The controversial writer's new salvo in the culture wars
mirrors the left-wing view he confronts, writes Gerard
Henderson.
A new front was opened last night in what have been termed the
culture wars. Columnist Frank Devine launched two books published
by Macleay Press - Keith Windschuttle's The White Australia
Policy and John Dawson's Washout. The former is
Windschuttle's most recent contribution to the Australian history
debate, following his controversial 2002 tome The Fabrication of
Aboriginal History. The latter is a defence of Windschuttle
that contains a foreword by the history warrior himself. Both
volumes are likely to attract return fire.
In his foreword to Washout, Windschuttle makes it clear
who his enemies are. Namely "most of today's senior Australian
historians who are products of the 1960s when they learnt their
craft as undergraduate and postgraduate students". He maintains
that, in the process, "many adopted the fashionable slogan of that
radical decade that 'everything is political'."
Windschuttle quotes Henry Reynolds as declaring in 1981 that his
work as a historian "is inescapably political".
The prime targets in The White Australia Policy include
Reynolds, Andrew Markus, Ann McGrath and John Mulvaney. They are
classified as members of the "academic left" and are accused of
fundamentally mistaking "the Australian character, Australian
nationalism and the reasons why the White Australia Policy was
introduced".
As with The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, the
strength of Windschuttle's latest book is that the author goes back
to the original sources to make his points and to discredit his
opponents. There is only one exception - but it demonstrates an
essential weakness in the author's approach.
In the concluding chapter of The White Australia Policy,
Windschuttle examines Labor leaders and the WAP. He refers to the
1975 Race Discrimination Act as "probably the great achievement" of
Gough Whitlam's administration. And, correctly, he condemns the
support given to the WAP by such previous Labor leaders as Chris
Watson and Arthur Calwell. Then Windschuttle takes issue with "the
academic adulation of Paul Keating" - maintaining that the most
recent Labor PM "earned the admiration of intellectuals by urging
that Australia cease being 'a branch office of empire', convert to
a republic and aim for 'enmeshment' " in Asia.
So, what's the source of this? After all, there are numerous
transcripts that document what Keating said when he was prime
minister. However, Windschuttle avoids all such primary evidence
and puts his faith in an American secondary source - Samuel P.
Huntington's The Clash of Civilisations. A reading of
Huntington's 1996 book will reveal that the author has little
understanding of Australia and that his journalistic sources for
the Keating quote do not support the claim that Keating called for
Australia's "enmeshment" in Asia. In fact, Keating said often that
Australia was not - and could never be - an Asian nation.
It appears that Windschuttle wanted to compare Keating's "mostly
empty rhetoric" with the reality that "annual Asian immigration" to
Australia fell during Keating's time as prime minister. The
intention is to de-authorise "the academic left's political
cheerleading on the issue" as part of a broader attempt to bag what
Windschuttle terms "hard multiculturalism". Yet the policy of
multiculturalism (which was introduced by Gough Whitlam and Malcolm
Fraser in the 1970s) has nothing to do with the White Australia
Policy (which was abandoned by the Coalition's Harold Holt and,
subsequently, Whitlam in the late 1960s and early '70s).
The problem with Windschuttle's work is that, at times, you get
the impression that he is a former Marxist - turned political
conservative - who is waging a personal war on the very left-wing
interpretation of Australian history that he once both embraced and
proclaimed. His revisionism is essential reading for anyone who
wants to join the debate on Australian history. Yet, because his
history contains a substantial degree of personal polemic, it
sometimes lacks empathy.
For example, in his revisionist interpretation concerning the
fate of the Tasmanian Aborigines, Windschuttle recorded that "only"
about 120 had been killed. His assertion has not been disproved,
yet the word "only" was regrettable. It is much the same with his
current work. Relying on contemporary sources and Myra Willard's
1923 History of the White Australia Policy, Windschuttle
argues that the WAP was introduced for economic and nationalistic
reasons and was not motivated primarily by race.
There is something to be said for this interpretation. Yet even
Willard concedes that "racial unity" was a factor. David Johanson
acknowledged in his 1962 essay in Immigration: Control or Colour
Bar? that the motives for the WAP "were racial as well as
economic". And Windschuttle himself refers to the presence of some
"overt racists" advancing the WAP cause within both the Labor and
Protectionist parties of about 100 years ago.
What is missing from Windschuttle's book is empathy for
individuals who were the victims of the WAP, which was often
harshly administered by bureaucrats, along with a recognition that
the WAP was a bad policy. It made little sense for an immigrant,
trading nation based in the Asian region to ban Asian immigrants
because of their race. Yet Windschuttle maintains that "even
through the eyes of its instigators . . . it was a rational, and in
a number of ways progressive, product of its times". In fact, there
was nothing rational and progressive about the WAP - which is why
it was junked half a century after its implementation.
Once again, Windschuttle has fired off much valuable information
that challenges contemporary views of Australia history. But, once
again, his offensive falters by being a mirror image of the
ideological-based history he is confronting.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney
Institute.
