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Silenced voices: the ''history wars'' have been conducted in the substantial absence of indigenous voices and with an exclusion of non-Western forms of knowledge. It is time to resituate, rethink and listen anew.

Article Excerpt
Earlier this year Keith Windschuttle debated historian Patricia Grimshaw in front of a capacity crowd at the Trades Hall in Melbourne. Among the audience were Gary Foley, Wayne Atkinson, Robbie Thorpe and Kevin Buzzacott. All four Aboriginal activists have led campaigns for land justice, their tactics ranging from Atkinson's advancement of the Yorta Yorta native title claim through the courts, to Buzzacott's confrontations with mining interests on Arabunna country.

In what we consider the most revealing work of Windschuttle, the September 2000 Quadrant article entitled 'The Break-up of Australia', which preceded the 'Myths of Frontier Massacres in Australian History' series, he insists that the 'notion of either the state or the nation, let alone the ideas of autonomy, sovereignty or self-determination' are alien to Aboriginal society. Derived from European political traditions, he argues, these 'ideas' were taken up by white radicals in the 1960s, from whom Aboriginal agitators, such as Foley, learnt about and adopted them. Aboriginal people have indeed made strategic use of white technologies and tools to advance their claims, from Victorian letter-writing conventions in the nineteenth century to guns, petitions and legal challenges. However, a continuity of concern is evident from the earliest of colonial encounters--the struggle to retain control over, maintain relationships with, and care for, country.

While Windschuttle's understanding of the complex political and social organisation of pre-contact indigenous nations across Australia, let alone his fanciful interpretation of the 1960s-70s land rights movement, is profoundly wanting, he can have had no doubt that night at Trades Hall that he was in enemy territory. The liberal-left-leaning academy, red-faced and infuriated in the crowded council chambers, constitute Windschuttle's most obvious enemy. In claiming that settler violence on the Australian pastoral frontier has been exaggerated and at times deliberately fabricated by a generation of Australian historians, Windschuttle has somehow been allowed to undermine thirty years of courageous, rigorous, and committed academic scholarship. Moreover, Windschuttle's work, which we concur with James Boyce will come to be understood as 'very bad academic history', has inspired two edited volumes of responses, and numerous archival-research-based...

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