Keith Windschuttle

As of November 2022, neither Volume 2 nor Volume 4 has appeared, and no revised publication schedule has been announced.

During the trial and imprisonment of Cardinal Pell in 2019-20 on charges of sexual abuse of a minor, Windschuttle led a campaign in Quadrant defending Pell's innocence. After Pell's acquittal by the High Court of Australia, Windschuttle published a book, The Persecution of George Pell, arguing that Pell had faced a concerted campaign by Victorian police, judiciary and victims' advocates to convict him on flimsy evidence.

In the wake of the 2011 Norway attacks, Windschuttle did not deny that the perpetrator, Anders Behring Breivik, had read and praised statements he had made at a symposium in New Zealand in 2006, but stressed that he was "still at a complete loss to find any connection between them and the disgusting and cowardly actions of Breivik". Windschuttle went on to add that "it would be a 'disturbing accusation' if people thought that he had ever used deliberately provocative language that might have caused Breivik to take up a rifle and shoot unarmed teenagers in cold blood".

In April 2010, Windschuttle announced that the two remaining books in the series, Volume Two on the Colonial Frontier from 1788 onwards, and Volume Four on the History Wars, originally projected for publication in 2003 and 2004, will be published at a date yet to be announced. In December 2013, Windschuttle advised that he hopes to have Volume Two published "in time to take its place in the discussions about our past during the Anzac Centenary in April 2015".

Published in 2009, the argument of this book is that the Stolen Generations is a myth.

In January 2009, Windschuttle was hoaxed into publishing an article in Quadrant. The stated aim of the hoax was to expose Windschuttle's purported right-wing bias by proving he would publish an inaccurate article and not check its footnotes or authenticity if it met his preconceptions. An author using the pseudonym "biotechnologist Dr Sharon Gould" submitted an article claiming that CSIRO had planned to produce food crops engineered with human genes. However, "Gould" revealed that she had regarded the article as an Alan Sokal style hoax, referring to an instance in which writings described as obvious scientific nonsense were submitted to and accepted by an academic journal. Based on the reporter's intimate knowledge of the hoax and what he described as her "triumphant" tone when disclosing the hoax to him, Windschuttle accused the online publication Crikey of being involved in the hoax, a claim Crikey denied. Two days later, Crikey revealed that "Gould" was in fact the writer, editor and activist Katherine Wilson. Wilson agreed to being named by Crikey, as her name had already appeared in online speculation and it seemed likely that her identity was about to be revealed by other journalists.

In June 2006, he was appointed to the board of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Australia's non-commercial public broadcaster.

Windschuttle's research in the early 2000s disputed the idea that the colonial settlers of Australia committed genocide against the Indigenous Australians. He also disputed the widespread view that there was a campaign of guerrilla warfare against British settlement. Extensive debate on his work has come to be called the "history wars". He dismissed assertions, which he imputed to the current generation of academic historians, that there was any resemblance between racial attitudes in Australia and those of South Africa under apartheid and Germany under the Nazis. He has been a frequent contributor to conservative magazines, such as Quadrant in Australia, of which he became editor in 2007, and The New Criterion in the United States.

With regard to the Human Rights Commission investigation into the Stolen Generations and their 1997 report entitled Bringing Them Home, he writes: "The empirical underpinnings of Bringing Them Home derived largely from the work of white academic historians. The Human Rights Commission did no serious research of its own into the primary historical sources. Co-authors Ronald Wilson and Mick Dodson also declined to hear any evidence that might have contradicted their preferred interpretation. They did not call witnesses from many of the still-living public officials responsible for child removal to hear or test their reasons for their policies and practices. The commission's only original contribution was to solicit the testimony of 535 Aboriginal people who had been removed from their parents and who spoke about their own experiences. While many of these stories were completely believable in what they said about what happened and how they felt, it is nonetheless true that when these witnesses were children they were not in a position to comprehend the question at the centre of the accusation of genocide, the motives of government policy makers".

Windschuttle argues that his analysis of the records shows that Aboriginal children "were never removed from their families in order to put an end to Aboriginality or, indeed, to serve any improper government policy or program". He argues that "until the term stolen generations first appeared in 1981, there had been no popular tradition among Aboriginal people that employed either the term or the concept". In 1981, a "then unknown white postgraduate history student, Peter Read" wrote, "in the course of just one day", a twenty-page pamphlet to make the case. "He alone was granted the vision denied to all who came before him".

Major published items include Unemployment (1979), which analysed the economic causes and social consequences of unemployment in Australia and advocated a socialist response; The Media: a New Analysis of the Press, Television, Radio and Advertising in Australia (1984), on the political economy and content of the news and entertainment media; The Killing of History (1994), a critique of postmodernism in the study of history; The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803–1847 (2002), which accuses a number of Australian historians of falsifying and inventing the degree of violence in the past; The White Australia Policy (2004), a history of that policy which argues that academic historians have exaggerated the degree of racism in Australian history; and The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume Three: The Stolen Generations 1881–2008, which argues the story of the "stolen generations" of Aboriginal children is a myth.

Windschuttle was a journalist on newspapers and magazines in Sydney. He completed a BA (first class honours in history) at the University of Sydney in 1969, and an MA (honours in politics) at Macquarie University in 1978. He enrolled as a PhD student but did not submit a thesis; instead he published it under the title The Media with Penguin Books. In 1973, he became a tutor in Australian history at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). Between 1977 and 1981, Windschuttle was lecturer in Australian history and in journalism at the New South Wales Institute of Technology (now the University of Technology, Sydney) before returning to UNSW in 1983 as lecturer/senior lecturer in social policy. He resigned from UNSW in 1993 and founded Macleay Press, a small-press publishing company. Published authors besides Windschuttle include Leonie Kramer and Michael Connor. He has been a regular visiting and guest lecturer on history and historiography at American universities.

An adherent of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s, Windschuttle later moved to the political right. This process is first evident in his 1984 book The Media, which took inspiration from the empirical perspective of the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson, especially his The Poverty of Theory, to make a highly critical review of the Marxist theories of Louis Althusser and Stuart Hall. While the first edition attacked "the political program of the New Right" and set out a case for both favouring "government restrictions and regulation" and condemning "private enterprise and free markets", the third edition four years later (1988) took a different view: "Overall, the major economic reforms of the last five years, the deregulation of the finance sector, and the imposition of wage restraint through the social contract of The Accord, have worked to expand employment and internationalise the Australian economy in more positive ways than I thought possible at the time."

Keith Windschuttle (born 1942) is an Australian historian. He was appointed to the board of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2006. He was editor of Quadrant from 2007 to 2015 when he became chair of the board and editor-in-chief. He was the publisher of Macleay Press which operated from 1994 to 2010.

James Boyce, a Tasmanian historian, dismisses Windschuttle's argument as "uninformed slander" based on a failure to read the only documentary sources that matter, the journals of French and British explorers recording the first contacts with Tasmanian Aboriginal people before the colonial period. Examining Windschuttle's use of sources for the view women were treated like slaves and drudges, he says Windschuttle relies on a selective reading of just two of many sources in an early work by Ling Roth, "written at the height of Social Darwinist orthodoxy" (1899). However, Ling Roth did not "write" these sources; he simply translated the diaries of the first contacts by the French explorers. One is from Péron, who noted scars on women, and interpreted them as signs of domestic violence, which however he had never witnessed. Other early observers took this scarring as an indigenous cultural practice. James Cook had noticed Aboriginal men and women's bodies were both incised with scars in the same manner. Péron was less sympathetic than other first observers on the Baudin expedition to Australia. Boyce argues that their observations, including those of the captain Nicolas Baudin, do not support Windschuttle's claims. Even Péron records an encounter at Port Cygnet with an Aboriginal group of men and women, who shared a meal of abalone with the French explorers and, according to Péron, provided "the most striking example we had ever had of attention and reasoning among savage people". Péron would have disagreed, Boyce believes, with Windschuttle's claim that "(t)raditional Aboriginal society placed no constraints on the women's sexual behaviour with men", for he was repeatedly rebuffed when he tried to make physical contact with Aboriginal women. Baudin believed that no one on his ship had managed to have sexual relations with the women on Bruny Island. The behaviour adduced by Windschuttle from the other, late report by J. E. Calder (in 1829) is, for Boyce, "self evidently a product of the extensive disruption of traditional life that had occurred by then". He concludes: "Only someone who is totally blind to the impact of changing power relations, of declining choices, of the profound impact of cultural disintegration and recurring violence and abuse, let alone the simple imperatives of survival, could cite the unfolding tragedy at Bruny Island in this period as evidence for the sexual mores and domestic relations of pre-invasion Aboriginal society".

He argues that only a small number of children were actually removed (approximately 8,250 in the period 1880 to 1971), far less than the tens of thousands claimed, and that most of the removed children had been orphaned or were abandoned, destitute, neglected or subjected to various forms of exploitation and abuse. These removals were based on traditional grounds of child welfare. He argues that his analysis of welfare policy shows that none of the policies that allowed the removal of Aboriginal children were unique to Aborigines and that the evidence shows they were removed for the same child welfare reasons as white children who were in similar circumstances. "A significant number of other children were voluntarily placed in institutions by Aboriginal parents to give them an education and a better chance in life".

Windschuttle challenges the idea that mass killings were commonplace, arguing that the colonial settlers of Australia did not commit widespread massacres against Indigenous Australians; he drastically reduces the figures for the Tasmanian Aboriginal death toll, and writes that Aboriginal people referred to by both Reynolds and Ryan as resistance figures, included "black bushrangers" and others engaged in acts normally regarded as "criminality"; arguing that the evidence clearly shows that attacks by Aboriginal people on settlers were almost invariably directed at acquiring goods, such as flour, sugar, tea and tobacco, and that claims by orthodox historians that this was a form of guerrilla warfare against British settlement aren't supported by credible evidence. Vicki Grieves argues that Windschuttle regards Aboriginal men who traded their women's services as pimps, although Windschuttle does not use the term. Adducing the work of a source who Stuart Macintyre claims is 'a particularly tendentious American anthropologist', he argues that the Tasmanian Aboriginal society was primitive, dysfunctional and on the verge of collapse, because their putative maltreatment of women impaired their ability to reproduce in a number of critical ways. Windschuttle agrees with earlier historical analysis, such as that of Geoffrey Blainey, that introduced disease was the primary cause of the demise of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. He is highly critical of recent historical scholarship, arguing that much of it ignores the scholar's basic duties to be objective and true to the evidence, and he advances a sympathetic analysis of settler opinion, arguing that historians such as Henry Reynolds had misrepresented the contents of records of settler opinion to conceal the fact that the majority of settlers were consistently in favour of the protection of Aboriginal people. He also criticises Aboriginal land right politics, arguing that it has resulted in many Aboriginal people being effectively confined to remote settlements far from viable employment opportunities and from the benefits of a modern society. His own examination of archives, contemporary newspapers, diaries and official accounts yields a provisory figure of approximately 120 deaths of Tasmanian Aboriginal people "for which there is a plausible record of some kind" as having been killed by settlers, as opposed to earlier figures ranging as high as 700, and thus far less than the number of whites (187) reported as killed during the "Black War" of 1824 to 1828 by Aboriginal people. Windschuttle argues that the principles of the Enlightenment, fused with the 19th century evangelical revival within the Church of England and Britain's rule of law had a profound effect on colonial policy and behaviour, which was humane and just, that together made the claimed genocide culturally impossible. Gregory D. B. Smithers argues that Windschuttle interpreted settler violence as self-defence.

Windschuttle argues that no word list records an Aboriginal term corresponding to the English word "land" in the sense that Europeans use it, "as a two-dimensional space marked out with definite boundaries, which can be owned by individuals or groups, which can be inherited, which is preserved for the exclusive use of its owner, and which carries sanctions against trespassers", but states that "they certainly did identify themselves with and regularly hunted and foraged on particular territories, known as their "country", which I openly acknowledge. They had obvious attachments to these territories. But they did not confine themselves to these regions nor did they deter other Aborigines from entering their own territory". "Members of the Big River tribe, for instance, annually visited Cape Grim in the north-west, Port Sorell on the north coast, Oyster Bay on the east coast, and Pittwater and Storm Bay in the south-east; that is, they regularly traversed most of the island". "The strongest evidence for this thesis is actually the history of white colonization and the timing of the conflict that did occur between blacks and whites. Most observers at the time agreed there was very little violence in Tasmania for the first twenty years after the British arrived. And the historians, except Lyndall Ryan, agree there were minimal hostilities before 1824. If the Aborigines had really felt the land was exclusively theirs, they would not have waited more than twenty years after the colonists arrived to do something about it".

Windschuttle refers to accounts by the French zoologist François Péron, by George Augustus Robinson in his journals, and by the early Australian writer James Bonwick, of the violence and cruelty with which many Tasmanian Aboriginal men were observed to treat women. He notes that the "murder of women because of insult, jealousy and infidelity, was common" and that a woman who refused a particular suitor would often be abducted and raped. He argues that this contributed to the willingness of some Aboriginal women to associate themselves with sealers and settlers rather than their own people, so reducing the full-blooded Aboriginal population's ability to reproduce itself. He cites a number of accounts including one published in 1820 by a British officer who had spoken with Aboriginal women living with Bass Strait sealers. The officer reported that Aboriginal women made it known that their (Aboriginal) husbands treat them with "considerable harshness and tyranny" and that they sometimes run away and "attach themselves to the English sailors", finding "their situation greatly improved by attaching themselves to the sealing gangs". Windschuttle holds that the willingness of some Tasmanian Aboriginal women to engage in prostitution with convicts, sealers and settlers and the Tasmanian Aboriginal men who "actively colluded" in the trade in their women aided in the transmission of venereal and other introduced diseases to the indigenous population. Windschuttle argues that introduced disease was the primary cause of the destruction of the full-blooded Tasmanian Aboriginal people, not merely by directly causing deaths but also through widespread infertility resulting from introduced venereal disease.

Shayne Breen argues that Windschuttle's claim is a calculated guess. The picture is however complex. Evidence exists for some use of women as trading commodities. Some women were abducted by sealers, while others were traded by Aboriginal men in attempts to establish reciprocal relations with the sealers. Shayne concludes that: "There is some evidence that Aboriginal men, especially along the northern and south eastern coastlines, used women as trading commodities. Some of this trading was culturally sanctioned, some of it was not. Sometimes women willingly participated, sometimes they did not. But no credible documentary evidence is available for widespread selling of women into prostitution. There is, however, strong evidence that the abduction of women by colonists was practised across the island for much of the period to 1820. Indeed, the 1830 Aborigines Committee found that the abduction of women was a major cause of attacks against colonists by Aborigines".

Windschuttle argues that encroaching pastoralism did not cause starvation through the loss of native hunting grounds as some historians have proposed, as their numbers were being drastically reduced by introduced disease, and large parts of Tasmania were not then, or now, occupied by white settlers. Windschuttle's estimate of the size of the Tasmanian Aboriginal population at the time of settlement is that it may have been as low as 2,000. Estimates made of the combined population of the Aboriginal people of Tasmania, before European arrival in Tasmania, are generally in the range of 3,000 to 8,000 people. Genetic studies have suggested much higher figures, which is supported by oral traditions that Aboriginal people were "more numerous than the white people were aware of" but that their population had been decimated by a sudden outbreak of disease prior to 1803. It has been speculated that early contacts with passing ships, exploratory expeditions or sealers before colonization may have caused outbreaks of epidemic disease. The low rate of genetic drift found in a recent genetic study argues that the highest previous estimate of pre-colonial Aboriginal population (8,000) is likely too low and that a significantly higher population cannot be ruled out. He argues that the evidence shows that what the orthodox historians construed as "resistance" by Tasmanian Aboriginal people were acts of theft and violence motivated by their desire for exotic consumer goods like flour, tea, sugar and blankets. The indigenous culture, in his view, "had no sanctions against the murder of anyone outside their immediate clan", therefore they had no cultural sanctions preventing the killing of settler outsiders to obtain desired goods or in revenge. The forced removal of Tasmania's Aboriginal people from the Tasmanian mainland to Flinders Island was the Colonial Administration's measure to ensure peace for hard-pressed settlers while attempting, unsuccessfully to prevent the extinction of the full-blooded Tasmanian Aboriginal people. The rapid decline in the Aboriginal population after the British colonisation was the product of the interaction of a number of factors, including introduced diseases causing death and infertility, continued internecine warfare, deaths through conflict with settlers and the loss of a significant number of women of childbearing age from the full-blooded aboriginal gene pool to white sealers and settlers through abduction, "trade" and by voluntary association.

Within a year Windschuttle's claims and research produced a volume of rebuttal, namely Whitewash. On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History, an anthology edited and introduced by Robert Manne, professor of politics at La Trobe University, with contributions by Australian academics from a range of disciplines. Manne, who called Windschuttle's publication "one of the most implausible, ignorant and pitiless books about Australian history written for many years", summed up the case against Windschuttle's book, noting that its assessment of Aboriginal deaths is based on Plomley, despite the fact that Plomley denied that any estimate regarding such deaths could be made from the documentary record. Manne added further observations, to the effect: that "a scrupulous conservative scholar", H. A. Willis, using exactly the same sources as Windschuttle, instead came up with a figure of 188 violent deaths and another 145 rumoured deaths; that Windschuttle's method excludes deaths of Aborigines who were wounded, and later died; that all surviving Aborigines transported by Robinson to Flinders' Island bore marks of violence and gunshot wounds "perpetrated on them by depraved whites"; that Windschuttle cannot deny that between 1803 and 1834 almost all Tasmanian Aborigines died, and the only evidence for disease as a factor before 1829 rests on a single conversation recorded by James Bonwick, and that Aboriginal women who lived with sealers did not, however, die off from contact with bearers of foreign disease; that Windschuttle likened Aboriginal attacks on British settlers to "modern-day junkies raiding service stations for money", whereas both colonial records and modern historians speak of them as highly "patriotic", attached to their lands, and engaged in a veritable war to defend it from settlement; that by Windschuttle's own figures, the violent death rate of Aborigines in Tasmania in the 1820s must have been 360 times the murder rate in contemporary New York; that Windschuttle shows scarce familiarity with period books, citing only 3 of the 30 books published on Van Diemen's land for the period 1803–1834, and with one of them confuses the date of the first visit by the French with the publication date of the volume that recounted their expedition; that it is nonsensical to argue that a people who had wandered over an island and survived for 34,000 years had no attachment to their land; that Windschuttle finds no native words in 19th century wordlists for "land" to attest to such an attachment, when modern wordlists show 23 entries under "country". In turn, this provoked Melbourne writer and Objectivist John Dawson, to undertake a counter-rebuttal, Washout: On the academic response to The Fabrication of Aboriginal History in which he argues that Whitewash leaves Windschuttle's claims and research unrefuted.