Windschuttle a fierce intellect

Keith Windschuttle was a fine historian who wrote what the archival evidence showed him to be true. He was a patriot who believed Australia’s history since 1788 was the record of good society we could make better. He was an intellectual with the capacity to read and reflect, to listen and learn, whose thinking evolved over a long life. With his death this week we lose one of the last of a generation of intellectuals who lived a life of the mind in society at large. He had the energy and unflagging enthusiasm for large and complex writing and research tasks, and the courage and capacity to make a living, largely from his pen, eschewing the career-long tenured university pay cheque that comes at the price of campus conformity.

In the way he worked, and what he achieved, he was a poster person for what this newspaper stands for – the contest of ideas. In some ways Windschuttle’s time had passed. Australian intellectual life is now more timid and trammelled than in his long heyday of debate. There are opinions that cannot be disputed without censure from business leaders through to vice-chancellors, notably that the appalling circumstances of Indigenous Australians in remote communities now is directly due to past injustices of what we are supposed to call “settler society”. That Australia Day (can April 25 be far behind?) as a day of mourning is orthodox opinion in schools and universities. That the written record of history itself is a creation of “white privilege”, and as such is immoral, is writ in humanities courses. Windschuttle saw this coming, writing The Killing of History: How a Discipline is being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists 30 years ago.

But in other ways Windschuttle was ahead of his time – the archives of the world are now electronically available, making it possible for independent-minded scholars like him to research and write on whatever they believe matters. Windschuttle spent his career disputing historical orthodoxy and was sometimes metaphorically and physically shouted down for it. Keith Windschuttle should be remembered for his work and his willingness to make a substantive case that he could stand up.