Welcome to History Wars

February 28, 2010

Introducing Quadrant Online's new History Wars page. A selection of essays that made headlines.

Robert Manne: a case to answer

by Keith Windschuttle

January 31, 2010

For a professor of politics at an Australian university to write about a policy of the Commonwealth Government and to omit its most telling decisions is a serious dereliction of his public duty.

There were no Stolen Generations

by Keith Windschuttle

December 1, 2009

No state or territory in Australia ever wanted to steal Aboriginal children from their parents in order to eliminate the race or put an end to Aboriginality. No Aboriginal children were removed as part of an agenda driven by racism or genocide. There were no Stolen Generations.

History Wars and the Holocaust

by Mervyn F. Bendle

October 1, 2009

Why would Australian historians travel to Germany to expound their dark and self-lacerating version of Australian history, likening the tragic situation of our indigenous people to a genocide or holocaust?

Rogue History

by Michael Connor

September 1, 2009

Some years ago Michael Cathcart published a one-volume abridgement of Manning Clark’s six-volume history. He should have learnt a lesson from that disastrous compilation of false facts, bad analysis and “nicked” vocabulary. He didn’t.

Stuart Macintyre rewrites the past

by Michael Connor

July 20, 2009

Stuart Macintyre tells it like it wasn’t: “There were no mandarin agents of the KGB here, no moles burrowing deep into the establishment, just fervent men and women recruited when the Soviet Union was an Australian ally to provide it with their limited knowledge of Cold War plans.”

The Assault on Anzac

by Mervyn F. Bendle

July 1, 2009

In a previous article I discussed the revisionist attack on the history of Gallipoli and the role it has played as the central component of the Anzac tradition in Australia. I pointed out that this campaign is explicitly being undertaken by the intelligentsia and the Left as we approach the twin centennials commemorating the outbreak of the Great War in 2014 and the Gallipoli landing in 2015.

Inventing White Aborigines

by Michael Connor

June 22, 2009

By changing the text of her PhD thesis for her best-selling book on the Tasmanian Aborigines Lyndall Ryan turned modern "part-Aborigines" into "Tasmanian Aborigines".

Gallipoli: Second Front in the History Wars

by Mervyn F. Bendle

June 1, 2009

As 2014 approaches there will be a resurgence, intensification and expansion of the already vigorous debates about the war as historians, intellectuals, ideologues, politicians, veterans’ organisations, community groups and laypersons continue to come to grips with the meaning of this titanic struggle.

The Fabrication-Deniers

by John Dawson

May 1, 2009

After analysing this case in detail in Washout, I concluded that: “Ryan’s instinct for self-exoneration is never too shy to spin her own failings off as her adversary’s culpability.” It is disturbing to discover that she is not the only professor willing to employ this extraordinary strategy.

Robert Manne's "Hogwash"

by Michael Connor

March 16, 2009

At the time Robert Manne reviewed a book critical of himself in the Australian Book Review he was the Chair of its management committee. He was a politics professor at La Trobe University. La Trobe University was the chief financial sponsor of the Australian Book Review.

Nulliusgate: the war on a book

by Michael Connor

February 23, 2009

How My History Career Went Bung.

Historical Revision versus Holocaust Denial

by William D. Rubinstein

December 1, 2008

Holocaust deniers, apologists for the gulags and for Japanese atrocities—these are but minor demons compared with His Satanic Majesty, Keith Windschuttle, who is repeatedly compared by Tony Taylor, in all seriousness, to David Irving, a characterisation both absurd and defamatory.

Stuart Macintyre and the Blainey Affair

by Keith Windschuttle

October 1, 2008

This political caricature of the Australian experience is the curriculum we can expect Macintyre to deliver to the Rudd government. It is no wonder that schoolchildren who have tasted earlier offerings from the same left-wing menu regard Australian history as dreary and uninspiring.

Convincing Ground: an invented massacre

by Michael Connor

December 1, 2007

Damien Cash: “the massacre claim was revealed as a case study in the misuse of historical evidence, beginning with a series of errors made by Robinson in 1841-42, and then perpetuated through a series of unreasonable conclusions and other errors made by historians and consultants.”

Postmodernism in Aboriginal History - Part 1

by Keith Windschuttle

April 1, 2006

In this article, I want to show how the two postmodernist tactics of language games and character assassination have been deployed in this debate.

Postmodernism in Aboriginal History - Part 2

by Keith Windschuttle

April 1, 2006

Bain Attwood has spent a lot of time, and a good deal of university money, in an obsessive pursuit of my past. For this project, he had two research assistants and funding from the School of Historical Studies at Monash University.

The Invention of Terra Nullius

by Michael Connor

December 8, 2005

It took less than thirty minutes in the Law Library at the University of Tasmania to suggest that the definitions of terra nullius given by historian Henry Reynolds, which I had been trying to understand, did not make sense and were not supported by the references he gave.

Against the bullies

by John Dawson

December 6, 2004

It did occur to me from time to time that attacking a score of the most renowned academics of the country may not be the smartest thing I have ever done. But whenever that thought struck me, I would re-read a Whitewash essay, and the pounding of another thought would start up again – if academics of such renown can get away with what they do in that book, then honest intellectual enquiry is finished in academia.

Nativity Sydney

by Michael Connor

March 3, 2003

This is us. In 1803, when George Howe began publishing the Sydney Gazette, most of our families had not arrived in the new homeland. But from the very beginning of our first newspaper its editor captured something familiar and typically Australian.