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

Morgan,

It's hardly surprising that you would support Bonnell and others against Windschuttle [Deleted for flaming, author suspended].

You said: "In these forums you have rejected scientific method in favour of creation mythology"

Wrong. I love science and I love the scientific method. What I reject is materialistic philosophy and ideology (eg. evolution) masquerading as science.

You said: "sex education in favour of puritan represssion"

Wrong. I am all for sex education. Our kids need it. But it needs to be good and accurate and complete - and it needs to have a developmental perspective.

You said: "and now [you reject] historical scholarship in favour of far-right rabid polemicism."

Wrong. I reject historical revisionism not historical scholarship. A significant component of my Master of Arts involved research in the history of science. And there is an incredible amount of histroical revisionism in this area! Galileo is a classic example, as is the account of Columbus supposedly sailing around the world to prove it was not flat.

You said: "Elsewhere, you have even tried to argue that the intellectual and scientific advances of the Enlightenment weren't an improvement on the Dark Ages."

Wrong. The dark ages were not dark, and the enlightenment was hardly enlightening. Enlightenment ideas were solely responsible for the 200 million deaths in the 20th century. This has been thoroughly documented by R. J. Rummel in his book "Death by Government".

Having worked up north for a number of years i will believe the genocide stories of the Aboriginals that survived rather than the PM,S man, windshuttle .
when i innocently asked my old , revered , and now deceased head stockman In the 1960,s " have you murdered any blacks ? " he casually said he hadn,t , but that he had well known of it to happen . i did not pursue the question further .
he would have been a young man in central Australia around the time of the massacre of Walpiri people in 1928 and spent the rest of his life on mostly remote cattle stations "at home" with tribal Aboriginals .
windshuttle and his supporters can have no idea of the mechanisms of survival and black labour management employed in "frontier" station life up until surviving Aboriginals were turfed off their ancestal homes in the late 60,s.
After their parents and grandparents survived invasion and settlement, many of my young black friends then died quickly from neglect, alcohol abuse, disease and broken spirits in town fringe shanty camps. No "fancy" science by dodgy academics will hide the truth of what happened.

terrific work Kartiya. You know a man, "who heard of that kind of thing happening".. Yet you fail to see the irony of critising Windshuttle with such a quote.
Gave me a good laugh though. Great work. Keep it up & you might even get employed by the ABC.

I heard Mr Windshuttle interviewed on the radio. He seemed reasoned any lucid to me. His views might be polemic to some but that in no way diminishes his right to hold or express them.

As for the polemics - I would not have banned the Hitler Apologist David Irving from visiting Australia - not because I in anyway agreed with his view, I simply agreed with Voltaire's.

Now to my view - history is a process which is often the victim of the interests of political agendas and the "truth" will generally be found to be less dramatic and more mundane than the supposed great injustices and extremes which results from hyperbole (the Holocaust, Hitler and Stalin exempted).

When we can consider both Mr Windshuttles and what has become the "contemporary and politically correct conventional view" (flavour enhanced with a liberal sprinkling of leftwing academic socialism) as opinions and form our own individual interpretation based on all inputs then we will advance.
Otherwise we are the puppets responding to how others choose to pull the strings of things which occured to get us here, where we are today.

sayeret ,
Please have another close look at what i have written on the recall of my old pioneering head stockman boss.There is nothing in it of 19th [or 20th] century hearsay .
Thanks for the positives ..... me at the ABC while You get a job with Windschuttle at the Quadrant .

Great K. I get to keep my credibility.