Academic, author and editor Keith Windschuttle made Australians think

Former prime ministers pay tribute to historian who challenged prevailing views as he strode that well-worn path from the left to the right of Australian politics.

Historian Keith Windschuttle has died, aged 83.

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Keith Windschuttle, the eminent historian and editor who died on Tuesday night in Sydney, was a firm subscriber to the maxim raised by Edmund Barton, Australia’s first prime minister, to describe the emerging federation of states in 1901: “A nation for a continent and a continent for a nation.”

Windschuttle, who was 83, sought for decades to avoid the nation dividing on racial lines, and was particularly opposed to those on the left who sought to wrench apart minor fissures of disagreement and who saw ours only as a damnable world.

As such, he was robustly opposed to the voice referendum of 2023 that he believed would tug at the threads of our unity. He thought the campaign for a Yes vote then “consolidated the objectives that were once on the far left” of Aboriginal politics, by which he was referring to the derivative black power movement here in the 1960s and beyond that was cloned from the violent disorder on the streets of Oakland, California and Harlem in New York City.

He would place in this category the Tasmanian activist Michael Mansell who, with others, had campaigned for a seventh state of Australia ruled by Indigenous Australians. Windschuttle believed such activists saw a victory for the voice as the thin edge of a wedge they would hammer apart, destroying Barton’s dream of harmony that has served us so well. He said victory at that referendum would have provided “a bargaining position for Indigenous people to exert far more influence over our national government than anyone now imagines”.

In the early days, various polls had the vote for the voice at more than 60 per cent. On polling day that was reversed, with 60.1 voting against.

Windschuttle was a writer, historian and ABC board member.

It wasn’t the only occasion in which the long-time editor and then chairman of the board of the conservative Quadrant magazine stood opposed to popular thought. He often had while teaching and lecturing in Australian history and undertaking that well-worn journey from the left of Australian politics to its right as he sought to present history as objectively as possible.

His research led to the 2002 book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen’s Land 1803-1847 that challenged the notion that settlers had led genocidal campaigns against local Indigenous people. It arrived at the first peak of what were called “the history wars”.

Former Prime Minister John Howard had known Windschuttle since they attended Sydney’s Canterbury Boys’ High School together. “He was two years behind me – we didn’t know each other well at school.”

The pair were politically apart. Howard said he thought Windschuttle might well have worn an “It’s Time” badge running up to the 1972 federal election – and perhaps even a “Shame, Fraser Shame” in 1975. But by the time of Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History they had long been thinking alike, even it that was not always popular: “He was a courageous intellect,” Howard said on Wednesday. “(He) challenged fashionable notions, but his challenges were always based on sound scholarship”

“We talked about our respective ideological journeys and he’d crossed over roads more than I had. But he was a deep thinker, and I respected his capacity to change attitudes on quite fundamental issues, but to do it in a measured, soundly based way.”

Another former Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, these days a board member at Quadrant, praised Windschuttle as one of Australia’s best and bravest historians and believes that the author’s intellectual journey from the left to the right led him to a deeper appreciation of the strengths of western civilisation.

“His greatest and most unique achievement was the intellectual rigour he brought to the history of Aboriginal people and their interaction with settler society,” said Abbott. “He was a stickler for authenticated facts such as the undoubted massacres at Myall Creek and Appin but a sceptic of many others based on subsequent oral history.”

Abbott said that Windschuttle understood that Australia had to confront the injustices of the past but that this need not undermine our national achievements.

“He knew that it’s grievously unfair to judge yesterday’s people by today’s standards,” said Abbott. During his 15 years as editor of Quadrant – “one of Australia’s premier intellectual magazines” – Windschuttle, with so few resources, maintained its editorial quality and maintained it as a much needed voice in the nation’s debates. “As a significant chronicler of modern Australia, our nation owes him honour and gratitude.”

Fellow historian and long-time friend Professor Ross Fitzgerald said that “Windshuttle argued that, to support their own political and ideological agendas, some Australian historians had either invented or falsified the amount of racial violence that occurred in colonial times”

“In this regard, Windschuttle extended the claims of pioneer Australian historian, Professor Geoffrey Blainey, by focusing on what he regarded as false statements about the extent of racial violence in early 19th Van Diemen’s Land,” Fitzgerald said.

Gary Johns, a former Labor MP and productivity commissioner met Windschuttle in 1980 at a time they were both of the left, but “we saw the light and shifted towards truth and verification rather than blind ideology”.

“He assisted a small group of enthusiasts in establishing the Bennelong Society, which aimed to improve outcomes for Aborigines, by hosting a preliminary conference in Sydney around 1999. The conference featured speakers such as Frank Devine, Paddy McGuinness—Keith’s predecessor as editor of Quadrant—and others like Ron Brunton, Ray Evans, and Peter Howson, who were alarmed by the severe implications of the growing trend toward separatism in Aboriginal affairs”

“Keith was the premier culture wars warrior, denouncing extreme claims that painted Australia as an illegitimate shell of itself, challenging revisionist historians to validate their outrageous accusations of frontier pogroms and stolen generations.”

Johns said that Windschuttle had “stood alone at numerous debates before baying crowds of true believers who insisted that Australia was an illegitimate society built on stolen land”. Warren Mundine, the former chairman of the federal government’s Indigenous Advisory Council would sometimes spar with Windschuttle, “a controversial figure (who) didn’t hold his punches”.

He always argued his case “on empirical evidence, as every historian should”. “He was a very proud Australian and he loved Australians and he stood against those people who are out there trying to divide us,” said Mundine.