia resulted in genocide, centres on whether "the term 'genocide' only applies to cases of deliberate mass killings of Aboriginal people by European settlers, or ... might also apply to instances in which many Aboriginal people were killed by the reckless or unintended actions and omissions of settlers". Historians such as Tony Barta argue that for the victim group it matters little if they were wiped out as part of a planned attack. If a group is decimated as a result of smallpox introduced to Australia by British settlers, or introduced European farming methods causing a group of Aboriginal people to starve to death, the result is, in his opinion, genocide.
Henry Reynolds points out that European colonists and their descendants frequently use expressions that included "extermination", "extinction", and "extirpation" when discussing the treatment of Aboriginal people during the colonial period, and as in his opinion genocide "can take many forms, not all of them violent". Janine Roberts has argued that genocide was Australian policy, even if only by omission. She notes that despite contemporary newspapers regularly decrying "the barbarous crop of exterminators", and "a system of native slaughter ... merciless and complete", the government contended that "no illegal acts were occurring", with the worst incidents being described as merely "indiscretions".
The political scientist Kenneth Minogue and other historians such as Keith Windschuttle disagree and think that no genocide took place. Minogue does not try to define genocide but argues that its use is an extreme manifestation of the guilt felt by modern Australian society about the past misconduct of their society to Aboriginal people. In his opinion its use reflects the process by which Australian society is trying to come to terms with its past wrongs and in doing this Australians are stretching the meaning of genocide to fit within this internal debate.
In the April 2008 edition of "The Monthly", David Day wrote further on the topic of genocide. He wrote that Lemkin considered genocide to encompass more than mass killings but also acts like "driv[ing] the original inhabitants off the land ... confin[ing] them in reserves, where policies of deliberate neglect may be used to reduce their numbers ... Tak[ing] Indigenous children to absorb them within their own midst ... assimilation to detach the people from their culture, language and religion, and often their names."
Controversy over smallpox in Australia.
The arrival of smallpox in Australia is of uncertain origin and is a major theme in the history wars. The lack of immunity among Aboriginal Australians to introduced diseases saw smallpox or some related disease inflict a devastating toll on the Aboriginal population. Though the First Fleet itself did not arrive with any known carriers of the disease, the observation of an epidemic, usually taken to be smallpox, among the Aboriginal population of Sydney around 16 months after the British arrived has led to speculation that the Fleet itself brought this disease to Australia. Some historians have suggested that the disease may have been either released by accident or via theft of medicine stores or perhaps been deliberately employed as a form of "germ warfare" against indigenous Australians. Inoculation was commonly practised by surgeons decades before 1796 and even after the process of smallpox vaccination was introduced by Edward Jenner. Dried smallpox scab was thus commonly stored in glass containers as part of a surgeon's remedies.
Early speculation on the origins of the disease is recorded in the writing of a First Fleet Captain of Marines, Watkin Tench, who noted an "extraordinary calamity" among the Aboriginal people of Sydney, beginning in April 1789. Repeated accounts of dead bodies marked with pustules consistent with smallpox began being reported around Sydney Harbour around this time. Tench wrote that the colonists' observations had led them to suppose that smallpox was not known in New South Wales and as no First Fleeters had suffered from the disease, its sudden existence among the Aboriginal people was "inexplicable". Tench speculated as to whether the disease might be indigenous to the country; or whether it had been brought to the colony by the French expedition of Lapérouse a year before; traversed the continent from the West where Europeans had previously landed; brought by expedition of James Cook; or indeed by the first British settlers at Sydney. "Our surgeons brought out variolous matter in bottles", he wrote, "but to infer that it was produced from this cause were a supposition so wild as to be unworthy of consideration."
Subsequently, and despite the lack of certainty over how or when the disease reached Australia, there has been a history war regarding the way that smallpox arrived in Australia, especially whether it was deliberately used as a crude biological weapon against indigenous peoples.
Medical scientists such as Sir Edward Stirling and Sir John Cleland published a number of books and articles between 1911 and 1966 suggesting that smallpox arrived in Northern Australia from an Asian source.
A rival theory, that smallpox was introduced to NSW in 1789 by British settlers, was put forward in 1914 by the director of the Australian Quarantine Service, Dr J. H. L. Cumpston.
In 1983, Professor Noel Butlin, an economic historian, suggested: "it is possible and, in 1789, likely, that infection of the Aboriginal people was a deliberate extermination act". Historians David Day and Henry Reynolds repeated Butlin's claims and in 2001 Reynolds wrote: "one possibility is that the epidemic was deliberately or accidentally let loose by someone in the settlement at Sydney Cove. Not surprisingly this is a highly contentious proposition. If true, it would clearly fall within the ambit of the Genocide Convention". Butlin argued that while Macassan fishermen could possibly 'have landed the virus on the Australian mainland at some stage their ability to do so was limited'. It is furthermore highly unlikely, he argued, that this virus should have been brought down from the Gulf of Carpentaria to coincidence with the first major outbreak "just fifteen months after the landing of the first fleet". Besides the time factor connected to Macassans, 'over seven or eight weeks (or more)', the type of vessels, the limited potential for contact between Aboriginal people and fishermen, and the fact of clothing as carrier and virus is destroyed or seriously reduced in contact with salt water, makes the Macassan theory highly unlikely, he argued. Indeed, infected 'Macassans would be either dead or fully recovered long before reaching the Gulf of Carpentaria. Whereas transfer somehow, theft accident or the like, from scab originally stored in glass containers carried by just one of the seven medical officers on the first fleet seems the most likely cause.
C. C. Macknight (1986) an authority on the centuries-old interaction between indigenous Australians and the people of Makassar (later part of Indonesia), revived the theory that smallpox was introduced to Australia by Macassan mariners visiting Arnhem Land.
Australian virologist Frank Fenner (1988) – who in 1977–80 led the successful World Health Organization (WHO) campaign to eradicate smallpox and was the principal author of a 1988 WHO report, "Smallpox and its Eradication" – pointed out that no cases of smallpox were reported amongst convicts, sailors, military personnel, or free settlers, on the First Fleet. The virus was also not reported among British or Aboriginal people at Port Jackson over the following 15 months. It was, therefore, unlikely that a person suffering from smallpox and travelling with the First Fleet had caused the 1789 outbreak.
While there were cases of smallpox in Macassar during 1789, there are no reports of it occurring prior to that period. However, smallpox had long been present in island South East Asia – possibly as early the 4th century according to Frank Fenner. There were outbreaks of smallpox in Indonesia throughout the 18th century. These included, for example, major epidemics in the Sultanate of Tidore (in the Moluccas) during the 1720s, the Sultanate of Banjar (South Kalimantan), in 1734, 1750–51, 1764–65 and 1778–79; and in southern Sumatra during the 1750s, the 1770s, and in 1786. Macassans had contact with these areas both directly and indirectly (through foreign traders and invaders).
David Day (2001) reiterated Butlin's argument and suggested that members of Sydney's garrison of Royal Marines may have attempted to use smallpox as a biological weapon in 1789. The following year, however, John Connor stated that Day's theory was "unsustainable".
In a 2002 book, "Invisible Invaders", historian Judy Campbell – advised by Fenner – reviewed reports of disease amongst Aboriginal people from 1780 to 1880, including the smallpox epidemics of 1789–90, the 1830s and the 1860s. Campbell argues that the evidence, including that contained in these reports shows that, while many diseases such as tuberculosis "were" introduced by British colonists, this was not so for smallpox and that the speculations of British responsibility made by other historians were based on tenuous evidence, largely on the mere coincidence that the 1789–90 epidemic was first observed afflicting the Aboriginal people not long after the establishment of the first British settlement. Campbell argues instead that the north–south route of transmission of the 1860s epidemics (which is generally agreed), also applied in the earlier ones. Campbell noted that the fleets of fast Macassan fishing vessels, propelled by monsoonal winds, reached Australia after being at sea for as little as ten to fifteen days, well within the incubation period of smallpox. The numbers of people travelling in the fleets were large enough to sustain smallpox for extended periods of time without it 'burning out'. The Macassans spent up to six months fishing along the northern Australian coastline and Aboriginal people had "day-to-day contact with the islanders. Aboriginals visited the praus and the camps the visitors set up on shore, they talked and traded..." She also notes that Butlin, writing in 1983, "did not recognize that Aboriginals were 'great travellers', who spread infection over long distances..." and that smallpox was spread through their extensive social and trading contacts as well as by Aboriginal people fleeing from the disease. Campbell also cited British historian Charles Wilson, who cited "medical microbiology" in disagreeing with Butlin about the origins of the 1789 outbreak, and "doubted his estimates of its demographic impact", as well as "First Fleet historian Alan Frost [who] also disagreed with Butlin's views".
The independent scholar Christopher Warren (2007) claimed that Fenner did not address the issue of variolous material brought in bottles by the First Fleet. This material was carried by First Fleet surgeons for inoculation purposes. Warren argued that, even if the variolous material was degraded, it could still infect susceptible people. Smallpox spread by the inhalation of airborne droplets of virus in situations of personal contact or by contact with blankets, clothing or other objects that an infected person had recently used. Warren also suggested that Frost's view was based on a false premise: that the First Fleet's stocks of virus were sterilised by summer heat. In a wide-ranging (13-page) discussion of medical literature on the survival of smallpox virus, Warren conceded there was evidence that "virus from scabs survived for mere months at a continuous temperature of 30C". However, he assumed the bottles were, both on the voyage and in Sydney, properly curated and "insulated in chests and packaging". He argued that, "The chest contents would have remained close to each day’s average [temperature] depending on the insulation and the thermal mass". Hence, he concluded, "First Fleet stocks never experienced 30C, day and night". 
Craig Mear (2008) and Michael J. Bennett (2009) have disputed Campbell's hypothesis that smallpox was introduced to Australia in 1789 through contact between Aboriginal people and mariners from Makassar.
H. A. Willis (2010), in a survey of much of the literature discussed above, reiterated the argument made by Campbell. In response, Warren (2011) suggested that Willis had not taken into account research on how heat affects the smallpox virus, cited by the World Health Organization. In reply, Willis (2011) reiterated that his position was supported by a closer reading of Frank Fenner's report to the World Health Organization (1988) and invited readers to consult that report online.
Macknight re-entered the debate in 2011, declaring: "The overwhelming probability must be that it [smallpox] was introduced, like the later epidemics, by [Macassan] trepangers on the north coast and spread across the continent to arrive in Sydney quite independently of the new settlement there."
In 2010 John Carmody, a professor of medicine, put forward an alternative theory on Robyn Williams's ABC Radio "Science Show". Carmody asserted that the 1789 epidemic could not have been smallpox and was almost certainly chickenpox. Carmody argued that smallpox, being much less infectious than chickenpox, could not have spread so rapidly from tribe to tribe around Sydney (nor from Arnhem Land to the Sydney region); but if present would certainly have infected some of the European colonists: "If it had really been smallpox, I would have expected about 50 cases amongst the colonists." This would have produced several recorded deaths, since smallpox has about a 30% fatality rate. However, the only non-Aborigine reported to have died in this outbreak was a seaman called Joseph Jeffries, who was recorded as being "a North American Indian". Carmody pointed out that chickenpox can take a severe toll on populations with little hereditary or acquired immunological resistance, and that it was certainly present in the colony. With regard to how smallpox might have reached the colony, Carmody later said: "There is absolutely no evidence to support any of the theories and some of them are fanciful and far-fetched." In response, Christopher Warren rejected suggestions that chickenpox caused the 1789 epidemic. Carmody's argument on the "Science Show" was not, for some time, followed by a scholarly paper, and was ignored by many historians.
However another medical researcher working on Aboriginal epidemiology, Dr G E Ford stated in late 2010 that he had previously and independently reached Carmody's conclusions: "In a project applying a specialist understanding of disease and epidemiology from my own previous professional life as a pathobiologist, I had verified that the small pox was not Smallpox but was Chicken Pox brought to the colony in a latent form later known as Shingles." Ford also said that he had "identified a likely convict carrier and the means by which the chicken pox infection spread through the population". However Ford concedes that neither he nor Carmody can claim priority for this theory since:
"In 1985 a teacher of 'medical geography', Peter Curson of Macquarie University presented a good case on historic evidence that the disease was chickenpox. [Also] At a conference on "Aboriginal Studies" in 1987, archaeologist Barry Wright presented his conclusion that: 
'I believe ... that an introduced epidemic of chickenpox not smallpox swept through the tribes, its effects every bit as deadly as if it had been smallpox.'"
To maintain coherence with earlier historical accounts, Ford refers to "the small pox epidemic" of 1789–1791, but makes two words of "small pox" and reminds the reader that he believes the "small pox" in question was "Chicken Pox, a small pox other than Smallpox". This convention has been followed by some later writers.
In fact another academic thesis that, like Ford's, was little noticed at the time but is now available on line, had already established that the chickenpox theory is far older than 1985. The settlement historian Peter J Dowling in his 1997 ANU PhD thesis "A Great Deal of Sickness" noted evidence that the 1789 epidemic was one to which (unlike smallpox) older European children were immune. He quotes the observation of the Judge-Advocate and Secretary of the Colony, David Collins that, "Notwithstanding the town of Sydney was at this time filled with children, many of whom visited the natives that were ill of this disorder, not one of them caught it". Despite this, Dowling largely discounts the chickenpox theory, which had, in 1997, few public champions among medical experts. He argues that most Europeans in the colony seem to have accepted the outbreaks were smallpox, a disease with whose signs they "would have been familiar". Yet he documents considerable uncertainty among the authorities, and also disagreements among colonial surgeons, on this point. He notes for instance Mair's argument that the 1789 and 1830 epidemics may have been the same disease:
Mair was convinced that the 1830 epidemic was smallpox; yet Dowling remarks:
Dowling regrets that the diaries of the first fleet surgeons have not survived, but judges that, "Despite the varied nature of the surviving historical documents there is strong evidence that the three epidemics were indeed smallpox". Yet he notes:
Dowling's wide-ranging research produces other complications. He says that by 1830, with the assistance of well-meaning settlers, many Aborigines seem to have been either vaccinated (with cowpox), or else inoculated /"variolated" with "variolous matter" (scrapings of dried and perhaps partly de-natured smallpox scab)—a method which would seem to have risked spreading either smallpox or its partial lookalike chickenpox, but provided significant protection against smallpox. Also, he notes that there are genetic variations, and large variations in virulence, among strains of smallpox. 
Warren (2014) subsequently rejected the theory that the 1789 epidemic had originated from Macassar. He claimed that there was no evidence of a major outbreak of smallpox in Macassar before 1789; there were no indigenous trade routes that would have enabled overland transmission from Arnhem Land to Port Jackson; the Makassan theory was contradicted by Aboriginal oral tradition, and 1829 was the earliest point at which there was possible evidence that Makassans had been the source of a smallpox outbreak.
Dr Seth Carus (2015) stated: "Ultimately, we have a strong circumstantial case supporting the theory that someone deliberately introduced smallpox in the Aboriginal population."
Yet in a paper in February 2014 on historic Aboriginal demography, the Australian National University's Boyd Hunter and Sydney University's Jack Carmody continue to argue that the recorded behaviour of the epidemic rules out smallpox and indicates chickenpox. 
A few weeks later, the "Ockham’s Razor" radio program for 13 April 2014 invited Chris Warren to restate his 2013-2014 arguments that the 1789 outbreak was in fact smallpox, and was probably deliberately introduced. 
Warren argued it was suspicious that in April 1789 a smallpox epidemic "was reported amongst the Port Jackson Aboriginal tribes who were actively resisting settlers from the First Fleet". He claimed that "The chickenpox theory was first floated by Richard Hingston in 1985", but was speedily dismissed by Frank Fenner. He acknowledged Carmody's and Ford's argument that the case of shingles detected on the first fleet meant that chickenpox was present. Yet, citing Watkin Tench's journal, he argued that smallpox was also present in 1789 in still-viable "variolous matter", sealed in the surgeons' glass jars: 
Warren also argued that Mair's report (suggesting that Aborigines with scars from the 1789 epidemic were immune to the 1829-1830 one) "therefore demonstrates that the earlier outbreak was true smallpox". Warren also mounted arguments that smallpox could not have arrived overland nor by sea. He argued that the British forces were perilously short of men, muskets and ammunition, and concluded it is probable that "some authority, not necessarily involving Governor Phillip, ordered the deployment of smallpox" [from the glass jars], perhaps "as an act of military necessity". 
Carmody was allowed a brief (218-word) right of reply on the same Ockham's Razor program. He rejoined:
Carmody also rejected Warren's argument that the surgeons' smallpox samples were still viable in April 1789, saying: 
Stolen Generations debate.
Despite the lengthy and detailed findings set out in the 1997 "Bringing Them Home" report into the Stolen Generation, which documented the removal of Aboriginal children from their families by Australian State and Federal government agencies and church missions, the nature and extent of the removals have been disputed within Australia, with some commentators questioning the findings contained in the report and asserting that the Stolen Generation has been exaggerated. Sir Ronald Wilson, former President of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission and a Commissioner on the Inquiry, has stated that none of the more than 500 witnesses who appeared before the Inquiry were cross-examined. This has been the basis of criticism by the Coalition Government and by the anthropologist Ron Brunton in a booklet published by the Institute of Public Affairs that was criticised in turn by the lawyer Hal Wootten. An Australian Federal Government submission has questioned the conduct of the Commission which produced the report, arguing that the Commission failed to critically appraise or test the claims on which it based the report and failed to distinguish between those separated from their families "with and without consent, and with and without good reason". Not only has the number of children removed from their parents been questioned, but also the intent and effects of the government policy.
Some critics, such as columnist and social commentator Andrew Bolt, have questioned the very existence of the Stolen Generation. Bolt stated that it is a "preposterous and obscene" myth and that there was actually no policy in any state or territory at any time for the systematic removal of "half-caste" Aboriginal children. Robert Manne responded that Bolt did not address the documentary evidence demonstrating the existence of the Stolen Generations and that this is a clear case of historical denialism. Bolt then challenged Manne to produce ten cases in which the evidence justified the claim that children were "stolen" as opposed to having been removed for reasons such as neglect, abuse, abandonment, etc. He argued that Manne did not respond and that this was an indication of unreliability of the claim that there was policy of systematic removal. In reply, Manne stated that he supplied a documented list of 250 names Bolt stated that prior to a debate, Manne provided him with a list of 12 names that he was able to show during the debate was "a list of people abandoned, saved from abuse or voluntarily given up by their parents"; and that during the actual debate, Manne produced a list of 250 names without any details or documentation as to their circumstances. Bolt also stated that he was subsequently able to identify and ascertain the history of some of those on the list and was unable to find a case where there was evidence to justify the term "stolen". He stated that one of the names on the list of allegedly stolen children was 13-year-old Dolly, taken into the care of the State after being "found seven months pregnant and penniless, working for nothing on a station".
The Bolt/Manne debate is a fair sample of the adversarial debating style in the area. There is focus on individual examples as evidence for or against the existence of a policy, and little or no analysis of other documentary evidence such as legislative databases showing how the legal basis for removal varied over time and between jurisdictions, or testimony from those who were called on to implement the policies, which was also recorded in the "Bringing Them Home" report. A recent review of legal cases claims it is difficult for Stolen Generation claimants to challenge what was written about their situation at the time of removal.
The report also identified instances of official misrepresentation and deception, such as when caring and able parents were incorrectly described by Aboriginal Protection Officers as not being able to properly provide for their children, or when parents were told by government officials that their children had died, even though this was not the case.
The new Australian Government elected in 2007 issued an Apology similar to those that State Governments had issued at or about the time of the "Bringing Them Home" report ten years earlier. On 13 February 2008, Kevin Rudd, prime minister of Australia, moved a formal apology in the House of Representatives, which was moved concurrently by the Leader of the Government in the Senate. It passed unanimously in the House of Representatives on 13 March 2008. In the Senate, the leader of the Australian Greens moved an amendment seeking to add compensation to the apology, which was defeated in a vote of 65 to 4. after which the motion was passed unanimously.
Media.
Windschuttle's "The Fabrication of Aboriginal History".
The historian Keith Windschuttle has disputed the historiography for the number of children in the Stolen Generations as well as the violence of European colonisation, arguing that left-wing scholars had exaggerated these events for their own political purposes.
Windschuttle's 2002 book "The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803–1847" focuses on the Black War in Tasmania; he says that there is credible evidence for the violent deaths of only 118 Tasmanian Aboriginal people, as having been directly killed by the British, although there were undoubtedly an unquantifiable number of other deaths for which no evidence exists. He argues that the Tasmanian Aboriginal population was devastated by a lethal cocktail of introduced diseases to which they had little or no resistance due to their isolation from the mainland and the rest of humanity for thousands of years. The deaths and infertility caused by these introduced diseases, combined with the deaths from what violent conflict there was, rapidly decimated the relatively small Aboriginal population. Windschuttle also examined the nature of those violent episodes that did occur and concluded that there is no credible evidence of warfare over territory. Windschuttle argues that the primary source of conflict between the British and the Aboriginal people was raids by Aboriginal people, often involving violent attacks on settlers, to acquire goods (such as blankets, metal implements and 'exotic' foods) from the British. With this and with a detailed examination of footnotes in and evidence cited by the earlier historical works, he criticises the claims by historians such as Henry Reynolds and Professor Lyndall Ryan that there was a campaign of guerrilla warfare against British settlement. Particular historians and histories that are challenged include Henry Reynolds and the histories of , particularly in Tasmania (such as in the Cape Grim massacre) but also elsewhere in Australia. Windschuttle's claims are based upon the argument that the 'orthodox' view of Australian history were founded on hearsay or the misleading use of evidence by historians.
Windschuttle argues that, in order to advance the 'deliberate genocide' argument, Reynolds has misused source documentation, including that from British colonist sources, by quoting out of context. In particular, he accuses Reynolds of selectively quoting from responses to an 1830 survey in Tasmania in that Reynolds quoted only from those responses that could be construed as advocating "extermination", "extinction", and "extirpation" and failed to mention other responses to the survey, which indicated that a majority of respondents rejected genocide, were sympathetic to the plight of the Aboriginal people, feared that conflict arising from Aboriginal attacks upon settlers would result in the extinction of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people and advocated the adoption of courses of action to prevent this happening.
Windschuttle's claims and research have been disputed by some historians. In "Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History", an anthology including contributions from Henry Reynolds and Professor Lyndall Ryan, edited and introduced by Robert Manne, professor of politics at La Trobe University, Manne argues that Windschuttle's arguments are "unpersuasive and unsupported either by independent research or even familiarity with the relevant secondary historical literature". Other academics including Stephen Muecke, Marcia Langton, and Heather Goodall also expressed concerns about Windschuttle's work.
In "Contra Windschuttle", an article published in the conservative publication "Quadrant", S.G. Foster examined some of the evidence that Windschuttle presented on one issue, Stanner's notion of the "Great Australian Silence". In Foster's opinion, the evidence produced by Windschuttle did not prove his case that the "Great Australian Silence" was largely a myth. Windschuttle argues that, in the years prior to Stanner's 1968 Boyer lecture, Australian historians had not been silent on the Aboriginal people although, in most cases, the historians' "discussions were not to Stanner's taste" and the Aboriginal people "might not have been treated in the way Reynolds and his colleagues would have liked". Foster argues that Windschuttle is "merciless with those who get their facts wrong" and that the fact that Windschuttle has also made a mistake means that he did not meet the criteria that he used to assess 'orthodox historians' he was arguing against and whom he accused of deliberately and extensively misrepresenting, misquoting, exaggerating and fabricating evidence relating to the level and nature of violent conflict between Aboriginal people and white settlers.
At the time of the publication of "The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One" it was announced that a second volume, to be published in 2003, would cover claims of frontier violence in New South Wales and Queensland, and a third, in 2004, would cover Western Australia.
On 9 February 2008, however, it was announced that the second volume, anticipated to be published later in 2008, would be titled "The Fabrication of Australian History, Volume 2: The "Stolen Generations"" and would address the issue of the removal of Aboriginal children (the "stolen generations") from their families in the 20th century.
The new volume was released in January 2010, now listed as "Volume 3", with a statement that Volumes 2 and 4 would appear later. Announcing the publication, Windschuttle claimed that the film "Rabbit-Proof Fence" had misrepresented the child removal at the centre of the story, and offered inaccurate accounts of Molly's journey as it was recounted by her daughter, Doris Pilkington. These claims were subsequently rejected by the makers of the film.
Stuart Macintyre's "The History Wars".
In 2003, the Australian historians Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark published "The History Wars". This was a study of the background of, and arguments surrounding, recent developments in Australian historiography, and concluded that the History Wars had done damage to the nature of objective Australian history. At the launch of his book, historian Stuart Macintyre emphasised the political dimension of these arguments and said the Australian debate took its cue from the Enola Gay controversy in the United States. The book was launched by former prime minister Paul Keating, who took the opportunity to criticise conservative views of Australian history, and those who hold them (such as the then–prime minister John Howard), saying that they suffered from "a failure of imagination", and said that "The History Wars" "rolls out the canvas of this debate". Macintyre's critics, such as Greg Melluish (History Lecturer at the University of Wollongong), responded to the book by declaring that Macintyre was a partisan history warrior himself, and that "its primary arguments are derived from the pro-Communist polemics of the Cold War". Keith Windschuttle said that Macintyre attempted to "caricature the history debate". In a foreword to the book, former Chief Justice of Australia Sir Anthony Mason said that the book was "a fascinating study of the recent endeavours to rewrite or reinterpret the history of European settlement in Australia".
Controversies.
National Museum of Australia controversy.
In 2001, writing in "Quadrant", a conservative magazine, historian Keith Windschuttle argued that the then-new National Museum of Australia (NMA) was marred by "political correctness" and did not present a balanced view of the nation's history. In 2003 the Howard Government commissioned a review of the NMA. A potentially controversial issue was in assessing how well the NMA met the criterion that displays should: "Cover darker historical episodes, and with a gravity that opens the possibility of collective self-accounting. The role here is in helping the nation to examine fully its own past, and the dynamic of its history—with truthfulness, sobriety and balance. This extends into covering present-day controversial issues." While the report concluded that there was no systemic bias, it recommended that there be more recognition in the exhibits of European achievements.
The report drew the ire of some historians in Australia, who claimed that it was a deliberate attempt on the part of the Government to politicise the museum and move it more towards a position which Geoffrey Blainey called the 'three cheers' view of Australian history, rather than the 'black armband' view. In 2006 columnist Miranda Devine described some of the Braille messages encoded on the external structure of the NMA, including "sorry" and "forgive us our genocide" and how they had been covered over by aluminium discs in 2001, and stated that under the new Director "what he calls the 'black T-shirt' view of Australian culture" is being replaced by "systematically reworking the collections, with attention to 'scrupulous historical accuracy'".
An example of the current approach at the NMA is the Bells Falls Gorge Interactive display, which presents Windschuttles's view of an alleged massacre alongside other views and contemporary documents and displays of weapons relating to colonial conflict around Bathurst in 1824 and invites visitors to make up their own minds.
University of New South Wales controversy.
Publication in 2016 of "Indigenous Terminology" guidelines for the teaching and writing of history by the University of New South Wales created a brief media uproar. Amongst the advised language changes, they recommended "settlement" be replaced by "invasion", "colonisation" or "occupation". They also deemed that the generally accepted anthropological assumption that "Aboriginal people have lived in Australia for 40,000 years" should be dropped for "since the beginning of the Dreaming/s" as it "reflects the beliefs of many Indigenous Australians that they have always been in Australia, from the beginning of time" and because "many Indigenous Australians see this sort of measurement and quantifying as inappropriate". While some commentators considered the guidelines appropriate, others categorised them as political correctness that was an anathema to learning and scholarship.
See also.
Australian topics
Similar topics in other countries