Keith Windschuttle (1942–2025)

Gosh. Golly gee whiz. Hot diggity dog. Bowl me over with a feather. And other such phrases.

Windschuttle is a famous (notorious?) revisionist historian in Australia well known for his biases, but I opened this book with the genuine desire to know more about this issue. I came away bleary-eyed, bewildered, and chortling like a Catholic schoolboy at a PG-rated film.

There are only two arguments in this book, and they’re both fantastic. I use that word in its literal sense.

The first argument show more is from the “scientists have made up climate change for nebulous and still-unrevealed reasons!” school of thought. Apparently, countless Australian historians and archaeologists have just invented much of the history of colonial Australia. Did you know that my Anglo ancestors didn’t actually have racist views? They threw pancake parties for Aboriginals and bought them all ponies! They were so kind.

Healthy scepticism is useful, and revisiting sources from scratch rather than relying on received wisdom is grand. Here, however, KW takes his scepticism way waaaay past the healthy yardline. Ironically, for someone who accuses almost all of his colleagues of acting with obvious bias and deceptive intent, he refuses to acknowledge that he might be less than impartial. Is Windschuttle German for “confirmation bias”, by any chance?

And why, you may ask, are historians on this crusade? Well, friend, that’s the second argument of the book! You see, the plan from Australian aboriginals is to secretly take over the country. Even better, they’re using us – that is, non-aboriginal Australians – to do it! That’s right! All of this messy reconciliation business is just a ploy to get an aboriginal state taking up 60% of the continent. Next up: all of it. ALL OF IT.
This is elaborate, B grade movie, “George W Bush flew the planes into the towers” bullshit. It’s right up there with the gays are planning to Pied Piper all of our children and the Jews are tracking my grandma’s bank account.

This book will no doubt find its audience, and bring comfort to Australia’s most nervous patriots. At the same time, please don’t tell my indigenous friends about it because they will be upset that they weren’t invited to be part of the conspiracy. Unfair, Secret Leaders of the Aboriginal Junta! My friends are cool! Let them play with you!

Hmm. I seem to have wandered off the point. Which is, at least, one thing I can’t accuse Mr Windschuttle of doing. His performance is a consistent thing of absurdist beauty, even if one rather suspects the performer isn’t in on the joke.
All this for only $44.95 plus postage? What a steal. show less

Interesting polemic denouncing the damage caused to history as a discipline by tendencies more interested in promoting a given discourse than in studying the facts (mainly postmodernism and poststructuralism). Windschuttle not only responds adequately to his arguments but also exposes them with the clarity that the refuted rarely practice. Although several years have passed since its initial publication, its validity only has increased (Specially with the aggravation of the problem in these show more post-truth times) show less

Whilst a scholarly work and not one of popular fiction this well researched book that refutes the orthodox view of Tasmanian aboriginal history is compelling reading.
While I had a feeling that much of the current narrative was biased in some way the extent and magnitude of such bias, when clearly proven in this work, was shocking. Also, saddening was the failure of historical and anthropological institutions to stay true to western liberal traditions.
I would recommend this book to anyone show more interested in the topic, especially those in government and it’s related institutions! show less

Keith Windschuttle takes a number of modern fads in history, most descended from literary theory, and attempts to show how incoherent and damaging they are to the discipline of history. Windschuttle takes on semiotics, structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, relativism, and so on. He does this primarily by attacking the faulty research of these practitioners, their illogical conclusions, then he tries to trounce their philosophical underpinnings.

All in all, he does a fine job, show more though the relativists and postmodernists he attacks will state that the "logic" he uses is provincial and Western, thus, not to be trusted. I have to deal with such ideas all the time in pursuing my Ph.D. in history. People like Foucault and Said are worshiped mainly because they attack the establishment, which means anything Western, Christian, conservative, or capitalist (four things which define me). Windschuttle makes many arguments against these people, which I will not go into here.

To allay fears that this is not, as many on Amazon claim, just a "right-wing" screed or hit piece, he attacks one of the beloved figures in "right-wing" historiography: Fukuyama. Why? Fukuyama used Marx's beloved Hegel to attack Marx, but Windschuttle hates any grand over-arching theory, Hegel included, even when supportive of the West.

A problem, though, Windschuttle does not acknowledge that these theorists, however odious, do bring something to the table. Postmodernists and structuralists do make the valid point that everybody, no matter how hard they try, is biased. It is only when they use this point to attack everything that they hate that it becomes silly. It is when they attack the historical heroes of the past, say Washington, turning him from a demi-god to nothing but pure evil. It is when they, as an example J. B. Harley, "cartographic postmodernist," goes about highlighting the motes in other eyes and ignoring the beams in his own. (Ah, how oppressive and culturally biased of me, so typically Western, to allude to the Gospels!) But Windschuttle too does not offer any philosophy in exchange for the ones he attacks, and seems to intimate that an objective, factual history is possible. While I think, in some ways, it can be possible, he offers no philosophical reasoning behind it.

Thus, four stars. Still, I believe that this is an important book, and should be assigned in historical methods courses alongside books by the like of Keith Jenkins, and others. show less