This, like all history, is fabricated

All history is a fabrication of some kind. Records of the past are incomplete, written records carry their author's bias, historians their own prejudices, no matter how well controlled. A fabrication is the result.

The title of Keith Windschuttle's book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History is some crazy tautology. Maybe this is why the discussion about it continues to go round and round in circles.

Windschuttle argues in the final chapter of his book that this need not necessarily be so. He cites moral anachronisms as an example of poor scholarship.

Yet he continues to claim that Tasmanian Aborigines "prostituted" their women. This is a fabrication. What evidence does he have to use the word "prostituted"? Was there an Aboriginal word for, or an Aboriginal concept of prostitution?

In European terms, the word carries centuries of cultural, religious and moral meaning. Windschuttle fabricates a description of Aboriginal behaviour using a European concept.

I wonder how Windschuttle defines the behaviour of British authorities before permanent settlement in Van Diemen's Land? Clearing the jails of southern England of hundreds of young women – shipping them out in the convict transport, The Lady Juliana, to supply a colony starved of women of child-bearing age.

Windschuttle quotes from the diaries of George Augustus Robinson to support his concept of Aboriginal society.

Robinson was a bricklayer, for heaven's sake, and not a very good one by some accounts. He had nil training in anthropology, and zero talent in this difficult discipline. His diaries are full of petty bias.

Despite the fact they are virtually the only record of prolonged first-hand observations of Tasmanian Aboriginal life, these diaries are one of the first fabrications. It is ironic Windschuttle uses them to support his thesis so enthusiastically.

Windschuttle claims that British settlement was "comparatively nonviolent", while Aboriginal hunter-gatherer society was "bloody and brutal".

Van Diemen's Land was a penal colony. It was deliberately bloody and brutal. Port Arthur and Sarah Island were hellholes. Governor Arthur's model prison at Port Arthur used solitary confinement and sensory deprivation on convicts for months on end. Eaglehawk Neck was guarded by attack dogs – this is truly British.

Men and women were socially flogged, executions by hanging were frequent and public. An occasional corpse was gibbetted on the highway south of Launceston, rotting in the sun, as a "deterrent". British settlement was established and maintained in this manner. That British muskets and military tactics were ineffective against the Aborigines who moved through the bush so efficiently, is essentially an irrelevance. Traditional Aboriginal life in Van Diemen's Land was doomed.

Windschuttle is a historian. He fabricates – he builds a fabric of history from inexact, incomplete records and his own prejudices. Good luck to him. It all makes entertaining reading, apart from the tautology.
Chris Donaldson
Westbury, Tas