Goodbye to all that: Keith Windschuttle on white Australia.

• Author: Stove, R.J.
• Position: The White Australia Policy - Book Review
• Pages: 42(10)

It is not obvious why anyone would actively seek the title of "Australia's best living historian." The very phrase suggests some surreal Guinness Book of Records entry, on the lines of "wittiest man in Luxembourg" or "greatest rock group ever produced by Bangladesh". What is perfectly obvious is that nowadays, Keith Windschuttle alone among Australians consistently threatens the historiographical preeminence of Geoffrey Blainey. One suspects that Blainey himself hails this development. Any major thinker cherishes competitors talented enough to be worth fretting about. He may, as Newton said of himself, stand on giants' shoulders; but he can never be content with his exalted location if his only confreres are earthbound midgets.

Between Windschuttle and Blainey lie similarities as notable as--if less manifest than--their differences. Both men are conspicuously honest, for one thing (eccentric though it would have seemed to our grandparents that possessing mere honesty might one day appear an unusual intellectual virtue). Accordingly, both men interest themselves more in wherever their researches take them, than in half-baked polemics: though Windschuttle's temperament has a steely argumentative edge, and a relish for combat, which Blainey's lacks. Yet either man's merits would have been in vain if they had been expressed through turgid prose. In fact, both Blainey and Windschuttle are blessed with the gift of rare, addictive readability.

This readability takes different forms with each writer. With Blainey, it reveals itself as a heightened poetic consciousness, a feather-light perception of the beauty and menace in nature, even the beauty and menace in those industrial processes which from Stalin's tame artists inspired torrents of novel social-realist garbage. Windschuttle's, by contrast, is an output as unpoetic as any black-letter lawyer's case-notes. Some ill-wishers think of Windschuttle as a hanging judge. One element of truth resides in the metaphor: namely, that his historiographical outlook is forensic rather than ambiguous or hesitating. He does not moralise. He does not empathise. He adjudicates. He can convey opponents' theses with often devastating fairness--generally in clearer language than those opponents condescend to use--but when the time comes for him to put on the black cap, he puts on the black cap.

Perhaps a danger exists in the Windschuttle approach: the danger of positivism, of supposing that if an event is officially undocumented it never occurred. (As every student of mediaeval European history--or of some other area where documentation remains frustratingly fragmented and scarce--soon realises, what people assume happened can be almost as significant as what actually happened.) Not that Windschuttle himself has been guilty of positivism in the above crude form. Still, some of his less intelligent supporters certainly have been; and their misreadings of Windschuttle's conclusions as a licence to canonise Gradgrind and Scrooge become intrinsically instructive, however unfortunate.

Hence the particular importance of Windschuttle's latest and best book, titled (with a straightforwardness characteristic of its creator) The White Australia Policy. (1) Many among those who cheered on The Fabrication of Aboriginal History's first volume will find The White Australia Policy an irritant. For Windschuttle--similar to Blainey in his reserves of moral courage, though without, it seems, Blainey's Christian beliefs--has dared to desecrate Australian political modernism's Holy of Holies. That thrice-sacred relic, of course, is the belief in the White Australia Policy's unremitting malevolence: a belief that unites the Rent-A-Mob Left with the Rent-A-Sleaze Right. To the Rent-A-Mob Left, the Policy must always be abominable as the birthmark of "institutional racism" on Australia's body politic. To the Rent-A-Sleaze Right, the Policy must always be equally abominable, as Australia's greatest and longest-lasting barrier to utopian visions of "the global economy". (Whatever this slogan may mean in textbooks, we have all grown only too aware of what it means in practice: a permanent male underclass of bachelors and divorces, gutted by anti-marriage femocrats' employment policies; unable to imagine the concept of a "family wage" even in its dreams; and indistinguishable from the atomised flotsam of Mexican barrios and Brazilian favelas, save by the Latinos' comparative paucity of television sets.) Therefore Windschuttle's production contains material bound to offend everyone, except that minuscule minority which prefers truth to chic. The fact that Windschuttle's own politics would seem to be of a thoroughly temperate sort--close to Chifley and Attlee, with no tincture of turbo-capitalism, let alone of white supremacism--will probably compound rather than reduce his opponents' rancour.

The particular Rent-A-Mob Left fable condemned by Windschuttle flourishes like bindweed in the history departments of our "universities", being upheld in its pure form by--to cite only the best-known names--Lyndall ("Historians are...