I have not read Windschuttle's recent essay, but I have read Windshuttle's book on Aboriginal history, the looney left's responses and Windschuttle's response to those responses.

I'll take Windschuttle's careful, judicious and thoroughly documented historical research ahead of the looney left's rantings any day. There is just no comparison. The work of looney left is the most dishonest, disingenous, irrational nonsense (apart from Chuck Darwin and Karl Marx) I have ever read.

Well said.....

According to Bonnell, in 'Fabrication' Windshuttle merely found "handful of minor errors in footnotes". What? The list of real errors going way beyond the footnotes is too extensive to cover in 350 words but two examples. (1) Lyndall Ryan referred to a massacre that didn't occur and supported it by reference to a newpaper article from a paper that didn't exist at the time. ie she made it up. (2) Reynolds so altered (doctored?) a quote from Governor Arthur as to completely change its meaning such that it better fitted his thesis. Reynolds has conceded "It’s a bad mistake". The list goes on.

Bonnell asks if Windschuttle can read. If Bonnell thinks that the revelations unearthed in 'Fabrication' are mere errors in footnotes we'd need to ask the same thing of him.

As has been well and truly demonstrated in the numerous scholarly articles that have rebutted Windschuttle's "Fabrication", his work in that sorry tome is little more than that of a paid attack dog for the looney right - who like to pretend that European colonists weren't responsible for the 'genocide' of Tasmanian Aborigines. While he may have provided a useful historical service in drawing attention to some significant errors in Lyndall Ryan's footnotes, this has been eclipsed by his rabid polemical pedanticism and his hypocrisy in employing the very same kinds of analytical errors of which he accuses his betters.

Despite what his fans here may think, Windschuttle has very little credibilty among professional historians, and has only become the darling of the far right think tanks (and their disciples) in this country, because of his willingness to prostitute his limited analytical skills to further their neo-colonial agendas. When I read "Tutorials in Terrorism" I noted to myself the same points that Andrew Bonnell makes here: that Windschuttle still refuses to see the wood, undoubtedly because his masters only throw him a bone when he lifts his leg on the trees. If I was his tutor, this miserable effort would be lucky to attract a bare pass.

Morgan

Morgan,

Windschuttle has no credibility with professional historians because he exposes all their historical errors, lies, disingenuous reasoning, and revisionist ideology.

Windschuttle would be proud he has no credibility with these disingenous ideologues. Who wants to be held in high regard by a bunch of liars?

Aslan,

Given your frequent reference in these forums to the absolute nature of the 'truth' that you and others derive from arbitrary and politically expedient interpretations of a bunch of myths and legends handed down from the prehistoric Middle East, it's hardly surprising that you would be incapable of understanding that historiography works differently to hermeneutics.

Personally, I have far more confidence in the knowledge achieved by the rigorous academic discipline of history - incorporating, of course, the robust debates that are part and parcel of any academic discipline - than I do in the rigid assertions of absolute biblical truth that you publish here, ad nauseam.

In these forums you have rejected scientific method in favour of creation mythology, sex education in favour of puritan represssion, and now historical scholarship in favour of far-right rabid polemicism. Elsewhere, you have even tried to argue that the intellectual and scientific advances of the Enlightenment weren't an improvement on the Dark Ages.

How fitting that you're an apologist for an intellectual basket case like Windschuttle.

Morgan