While the first edition attacked "the political program of the New Right" and set out a case for both favouring "government restrictions and regulation" and condemning "private enterprise and free markets",[11] the third edition four years later (1988) took a different view: "Overall, the major economic reforms of the last five years, the deregulation of the finance sector, and the imposition of wage restraint through the social contract of The Accord, have worked to expand employment and internationalise the Australian economy in more positive ways than I thought possible at the time."
For Windschuttle, the task of the historian is to provide readers with an empirical history as close to the objective truth as possible, based on an analysis of documentary, or preferably eyewitness, evidence.
He dismissed assertions, which he imputed to the current generation of academic historians, that there was any resemblance between racial attitudes in Australia and those of South Africa under apartheid and Germany under the Nazis.
Windschuttle went on to add that "it would be a 'disturbing accusation' if people thought that he had ever used deliberately provocative language that might have caused Breivik to take up a rifle and shoot unarmed teenagers in cold blood".
[23] Windschuttle challenges the idea that mass killings were commonplace, arguing that the colonial settlers of Australia did not commit widespread massacres against Indigenous Australians; he drastically reduces the figures for the Tasmanian Aboriginal death toll, and writes that Aboriginal people referred to by both Reynolds and Ryan as resistance figures, included "black bushrangers" and others engaged in acts normally regarded as "criminality"; arguing that the evidence clearly shows that attacks by Aboriginal people on settlers were almost invariably directed at acquiring goods, such as flour, sugar, tea and tobacco, and that claims by orthodox historians that this was a form of guerrilla warfare against British settlement aren't supported by credible evidence.
[12] Adducing the work of a source who Stuart Macintyre claims is 'a particularly tendentious American anthropologist',[30] he argues that the Tasmanian Aboriginal society was primitive, dysfunctional and on the verge of collapse, because their putative maltreatment of women impaired their ability to reproduce in a number of critical ways.
[23] Windschuttle agrees with earlier historical analysis, such as that of Geoffrey Blainey, that introduced disease was the primary cause of the demise of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people.
[34] His own examination of archives, contemporary newspapers, diaries and official accounts yields a provisory figure[35] of approximately 120 deaths of Tasmanian Aboriginal people "for which there is a plausible record of some kind" as having been killed by settlers, as opposed to earlier figures ranging as high as 700,[36] and thus far less than the number of whites (187) reported as killed during the "Black War" of 1824 to 1828 by Aboriginal people.
[37][38] Windschuttle argues that the principles of the Enlightenment, fused with the 19th century evangelical revival within the Church of England and Britain's rule of law had a profound effect on colonial policy and behaviour, which was humane and just,[39] that together made the claimed genocide culturally impossible.
[29][38] Windschuttle argues that encroaching pastoralism did not cause starvation through the loss of native hunting grounds as some historians have proposed, as their numbers were being drastically reduced by introduced disease,[40] and large parts of Tasmania were not then, or now, occupied by white settlers.
[44] He argues that the evidence shows that what the orthodox historians construed as "resistance" by Tasmanian Aboriginal people were acts of theft and violence motivated by their desire for exotic consumer goods like flour, tea, sugar and blankets.
The rapid decline in the Aboriginal population after the British colonisation was the product of the interaction of a number of factors, including introduced diseases causing death and infertility, continued internecine warfare, deaths through conflict with settlers and the loss of a significant number of women of childbearing age from the full-blooded aboriginal gene pool to white sealers and settlers through abduction, "trade" and by voluntary association.
Windschuttle refers to accounts by the French zoologist François Péron,[45][46] by George Augustus Robinson in his journals, and by the early Australian writer James Bonwick, of the violence and cruelty with which many Tasmanian Aboriginal men were observed to treat women.
The behaviour adduced by Windschuttle from the other, late report by J. E. Calder (in 1829) is, for Boyce, "self evidently a product of the extensive disruption of traditional life that had occurred by then".
[53] In reply to his critics, Windschuttle argues that Henry Reynolds "willfully misinterprets" what he wrote, since his argument about Aboriginal concepts of land is based not on their words but on their deeds.
[34][37] Windschuttle argues that no word list records an Aboriginal term corresponding to the English word "land" in the sense that Europeans use it, "as a two-dimensional space marked out with definite boundaries, which can be owned by individuals or groups, which can be inherited, which is preserved for the exclusive use of its owner, and which carries sanctions against trespassers", but states that "they certainly did identify themselves with and regularly hunted and foraged on particular territories, known as their "country", which I openly acknowledge.
On Windschuttle's analysis of the "fabrications", Blainey wrote: "While reading the long recital of these failings, I felt an initial sympathy towards the Australian and overseas historians who were under such intense scrutiny.
On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History, an anthology edited and introduced by Robert Manne, professor of politics at La Trobe University, with contributions by Australian academics from a range of disciplines.
Manne added further observations, to the effect: that "a scrupulous conservative scholar", H. A. Willis, using exactly the same sources as Windschuttle, instead came up with a figure of 188 violent deaths and another 145 rumoured deaths; that Windschuttle's method excludes deaths of Aborigines who were wounded, and later died; that all surviving Aborigines transported by Robinson to Flinders' Island bore marks of violence and gunshot wounds "perpetrated on them by depraved whites"; that Windschuttle cannot deny that between 1803 and 1834 almost all Tasmanian Aborigines died, and the only evidence for disease as a factor before 1829 rests on a single conversation recorded by James Bonwick, and that Aboriginal women who lived with sealers did not, however, die off from contact with bearers of foreign disease; that Windschuttle likened Aboriginal attacks on British settlers to "modern-day junkies raiding service stations for money", whereas both colonial records and modern historians speak of them as highly "patriotic", attached to their lands, and engaged in a veritable war to defend it from settlement; that by Windschuttle's own figures, the violent death rate of Aborigines in Tasmania in the 1820s must have been 360 times the murder rate in contemporary New York; that Windschuttle shows scarce familiarity with period books, citing only 3 of the 30 books published on Van Diemen's land for the period 1803–1834, and with one of them confuses the date of the first visit by the French with the publication date of the volume that recounted their expedition; that it is nonsensical to argue that a people who had wandered over an island and survived for 34,000 years had no attachment to their land; that Windschuttle finds no native words in 19th century wordlists for "land" to attest to such an attachment, when modern wordlists show 23 entries under "country".
[60][61] In turn, this provoked Melbourne writer and Objectivist John Dawson,[62] to undertake a counter-rebuttal, Washout: On the academic response to The Fabrication of Aboriginal History in which he argues that Whitewash leaves Windschuttle's claims and research unrefuted.
[63] In their reviews, Australian specialists in both Aboriginal and indigenous peoples' history were generally far less impressed than those who praised the book, which included Geoffrey Blainey, Claudio Veliz and Peter Coleman.
While many of these stories were completely believable in what they said about what happened and how they felt, it is nonetheless true that when these witnesses were children they were not in a position to comprehend the question at the centre of the accusation of genocide, the motives of government policy makers".
[81] However in the Trevorrow case, Windschuttle argues that the decision shows "that the actions of the Aborigines Protection Board in placing Bruce in foster care without his parents' agreement was actually illegal at the time" and not the result of a policy of removal but rather the illegal actions of welfare officials who believed, rightly or wrongly, that Bruce Trevorrow was neglected and that his health and life would be in danger if they returned him to his mother.
[83] In December 2013, Windschuttle advised that he hopes to have Volume Two published "in time to take its place in the discussions about our past during the Anzac Centenary in April 2015".
The stated aim of the hoax was to expose Windschuttle's purported right-wing bias by proving he would publish an inaccurate article and not check its footnotes or authenticity if it met his preconceptions.
An author using the pseudonym "biotechnologist Dr Sharon Gould" submitted an article claiming that CSIRO had planned to produce food crops engineered with human genes.
However, "Gould" revealed that she had regarded the article as an Alan Sokal style hoax, referring to an instance in which writings described as obvious scientific nonsense were submitted to and accepted by an academic journal.
[88] Reporters Kelly Burke and Julie Robotham note that "the projects cited by 'Gould' as having been dumped by the organisation [CSIRO] are not in themselves implausible, and similar technologies are in active development.
Gould also suggests the CSIRO abandoned research into the creation of dairy cattle capable of producing non-allergenic milk for lactose-intolerant infants and a genetically engineered mosquito that could stimulate antibodies against malaria in humans who were bitten, mitigating against (sic) the spread of the disease.
Windschuttle states: "A real hoax, like that of Alan Sokal and Ern Malley, is designed to expose editors who are pretentious, ignorant or at least over-enthusiastic about certain subjects.