TNC’s March 2003 issue featured Keith Windschuttle’s Rabbit-Proof Fence: a true story, which took on the premise of Phillip Noyce’s film–that administrative policy in Western Australia from the 1930s to 1970s was an effort at systematic genocide of Aboriginals.
Noyce, however, was only a filmmaker. The real culprits, those historians who supplied Noyce’s myths, had been dispatched months earlier in Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One, Van Diemen’s Land 1803-1847 (see also “Native fiction,” a review by Geoffrey Blainey in the April New Criterion).
The liars and frauds are barking, though not exactly biting, back. Here’s a piece from Australia’s Herald Sun (courtesy of erinoconnor.org) in which Professor Lyndall Ryan, one of the “historians” debunked in Windschuttle’s book, manages spectacularly to discredit herself.
And an older piece against Windschuttle’s book, by Dr. Shayne Breen, a professor of Aboriginal Studies at the University of Tasmania. Not much of an argument, but worth reading for gems like this one: “The disorganised criminal view owes more to English philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s description of native peoples as nasty, brutish and short, than it does to credible evidence.”