Keith Windschuttle

Keith Windschuttle.

Keith Windschuttle (1942–) is an Australian right-wing historian (BA University of Sydney in 1969), journalist and former editor-in-chief of the Quadrant literary magazine.

Biography

Formerly a follower of the New Left, Windschuttle later shifted his views to the right-wing in the 1990s onwards. In 1993, he founded a small-press publishing company called Macleay Press. In 2000, Windschuttle wrote a book called The Killing of History, where he accused literary and social theorists of obscuring facts and replacing traditional history to suit their political agendas. Two years later, he self-published a book titled The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847, where he accused "orthodox" historians of deliberately fabricating accounts of genocide against Aboriginal Australians in Van Diemen's Land (present-day Tasmania). In response, a rebuttal titled Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History was published the following year, where Robert Manne and other historians critique Windschuttle's thesis and utilization of sources by relying primarily on government documents and deductive reasoning to suit his thesis, while also comparing him to other historical denialists such as David Irving. In Whitewash, professor Henry Reynolds described Windschuttle's book as "without doubt, the most biased and cantankerous historical work to appear since the publication of [George William] Rusden's three-volume History of Australia in the 1880s." This dispute was a major event in a series of historical debates known as the "History Wars." In addition, Windschuttle and Tim Gillin published an article on Quadrant subscribing to a now-discredited myth of a vanished race of pygmies that were wiped out by "Aboriginal invaders."

Afterwards, Windschuttle wrote a few more books criticizing historians for allegedly supporting a "black armband" view conveying the message of white guilt. In 2009, Windschuttle published a third volume denying the racial motivations behind the removal policy involving the Stolen Generations, where indigenous children of mixed descent were removed from their families to be adopted by white families. In the new volume, Windschuttle complained about the 2002 film Rabbit-Proof Fence's depiction of the removal policy, stating that the reasons why the three girls were removed from their families was because of sexual activity with white men. However, his claims were dismissed by the filmmakers, professor Robert Manne and Molly Craig's daughter, Doris Pilkington Garimara as a politically-motivated attempt to slander the girls and downplay the Stolen Generations. In that same year, shortly after becoming the editor of the Quadrant magazine, Windschuttle unknowingly published a hoax article written by Catherine Wilson claiming that the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) "had planned to produce food crops engineered with human genes" in an effort to expose Windschuttle's purported political bias.