Keith Windschuttle on White Australia.

• Author: Teichmann, Max
• Position: 134672595
• Pages: 38(6)

Keith Windschuttle (1) has given us the best and certainly the most comprehensive account of the White Australia Policy since Myra Willard's history, which was produced in 1923 by Melbourne University Press. In between these two there was a steady drip of books on the Policy and then, as the multiculturalists took over the best places in our education and information sectors, a flood of taxpayerbacked publications purporting to tell us the true story of "The Policy" and how racist and ruthless our forebears were, and how most Australians still have not really rid themselves of these dirty habits. A few comparisons with the Nazis turned up, but many more with South African apartheid systems. These "histories", this "information" from the new breed of radical historians, dominates school syllabi, our university departments and research institutes, the public media and the utterances of left Labor activists, helping to explain why so many ordinary Australians have turned away from Labor. Few of them will return until the slanderers and falsifiers of our history and our society, depart. That is a job for the A.L.P.

Normal Australians judge their countrymen by mixing within their society and by remembering their parents' attitudes, and quite often their grandparents'. So they know by direct acquaintance that most Australians are neither racist nor callous, and that most settlers from other lands agree with them. Also, large numbers of Australians travel and live and work for periods overseas and encounter varieties of racism and exclusionism which have never gained a foothold here. They return, often expressing surprised pleasure at the fact that this is one of the most tolerant and easygoing societies on earth. So the New Class have, in a sense, been ploughing the sea. Nevertheless, they have muddied and in some places polluted the waters of enquiry and legitimate discussion, such that Windschuttle had to spend much time researching their numerous utterances and pronouncements and trying to trace these to their source. One envies him his persistence and his industry.

Time and again he found that our new revisionists had not gone back to the primary sources but been content with quoting one another, or scraps from newspapers--especially the undoubtedly racist Bulletin--or particular politicians or people on the margins of the political and quite often, the social system. When a primary source had been purportedly accessed by the writer, Windschuttle too frequently found the quote wrong or truncated by leaving out a sizeable or important part of the original utterance: cooking the books, so to speak.

So, the overall conclusion that Windschuttle is obliged to draw, is that the main body of the attitudinising of the New Historians concerning the history, origins and motivations of the White Australia Policy and the tendentious conclusions which they have drawn and insistently disseminated, is fallacious and professionally incompetent.

This new or revisionist history might best be described as agitmythology.

In particular the author singles out and examines Henry Reynolds' North of Capricorn and describes it as a travesty of the truth. "He has...