On Keith Windschuttle, the Fabrication

Windschuttle's life had more continuity than many wish to admit, and did more for the left than the right, which no-one will be comfortable with

Keith Windschuttle ‘a man with the crack of the century running through him’

Nil nisi mortuisi wotsit don’t speak ill of the dead has really got a stress test workout, with the recent demise of Keith Windschuttle, most recently editor of Quadrant, historian, and former man of the left. That was in the streets at least, where news of his passing was greeted with unrestrained joy by those who heard it. Whatever mere disagreement people might have had with Windschuttle on any number of issues, he was despised for his volume The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Vol 1 which argued that there had been no genocide of the Tasmanian aboriginal people, and which created an extended furore in the long lost days of the Howard government, when these hings could go on for months. Fabrication is the first many had heard of Windschuttle. To a smaller group, it marked the completion of his somewhat predictable arc, from left-wing ugh firebrand, to curmudgeonly creature of the right. Fabrication marked the final stage of the Luciferian fall, regular in Australian politics as Jetstar, for the revolutionary to reign in the Hell of failed hopes of the century. But in fact the story of Keith Windschuttle is more interesting than that. The arc his life described was dictated by the mass of the times, and tells us a lot about them

Fabrication is thus the bloody mot juste, when looking at the obituaries and tributes in the papers of the right. Poor Alan Howe, the wet old News Corp lettuce currently shoved in the Australian’s obit office (like the venerable funeral director, is it really worth going home). All the juicy, great stuff about Windy from his wild years, and he had to document his taking-on of the great boredom of reaction: churning out Fabrication Vols 1 and 3 (Volume 2 is yet to appear; this you will learn is absolutely standard in the Windschuttle passage), dutifully getting the Gina Rinehart subsidised Quadrant to the six newsagents left, from which the torn off covers would return a few months later. He began on the left, and soon saw the folly of his ways etc etc was the tenor of the remarks.

Ha, no. That would be too easy, but not only for the right, for the left as well. The truth is that Windschuttle was not some undergrad radical, who went straight. I mean he was an undergrad radical. But he was an important and effective leftist for fifteen core years, and adjacent for another five or so, and much of what he did on the right was a belated, and unsuccessful, attempt to undo much of what he had achieved in the 1970s and 80s, the very things the right most despised about the present. Yes, the radical chic is all there. In 1967, ASIO records a young Keith Windschuttle as a prominent advocate of the revolutionary qualities of high-dosage LSD. Around 1970, after Australia’s one incident of black power guerrilla action - a molotov cocktail thrown at a digger in Brisbane during protection of a blak neighbourhood - the Brisbane black panthers received a letter enclosing a donation, now that it was clear the blacks were getting serious about the struggle and signed by guess who?

By the early 1970s, Windschuttle had settled down, as we all must. In his case to Maoism. The movement was hugely influential at the time, attracting those on the left whose instinct was, in the last instance, towards the people as they were - which, in the case of Australia, was anglo-celtic, masculine, workerist, and keenly nationalist, expressed through sport, history etc (those who preferred to wait for the working class as they were to be, became Trotskyists; they are still waiting). Few people joined the China aligned party the CPA (Marxist-Leninism), a hardcore cult which involved a lot of getting yelled at by Ted Hill, or in Adelaide, it being Adelaide, Christopher Pearson, John Howard’s later speechwriter. Around the party was a much larger penumbra, associated with the cultural left nationalism of the time, and an Australia Independence Movement trying to kindle a radical republicanism. The Maoist approach to Australia was that it was not primarily (or politically should not be seen primarily) as an advanced nation, but as an underdeveloped one, kept so industrially by dominance within the world system. This led to a different politics to the Trots; organise workers through appeal to historical notions of basic resistance to authority, and the collectivism of mateship. Hence success in places like the building industry, in plumbing and other tough trades (but also in nursing; and theatre). Hence the Eureka flag.

Maoism is always willing to err on the side of the One Big Force on offer, to make something actually happen. To this movement, Windschuttle brought something distinctive; an early interest in media, as a more autonomous process than classical Marxism would admit. He popularised then obscure texts, and co-ran a journal called The Reporter analysing Australian politics through this more complex frame (and with an early focus on the destructive influence of Murdoch). He was energetic, well-organised, a professional agitator in a frequently more easy-going (read: dopedazed) time. He pioneered media studies as a discipline. Like many, he got a bit carried away with the Mao analogy, describing media studies departments in universities as ‘red bases’, from which to attack privilege-reproducing departments such as English.

Windschuttle was admired on the left for his energy, his theoretical acuity, his sense of purpose and widely disliked for being, well, a prick. By now it was clear that he was, in today’s language, personality-disordered. His theoretical acuity about media was an expression in part of his paranoid hypervigilance. He was hypersensitive, easy to offend, and he sued everybody, including magazines he was writing for. Hilariously, the better his work was, the more absurd conclusions he drew from it. In 1977-78, he reported from the Hunter Valley and Newcastle on the effects of structural, rather than cyclical, unemployment and stagflation on the working class, particularly youth. He was the first to see that class politics was yielding to cultural resistance, in a nascent punk movement, intersecting with an anarchisty politics. He was one of the first to spot this, and see the gradual shift underway, though like many at the time, he still believed that this was no more than a prelude to a new socialist struggle. The ineluctable logic of comparing scrap-heaped Newcastle kids to the damned of the earth, led him necessarily, to becoming a fanboy of Pol Pot.

Now….there were many people at the time, who saw in the Cambodian revolution an answer to the relentless embrace of global imperialism. The Khmer Rouge weren’t hyperviolent hippie primitivists as they have come to seem; their plan was to become fully self-sufficient in food, then develop industry. The times, the times, but Windschuttle took the notion of Australian independence and counter-system revolution to its logical conclusion. In a 1977 piece for the Nation Review introducing the Chilean left text How To Read Donald Duck (it sought to show how the CIA used mass culture to culturally undermine class resistance; it was a staple cultural studies text for decades) Keith observed that ‘the oil would soon be gone, and the blacks and workers would soon join together in peasant revolution’ in Australia Cambodia/Kampouchea was the model, and Windschuttle’s stanning of Brother Number One was not concluded by, the death of hundreds of thousands, but by the Khmer Rouge’s murder of Malcolm Caldwell, a Scots academic Pol Pot fan (and mentor of Gordon Brown) who had visited the now ghost city of Phnom Penh and clearly said the wrong thing. Windschuttle at this time, in which there was a lot of loose talk of violence on the left, was more ready than most to defend, verbally, the acts of the Red Brigades and Baader-Meinhof in Europe’s hot year, ‘77. Tony Abbott is exceptional generous in his praise of Windschuttle, because as a conservative student political leader of the late 1970s, had he got the kicking-to-unconsciousness that Peter Costello had got from a Monash anarchist, I do not think Windschuttle would have been particularly sorry or ‘hypocritically liberal’ about the violence of the system. He struck some at the time, as disturbingly attracted to what many were seeing as nihilistic descent. He was certainly lucky in his editors, who he cursed for their excisions.

The radical left collapsed in the late 70s; the Reagan/Thatcher arrival suggested this might be a dialectical dip before the contradictions produced the revolution, especially from catastrophic unemployment. It did not. Windschuttle published his (very good) book Unemployment in 1982, his last fully leftist work. When the left collapsed entirely in 1984-5, so did Windschuttle into a sustained melancholy leavened with hyperactivity. This was exacerbated by his growing realisation that the changes he had pioneered in the humanities were being filled out with the new anti-materialist and apparently nihilist ideas of postmodernism. This prompted The Killing of History, his transitional volume, in which he damned the new perspectivalism in historical studies, but in doing so retreated to a cruder realism than he had been purveying in the 1970s. Another book The Media became a high school staple for years, and was an extension of his idea that inculcating media literacy at secondary level was a revolutionary act.

This is the clue to the great paradox of Windschuttle and how he is viewed, and will give comfort to neither left nor right. His journey from left to right was not that of the bright kid who does two years in the International Socialists, and then jokes about it decades later at dinner parties with fellow SES public servants, PR agency heads and overseas education marketers. The transition was one of a certain type of Marxist, especially of the more Leninist type: the epochal defeat of the radical left in the late 1970s had set the long range political struggle very far back. One now looked to elements on the right for a reduced version of the transformative power the left once enjoyed. It was the left - now green, ‘primitivist’, affective, individualistic - that was conservative in its approach. The continuity of radical struggle was to occur in the cultural sphere.

Maoists were not the only ones to follow such logic, though most of them did: the ‘Red Eurekaists’ of Albert Langer and Barry York for example, a North Fitzroy Don Quixote and his Sancho Panza with the body types reversed. The Leninist UK Revolutionary Communist Party under Frank Furedi made the trip, and for a while, had the Centre for Independent Studies as their useful idiots over here. In Tasmania, former BLFr Jim Bacon, drew all the old Melbourne Maoists to the enchanted isle and went to war against the Green movement. Windschuttle was given his chance when Paddy McGuinness, the ‘editor’ of Quadrant - the former anarchist and old soak was so far gone by then he was a more a sort of magazine Queen Mother, of who he published an oleaginous obit - suggested Windschuttle look into some of he higher profile massacres focused on by the new frontier histories. It was after the Mabo judgement, and politics had changed. Black Power was now dead. Mabo had credited native title by finding it supported in English common law, not by acknowledging it as an entirely autonomous part of the non-settler ‘other’. The judgement and subsequent law invited indigenous people - who had been unified by the common oppression of 1788 - to differentiate themselves, in order to fulfil the conditions of native title. For the old right, the outrage of Mabo was simply questioning written title tout court; for the left turned right, it was that it invited blacks to be not revolutionary but conserving, to rediscover what they had had, to reproduce its ancient character in the present - and to increasingly organise their identity around not oppression, but victimhood. And that is how, out of the three articles that Paddy McG wanted, an old Maoist made a book simultaneously forensic and deeply deranged, a volume which concretised the full collapse of his political mind and morale into needfulness.

Windschuttle’s central proposition in Fabrication was that there had been no genocide in Tasmania. Tough gig since it was a matter of record that, over seventy years, every one of the 15-20 Tasmanian nation/tribe/clan grouping had been entirely dissolved by direct killing, disease and ‘protection’ transportation, and only managed to reconstitute themselves publicly decades later. Since Tasmania had become a commercial wool colony in the 1820s, the expansive need for the small island’s grazing land had created continuing lethal encounters between black and white; eventually above the ‘black line’, the murder statute was withdrawn. This was war, and then it was something else; so asymmetrical tha, trying to consider it from the black side, HG Wells would come up with War of the Worlds.

How did Windschuttle reduce this horror to a death toll which he initially claimed to be in the (high) two figures; then about 120; finally about 200? Simple. He used the archive-only historian Brian Plomley’s work as a statistical base. But since Plomley had specifically said he was only considering documented, and overwhelmingly white deaths, Windschuttle’s method was invalid from the start. The remaining ‘gaps in the record’ were solved by Windschuttle lowballing the estimate of stable population. Every scholar has put that range at 4000-8000 (which surprises some; but this was an adapted non-agricultural people in harsh terrain); Windschuttle claimed it as 2000, with no evidence to support it. This neatly squared out his figures, disappearing hundreds more deaths.

The war had produced a wealth of stories and legends on both sides, as horror and claimed glory. Windschuttle did show that some of these were undoubtedly exaggerated, misplaced and transferred. But the usefulness of this was absolutely traduced by the fact that any fair reader could see that the book’s whole strategy was mad. Not just cynical, self-flattering or whatever. It hid from itself the conditions of its possibility of denial, of a very obvious process of genocide by multiple means, including efforts at genuine ‘protection’ of survivors.

Fabrication was a sign to many seasoned Windschuttle-watchers that Keith had finally lost it. His radical hopes, hysterical character and the course of events had done for him. About that time, an occasional tic he had manifested became a full-face twitch, Swiss-regular. It was as if the man himself had cracked right down the middle. Central to the horror of former comrades at what this man had become was a late chapter of Fabrication, which was nothing other than a hymn of hate towards the Tasmanian aborigines. Every principle of social science non-value analysis is thrown away. An adapted isolated nation/clan people, with a complex culture of kinship, taboos and totem, body-scarification art, and a diet of lobster, abalone and wild game were simply abused as a bunch of morons who had only made it through 35,000 years through dumb luck, and might have disappeared anyway had the British not arrived. Reading that chapter is like being trapped with an angry lunatic in a lift. Where did it come from, I wondered at the time. Initially I thought it was simply Windschuttle’s crackedness getting off the leash towards manuscript’s end (it was published through his own Macleay Press, self-funded, after he married into the wealthy Sydney establishment Fink family; Keith was his own editor).

His hatred, I thought, was the old Maoist’s disdain for the pre-peasantry; tribal peoples in a world of a substantially reproduced present, not yet in History. Maoists liked Black Power. They’re less keen on preserving or honouring pre-modern ways of life, as evidenced by their assault on the culture of Tibet. Mao left one great monastery intact, and had the rest smashed up, so that the country’s vastly cruel and oppressive culture could not restart. It seemed as if this vituperative assault might be in this spirit, a deliberate profaning of a past rapidly, in the 1990 and 2000s, being sacralised at a national level. I’ve come to wonder if it was not a calculated self-deleashing for that purpose. But the greater madness of the book itself. No, that's all his own work.

But that possibility does give Windschuttle’s life a unity, or a current of one. He notoriously argued that one reason there couldnt have been a genocide was that British naval officers were anti-slavery evangelical Christians, and so would never do that sort of thing. Once again, this ludicrous one-sidedness distorts the truth. From a Marxistish point of view, one has to acknowledge that the world transformative force of the time was the British empire and Navy. If you want world revolution you need a World, and that was provided by James Cook, who knitted the various bits of map into a coherent globe. That reconception of humanity underpins the universalism from which the radical left comes. In the 18th century, protestant Christian naval officers were the universal force, Augustan Maoists. When that cracked, the fissure ran right down the middle of Keith.

I can’t hate the man, because such is crowded out by a mixture of pity and contempt for what he allowed himself to become eventually, a clubbable type, flattered by a right he wasn’t from, willing to fall into any paranoid fantasy or petty culture war obsession, like a hiker on a long march falls at final step with relief, into a hot bath. The further joke of all of it is that nothing he did in his right period cancels, as he might have been seeking it to do, the innovations of his earl energy and focus. He did do an enormous amount to put a certain inherently political way of reading culture at the centre of the Australian humanities, and that is for better and for worse. But does anyone now think that there wasn’t a Tasmanian genocide? That, as he later suggested, Labor was solely responsible for the White Australia Policy, while brave liberals resisted? These things didn’t get read into the culture, in part because of the way that Windschuttle taught us how to read them. His long voyage became a circumnavigation, in pursuit of describing a big zero at its end. Myself, I’d suggest the non-binary anarcho-communists of RMIT Media Studies crack an edible for him this week, because you wouldn’t have your department without him (and others), and that is the unmediated truth.