Keith Windschuttle: The final chapter for courageous historian

Keith Windschuttle was always generous to others especially when they were subjected to the slings and arrows of outrageous leftists.

Historian, Keith Windschuttle. Picture: Ross Swanborough.

Keith Windschuttle was one of the most courageous intellectuals I ever met. Long before the terms were invented, he was cancelled and de-platformed for daring not just to write history based on the evidence but also to expose the lies and hypocrisy of the left.

Yet it was impossible to cancel Keith because, as he proudly told me over one lunch one day, he created his own institutions and platforms. In 1988, he and his wife, Liz, founded Macleay College, a private institution offering courses in journalism and media. In 1993, he founded Macleay Press, and in 2007, when he became editor of Quadrant Magazine, he set up Quadrant Books.

The left, of course, never gave up trying to cancel him, withdrawing the funding for Quadrant from the Australia Council for the Arts when they continued to fund its left wing counterparts. Keith simply turned adversity to his advantage and made it into the keynote of his appeal for donations which promptly doubled.

Keith’s great professional loves were history and journalism, the first draft of history. After completing a Bachelor of Arts with first-class honours in history at the University of Sydney in 1969 and later a Master of Arts with honours in politics from Macquarie University in 1978, he worked as a journalist and taught media studies at the University of NSW and later at the University of Technology.

Keith wrote at least a dozen books over the course of his career but it was The Killing of History: How a Discipline is Being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists (1994) that established him as a major critic of postmodernism and the politicisation of scholarship — not just in Australia, but internationally.

It marked a turning point in his career, his break with the academic left, and launched him into national prominence as a conservative public intellectual. After The Killing of History, he moved more decisively into cultural battles with his erstwhile colleagues writing Volumes One and Three of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, The White Australia Policy (2004), The Break-Up of Australia: The Real Agenda Behind Aboriginal Recognition (2016), and The Persecution of George Pell (2020).

Windschuttle after he was appointed to the board at the ABC.

Keith served as editor at Quadrant magazine from 2008 to 2023 with only a short break for two years when John O’Sullivan took over. Although editing Quadrant is a demanding task, his energy seemed boundless.

He took over after the death of Paddy McGuinness, who had been editor from 1998 until early 2008 (but McGuinness had been ill in his final months and Keith was already helping with editorial work).

Keith not only became editor, but also eventually chairman of the Quadrant board, giving him a major leadership role in the magazine’s direction and operations.

During his time at Quadrant, he had the foresight to purchase a beautiful office in the old Sunlight Soap factory in Balmain, giving it a permanent home.

Keith was always generous to others especially when they were subjected to the slings and arrows of outrageous leftists.

Quadrant’s Poetry editor Professor Barry Spurr recounts how Keith reached out to him to take over from Les Murray after Spurr’s private emails were hacked and published and he was denounced and cancelled. He was a staunch defender of Cardinal Pell, when he was mercilessly pursued by the left.

Quadrant Books provided a platform for great authors who were inspired by Keith, such as Peter O’Brien who wrote Bitter Harvest debunking Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu; as well as old hands like former editor of The Australian, Frank Devine; former Quadrant editor, Peter Coleman; an award-winning history by Hal Colebatch, Australia’s Secret War: How Unionists Sabotaged Our Troops in World War II; The Burden of Culture by Gary Johns, a book arguing that aspects of traditional Aboriginal culture are holding back Indigenous Australians today; Romancing the Primitive: The Myth of the Noble Savage (2006) by William Lines, a critique of how modern environmentalists, anthropologists, and sections of the political left idealise Aboriginal Australians; a poetry anthology by Murray; and two histories by Margaret Cameron-Ash, Beating France to Botany Bay and Lying for the Admiralty.

How Keith managed to do all this and bring out 10 issues of Quadrant every year is a tribute both to his enormous capacity for hard work and the great team he put together at Quadrant.

Keith really deserved the Order of Australia Medal for his services to history but it is easy to imagine that he was thwarted by leftists on the selection committee. We will miss his courage and will not see his like again.

Rebecca Weisser is CEO & editor-in-chief of Quadrant Magazine and Quadrant Books, and a columnist at The Spectator Australia.