"The Fabrication of Aboriginal History" by Keith Windschuttle, in The New Criterion (Sept. 2001), 850 Seventh Ave., New York, N.Y. 10019.

When Kathy Freeman, an Australian monies of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, it Aboriginal sprinter, was chosen to carry the was widely viewed as a sign that Australians Olympic torch during the opening cere-were finally coming to terms with a sordid colonial past. That past includes a genocidal campaign against Australia’s Aboriginals, many critics say. In an article widely published during the Olympics, Yale University historian Ben Kiernan wrote of "ethnic cleansing" and "hundreds of massacres," tallying as many as 20,000 Aborigines killed during the British colonization of Australia between 1788 and 1901.

Windschuttle, an Australian historian and author of The Killing of History (1997), questions these charges. He argues that "much of the evidence of the claims about massacres, terrorism, and genocide turns out to be highly suspect." While there was armed conflict on the frontier, he believes that the decimation of the Aboriginal population was caused mostly by smallpox, influenza, and other diseases.

Kiernan and many other scholars base their estimates of Aboriginal deaths on historian Henry Reynolds’s The Other Side of the Frontier (1981). But Windschuttle found that Reynolds relied heavily on one of his own works, a 1978 monograph titled Race Relations in North Queensland, which "is not about Aboriginal deaths at all. It is a tally of the number of whites killed by Aborigines. Nowhere does it mention 10,000 Aboriginal dead."

Windschuttle also took a hard look at one of the most notorious incidents, the alleged 1804 massacre of some 50 Aboriginal men, women, and children at Hobart in Tasmania. The earliest account, written by the British officers at Hobart, reports that a group of 200 Aborigines had surrounded a settler couple, threatening them with spears. Soldiers from a nearby camp came to their defense, killing three Aborigines. It was not until the government convened an inquiry 26 years later that a former convict testified that "he thought ‘40 to 50’ blacks had been killed [at Hobart], even though he acknowledged he had not been at the scene at the time." Yet this figure now appears in many history texts as fact.

In Australia, Windschuttle has been compared to Holocaust denier David Irving. His critics argue that white settlers on the Australian frontier "could kill blacks with impunity," says Windschuttle. They say that settlers and the police "either turned a blind eye or were complicit in

massacres themselves. Hence widespread killings would have occurred without leaving any trace in the historical evidence." Historian Bain Attwood of Australia’s Monash University wrote that "very little historical interpretation is verifiable in any strict sense" and that historians arrive at the truth on the basis of a "scholarly consensus." But Windschuttle counters that if concrete evidence does not exist, "then the consensus can owe nothing to scholarship."

Australian prime minister John Howard has "faced enormous public pressure to issue a formal apology over the issue and thus open the way to large-scale claims for compensation." Some advocates call for establishment of an Aboriginal state, where native peoples could revive their traditional culture. They blame the woes of today’s outback Aboriginal communities—"chronic alcoholism, petrol sniffing, heroin addiction, domestic violence, unemployment, and appalling health and education standards"—on the destruction of the Aborigines’ culture. But the great majority of the estimated 386,000 Aboriginals in Australia today, writes Windschuttle, "show little inclination to fulfill [this] romantic agenda."