He saw this as a structural and deliberate process to omit "several hundred thousand Aboriginal people who lived and died between 1788 and 1938 ... (who were but) ... negative facts of history and ... were in no way consequential for the modern period".
Interpretations of Aboriginal history became part of the wider political debate sometimes called the 'culture wars' during the tenure of the Coalition government from 1996 to 2007, with Prime Minister of Australia John Howard publicly championing the views of some of those associated with Quadrant.
Keating was a staunch advocate of a symbolic apology to indigenous people for the misdeeds of past governments, and outlined his view of the origins and potential solutions to contemporary Aboriginal disadvantage in his Redfern Park Speech (drafted with the assistance of historian Don Watson).
Keating has argued for the eradication of remaining symbols linked to British origins: including deference for ANZAC Day, the Australian flag and the Monarchy in Australia, while Howard was a supporter of these institutions.
[17] In 2006, John Howard said in a speech to mark the 50th anniversary of Quadrant that "political correctness" was dead in Australia but: "we should not underestimate the degree to which the soft-left still holds sway, even dominance, especially in Australia's universities"; and in 2006, The Sydney Morning Herald political editor Peter Hartcher reported that Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd was entering the philosophical debate by arguing in response that "John Howard, is guilty of perpetrating 'a fraud' in his so-called culture wars ... designed not to make real change but to mask the damage inflicted by the Government's economic policies".
The phrase then began to be used by some commentators pejoratively to describe historians viewed as writing excessively critical Australian history "while wearing a black armband" of "mourning and grieving, or shame".
[30] The Howard government's responses to the question of how to recount Australian history were initially formulated in the context of former Labor prime minister Paul Keating's characterisation of the subject.
Any truthful reflection of our nation's past is that these are all part of the rich fabric of our remarkable story ...[32]Stephen Muecke, Professor of Ethnography[33] at the University of New South Wales, contributed to the debate by arguing that black armband events bring people together in common remembrance and cited Anzac Day as an example; while Aboriginal lawyer Noel Pearson argued that whilst there was much that is worth preserving in the cultural heritage of non-Aboriginal Australia, "To say that ordinary Australians who are part of the national community today do not have any connection with the shameful aspects of our past is at odds with our exhortations that they have connections to the prideful bits".
Windschuttle's naming of historians whom he accused of misrepresentation and fabrication of the historical evidence, created considerable controversy and produced a range of responses including condemnation of as well as support for his work.
Debating the native police and the frontier in public in 1880 in the columns of The Queenslander, a prominent settler wrote: "And being a useless race, what does it matter what they suffer any more than the distinguished philanthropist who writes in this behalf cares for the wounded half-dead pigeon he tortures at his shooting matches?".
[58] In the specific instance of the Tasmanian Indigenous Australians, Henry Reynolds, who takes events in other regions of colonial Australia as marked by "genocidal moments",[59] argues that the records show that British administrative policy in Tasmania was explicitly concerned to avoid extermination.
[67] Henry Reynolds points out that European colonists and their descendants frequently use expressions that included "extermination", "extinction", and "extirpation" when discussing the treatment of Aboriginal people during the colonial period, and as in his opinion genocide "can take many forms, not all of them violent".
She notes that despite contemporary newspapers regularly decrying "the barbarous crop of exterminators", and "a system of native slaughter ... merciless and complete", the government contended that "no illegal acts were occurring", with the worst incidents being described as merely "indiscretions".
Smallpox was first recorded by British observers in April 1789 some 16 months after the First Fleet had arrived, then again four decades later in 1830, and then in an extended outbreak in the 1860s which seems to have begun in Northern Australia, though it spread within some three years as far south as the Great Australian Bight.
[79] One possible explanation of the 1789 outbreak (that smallpox was deliberately introduced to Australia by the British as a form of germ warfare against the Indigenous Australians) would make it a central issue in the History Wars.
[90] Yet the History Wars element in the debate involves issues that are emotional for many Australians; and the “scanty data”, of which Frank Fenner complained[91] leave large scope for scenarios that support a preferred view.
"[93] Despite these uncertainties, the debate has been mainly a respectful and co-operative exchange between experts in differing disciplines, and it has occurred quite largely so far in academic publications rather than at media or tabloid level.
[96] An example is Barry Wright's 1988 statement, “I believe ... that an introduced epidemic of chickenpox not smallpox swept through the tribes, its effects every bit as deadly as if it had been smallpox.”[97] One of the few academics to strongly invoke the History Wars is the historian Craig Mear.
[103] Books like Jarrad Diamond's 1997 Guns, germs and steel or Krause and Trappe's 2019 A short history of humanity[104] have created a widespread awareness of how diseases that were almost harmless to Europeans were often deadly to isolated peoples.
Some would also argue that his belief that Britain's literate culture, scientific technologies, and agricultural and administrative skills would create space, prosperity and an improved life for both races was not necessarily insincere, even if it was seriously misguided.
This has been the basis of criticism by the Coalition Government[111] and by the anthropologist Ron Brunton in a booklet[112] published by the Institute of Public Affairs that was criticised in turn by the lawyer Hal Wootten.
[115] Bolt then challenged Manne to produce ten cases in which the evidence justified the claim that children were "stolen" as opposed to having been removed for reasons such as neglect, abuse, abandonment, etc.
[124] The historian Keith Windschuttle has disputed the historiography for the number of children in the Stolen Generations as well as the violence of European colonisation, arguing that left-wing scholars had exaggerated these events for their own political purposes.
He argues that the Tasmanian Aboriginal population was devastated by a lethal cocktail of introduced diseases to which they had little or no resistance due to their isolation from the mainland and the rest of humanity for thousands of years.
With this and with a detailed examination of footnotes in and evidence cited by the earlier historical works, he criticises the claims by historians such as Henry Reynolds and Professor Lyndall Ryan that there was a campaign of guerrilla warfare against British settlement.
[131] Announcing the publication, Windschuttle claimed that the film Rabbit-Proof Fence had misrepresented the child removal at the centre of the story, and offered inaccurate accounts of Molly's journey as it was recounted by her daughter, Doris Pilkington.
At the launch of his book, historian Stuart Macintyre emphasised the political dimension of these arguments[134] and said the Australian debate took its cue from the Enola Gay controversy in the United States.
A potentially controversial issue was in assessing how well the NMA met the criterion that displays should "cover darker historical episodes, and with a gravity that opens the possibility of collective self-accounting.
[144] In 2006 columnist Miranda Devine described some of the Braille messages encoded on the external structure of the NMA, including "sorry" and "forgive us our genocide" and how they had been covered over by aluminium discs in 2001, and stated that under the new Director "what he calls the 'black T-shirt' view of Australian culture" is being replaced by "systematically reworking the collections, with attention to 'scrupulous historical accuracy'".
[151] Attacks on the aboriginality of Bruce Pascoe and the accuracy of his 2014 book Dark Emu, with its contested claims about agriculture and building before European contact, have been interpreted by Adelaide writer Walter Marsh as a new battlefield in the history wars.