Latest view of black and white frontier conflict sparks new history war

THE author of a new book on frontier conflict in Van Diemen’s Land hopes it will finally end the nation’s “history wars”.

THE author of a new book on frontier conflict in Van Diemen’s Land hopes it will finally end the nation’s “history wars”, but a key protagonist has already dismissed the idea as “wishful thinking” and “propaganda”.

Tasmanian historian Nicholas Clements, a descendant of a white farmer linked to the killing of 11 Aborigines, told The Weekend Australian his book The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania attempts to “break the circularity” of the history wars.

Clements has dug up further evidence on the bloody encounters between colonists and Aborigines and seeks to present it dispassionately, using alternate chapters told from black and white perspectives.

He declares that conservative historian Keith Windschuttle was wrong to suggest there was no war between Aborigines and whites, arguing about 1000 lives were lost to direct conflict, with atrocities committed by both sides.

However, Clements said he deliberately decided against using “emotive” terms such as “genocide”, “massacre” or even “murder” and believed that all involved were victims of circumstance.

While concluding the invasion of tribal lands was the main cause of conflict, he suggests the lack of white women in the early colony led to the abduction and rape of black women, which was a ­frequent trigger for violence.

“I’ve tried to break the circularity of the (history wars) debate,” Clements said. “I was not so much fed up with the polemics, but I recognised how eminently unhelpful they were.

“They seem to ignore some basic facts of human psychology and the reality of the past, which was far more complicated than they suggested: that it was all one person’s fault or the other one’s fault. That’s not how reality works and that’s not how the black war worked.

“My book, by writing two histories in parallel, confronts the reader and forces them to empathise. Even the most hardened of black armband or white blindfold (historians) has to place themselves in the shoes of both sides.”

It’s an approach that has won praise from historian Henry Reynolds, who wrote a foreword to the book, released next week.

“Clements has written a book that, while reflecting upon the history wars, has transcended their angry contention and has, consequently, brought them to an end,” Reynolds argues.

Windschuttle, whose 2002 book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One, Van ­Diemen’s Land 1803-1847 rejected the notion of a frontier war and accused left-wing historians of exaggeration and fabrication, is largely unconvinced.

He is scathing of Reynolds’s claim that ­Clements has brought to an end the history wars.

“This is wishful thinking — it is straight out of the same manual for propaganda that once claimed the scientific debate over climate change was now settled,” Windschuttle said.

He takes issue with Clements’s claim of 1000 deaths, conceding only his own figures of 121 Aboriginal deaths and 187 white deaths between 1803-1831 could now be increased “perhaps by another 10 or 20 Aboriginal deaths”.