After another late night out at Myer’s Place with the lovely Mary K, I regrettably slept through the whole of Kevin Rudd’s historical (but unconscionably early) ‘sorry’ speech. Rudd’s formal parliamentary motion, penned by the cant-prone Jenny Macklin and her advisors, was straight to the point, if a little syntactically-challenged. But from all accounts, Rudd’s prime ministerial address was inspiring, deftly pinpointing the injustices of indigenous history and laying the groundwork for an era of positive and concrete policymaking. In Michelle Grattan‘s words, ‘Rudd has made an excellent and moving start in indigenous affairs’. It’s something of a truism that symbolism without substance is ultimately meaningless, but the Rudd government has made the best possible start.

But if Rudd owned the day, the same can’t be said for his political opponents. After barely three months in the wilderness of opposition, Brendan Nelson and the Liberals have hit rock bottom. While I would defend Nelson’s right to say whatever he wants in public — and live by the political consequences — I did find his speech a little tasteless given the nature of the occasion. This had less to do what he was saying than for the unalloyed political desperation of the act. Nelson clearly wants it both ways: he wants to be seen to support reconciliation, while also staying loyal to his party’s conservative base, who are still ambivalent about a formal apology. But, if anything, he has ticked off both sides of politics. Today’s speech only confirmed to the left that Nelson is heartless, while showing conservatives that, unlike John Howard, he is not a leader who sticks to his ideological guns. This flip-flopping will come back to haunt the Liberal Party.

Apart from Nelson’s gaffe, it has been interesting to see how conservative Australia is coming to grips with ‘sorry day’. In The Australian, historian Keith Windschuttle came out swinging, arguing that the idea of an apology to the Stolen Generation flew in the face of the historical ‘facts’. According to Windschuttle, most of the removals from indigenous communities were of teenagers (as opposed to toddlers or infants, as is commonly assumed), many of whom were given jobs, apprenticeships and other opportunities in the Australian community. He argues further: ‘there is another very good reason why it was not the policy of the government to remove Aboriginal children from their parents: it wanted them to go to school. It pursued this objective with both action and money’. From this evidence, Windschuttle disputes the idea that Australian government policy towards indigenous Australia was ‘genocidal’ in intent.

In the left-liberal circles in which I move, these are not popular views. But I’m not sure where I stand on Windschuttle. On the upside, he lacks the Albrechtsonite zeal and patriotic boosterism of so many of his conservative colleagues. He also argues his case rationally and presents hard evidence in support of his conclusions. And the downside? Probably his reputation: in ‘polite’, socially-conscious company, talking about Windschuttle is like handling social dynamite. I first learned this in 2003 or 2004 while studying in the history department at Melbourne University, where Windschuttle has long been persona non grata. Before I’d even read any of his work for myself, indigenous academics like Tony Birch had painted him as the devil incarnate, a right-wing bigot driven by intellectual mendacity and the racist imperative of his historical ‘denialism’. However, after reading some of Windschuttle’s views on historical methodology, I began to question his standard depiction as a ‘hate-figure’ of the left.

Windschuttle’s central view of history, put forward in his 1997 book The Killing of History, is that the fashionable posturing of literary postmodernism — ‘there are no facts’ — undermines history’s authority by removing the bedrock of factual evidence upon which all its claims are made. If, as some postmodernists and poststructuralists claim, history writing is an ‘inherently political’ process, and all historians are mere mouthpieces for a latent and unacknowledged political bias, little — other than ideology — remains to orient their conclusions. Similarly, if historians jettison the possibility of objective judgment, the evidential logic that leads a historian to their conclusions is less important than whether their conclusions serve a social or political ‘end’ — whether, in short, they express a ‘good’ bias or a ‘bad’ bias. What then is historical scholarship but a form of covert political activism, a bold declaration of ideological partisanship?

In Windschuttle’s view, history should never be the handmaiden of an ideological agenda. Instead, it should aim for objectivity and critical distance, in the noble tradition of Thucydides and the nineteenth century German historian Leopold von Ranke. As Windschuttle himself puts it:

In defending the ability of historians to get to the truth of the matter, or at least of some matters, I am referring to the traditional, empirically-grounded practice of historians rather than to those speculative works that claim to find some great underlying force — be it geography, ideology or the imperative of the class struggle — driving the historical process.

Certainly, many historical conclusions will have far-reaching political implications; but it is the historian’s duty to try and remain aloof from the political passions of his or her era. There will also be many instances where gaps in the historical record preclude a firm establishment of the facts; but in these cases debate and historical interpretation should flourish, always anchored by a shared belief in the possibility of reaching an objective version of events. Where uncertainties and ambiguities abound, weight of evidence and subtlety of argument exalt the good historian and doom the mediocre. ‘Conservative’ or not, I see no reason to disagree with Windschuttle on any of these points.

Where he wades into more uncertain waters is in his claim that much of the historical writing on which we base our assumptions of the ‘Stolen Generation’ and the massacres in Van Diemen’s Land — particularly the work of Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan — was ideologically motivated and empirically unsound. In The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2001) Windschuttle argues that much of the evidence in these works was bent, twisted or simply fabricated in order to support the claim that Australian policies towards indigenous peoples were ‘genocidal’ and that black resistance to white settlement in Van Diemen’s Land constituted a ‘war of liberation’ against European rule. I can’t make any judgment as to the veracity of these claims, since I don’t have a good enough knowledge of the historical texts and documents which are at the centre of these controversies. Whether Windschuttle’s argument truly applies in the case of the so-called ‘black armband’ historians — or whether Windschuttle himself practices what he preaches (and Robert Manne argues that he doesn’t) — is still unclear to me.

Whatever the truth — and I suspect it is buried somewhere in the heavily-mined no-man’s-land between the Bolts and the Birches — Windschuttle’s arguments should be weighed on their merits, not on any presumption of political guilt. University students should be encouraged to read Windschuttle critically for themselves and make up their own minds about his unfashionable views, rather than taking the word of tenured leftist academics who confuse teaching with dictating, education with activism.