Keith Windschuttle (1942 – 8 April 2025) was an Australian historian. He served on the board of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation from 2006 to 2011. He was editor of Quadrant from 2007 to 2015 when he became chair of the board and editor-in-chief. He was the publisher of Macleay Press, which operated from 1994 to 2010.
Major published items include Unemployment (1979), which analysed the economic causes and social consequences of unemployment in Australia and advocated a socialist response; The Media: a New Analysis of the Press, Television, Radio and Advertising in Australia (1984), on the political economy and content of the news and entertainment media; The Killing of History (1994), a critique of postmodernism in the study of history;Roger Kimball, "The Killing of History: why Relativism is Wrong," The New Criterion, Vol. 15, 1996, p. 22. The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803–1847 (2002), which accuses a number of Australian historians of falsifying and inventing the degree of violence in the past;R. J. Stove, "Keith Windschuttle and Aboriginal History," National Observer, No. 56, Autumn 2003. The White Australia Policy (2004), a history of that policy which argues that academic historians have exaggerated the degree of racism in Australian history;R. J. Stove, "Goodbye to All That: Reflections on White Australia," The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2005. and The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume Three: The Stolen Generations 1881–2008, which argues the story of the "stolen generations" of Aboriginal children is a myth.
Biography
Windschuttle was born in 1942. He attended Canterbury Boys' High School (where he was a contemporary of Liberal Australian prime minister John Howard).
Windschuttle was a journalist on newspapers and magazines in Sydney. He completed a BA (first-class honours in history) at the University of Sydney in 1969, and an MA (honours in politics) at Macquarie University in 1978. He enrolled as a PhD student but did not submit a thesis; instead he published it under the title The Media with Penguin Books. In 1973, he became a tutor in Australian history at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). Between 1977 and 1981, Windschuttle was lecturer in Australian history and in journalism at the New South Wales Institute of Technology (now the University of Technology, Sydney) before returning to UNSW in 1983 as lecturer/senior lecturer in social policy. He resigned from UNSW in 1993 and founded Macleay Press, a small-press publishing company. Published authors besides Windschuttle include Leonie Kramer and Michael Connor. He was a regular visiting and guest lecturer on history and historiography at American universities.
In June 2006, he was appointed to the board of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Australia's non-commercial public broadcaster, for a 5-year term which ended on 14 June 2011.
Windschuttle died in Sydney on 8 April 2025.
Political evolution An adherent of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s, Windschuttle later moved to the political right. This process is first evident in his 1984 book The Media, which took inspiration from the empirical perspective of the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson, especially his The Poverty of Theory, to make a highly critical review of the Marxist theories of Louis Althusser and Stuart Hall. 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",Gerard Henderson, "The Battle is not to be Left Behind", The Age, 24 December 2002. 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."
In The Killing of History, Windschuttle defended the practices and methods of traditional empirical history against postmodernism and praised historians such as Henry Reynolds, but he later argued that some of those he had praised for their empirically-grounded work fail to adhere to the principle. In the same book, Windschuttle maintained that historians on both sides of the political spectrum had misrepresented and distorted history to further their respective political causes or ideological positions.
In The Fabrication of Aboriginal History and other writings on Australian Aboriginal history, Windschuttle criticised historians who, he claimed, had extensively misrepresented and fabricated historical evidence to support a political agenda. He argued that Aboriginal rights, including land rights and the need for reparations for past abuses of Aboriginal people, had been adopted as a left-wing 'cause' and that those he perceived as left-wing historians were distorting the historical record to support that cause. For Windschuttle, the task of the historian was 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 questioned the value of oral history. His "view is that Aboriginal oral history, when uncorroborated by original documents, is completely unreliable, just like the oral history of white people". A historian has no responsibility for the political implications of an objective, empirical history. One's political beliefs should not influence one's evaluation of archival evidence.Keith Windschuttle, 'Doctored Evidence and Invented Incidents in Aboriginal Historiography', in Bain Attwood and S. G. Foster (eds), Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience, Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2003, p. 106.
For some of his critics, "historians don't just interpret the evidence: they compose stories about these meanings, or in the words of Hayden White, they 'emplot' the past. This is itself a cultural process".Stephen Garton, "On the Defensive: Poststructuralism and Australian Cultural History" in Hsu-Ming Teo, Richard White (eds.) Cultural history in Australia, UNSW Press, 2003 pp
Windschuttle's research in the early 2000s disputed the idea that the colonial settlers of Australia committed genocide against the Indigenous Australians. He also disputed the widespread view that there was a campaign of guerrilla warfare against British settlement.Keith Windschuttle, Postmodernism and the Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Lecture to NSW Higher School Certificate History Extension Conference, Tom Mann Theatre, Sydney, 30 May 2007. He writes: "There are two central claims made by historians of Aboriginal Australia: first, the actions by the colonists amounted to genocide; second, the actions by the Aborigines were guerilla tactics that amounted to frontier warfare." He goes on to say: "Ryan says the so-called 'Black War' of Tasmania began in the winter of 1824 with the Big River tribe launching patriotic attacks on the invaders." Extensive debate on his work has come to be called the "history wars". 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. He was a frequent contributor to conservative magazines, such as Quadrant in Australia, of which he became editor in 2007, and The New Criterion in the United States.
In the wake of the 2011 Norway attacks, Windschuttle did not deny that the perpetrator, Anders Behring Breivik, had read and praised statements he had made at a symposium in New Zealand in 2006,Keith Windschuttle, The Sydney Line, 2006. but stressed that he was "still at a complete loss to find any connection between them and the disgusting and cowardly actions of Breivik". 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".Laura Westbrook, "Mass killer Anders Behring Breivik's NZ link," Stuff, 2011.
The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, Van Diemen's Land 1803–1847 In his The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, the first book of a projected multi-volume examination of frontier encounters between white colonisers and Aboriginal people,Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803–1847, Macleay Press, 2002. Windschuttle criticised the last three decades of historical scholarship which had challenged the traditional view of Aboriginal passivity in the face of European colonisation.Gregory D. B. Smithers, "Reassuring 'White Australia': A Review of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One", in Journal of Social History, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Winter, 2003), pp. 493–505, p.493. His critique specifically challenged the prevailing consensus created by what he called the "orthodox school" of Australian frontier history concerning the violence between indigenous Australians and settlers, by examining the evidence for reported massacres in what is known as the "Black War" against the Aboriginal people of Tasmania. He referred to historians he defined as making up this "orthodox school" as being "vain" and "self-indulgent" for imposing their politics onto their scholarship,Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803–1847, p. 402. and "arrogant, patronizing and lazy" for portraying the Tasmanian Aboriginal people's behaviour and motivations in terms of European cultural concepts rather than taking the time to understand the cultural concepts of a hunter-gatherer society.Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803–1847, p. 406. Windschuttle's "orthodox school" comprises a large number of historians and archaeologists, dead or living, such as Henry Reynolds, Lyndall Ryan, Lloyd Robson, John Mulvaney, Rhys Jones, Brian Plomley, and Sharon Morgan, whom he regarded as responsible for a politicised reading of the past, and for inflating the number of Aboriginal deaths.Gregory D. B. Smithers, "Reassuring 'White Australia': A Review of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History", p. 495. Reviewing their work, he highlit multiple examples of what he alleged were misrepresented sources,e.g. a colonial government report being cited as evidence of a massacre by a vigilante group when the report refers only to the movement of troops in response to Aboriginal attacks: Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803–1847 Macleay Press, 2002, p. 142. inaccurate reportageAn Anglican minister's diary reported as recording 100 Aboriginal and 20 white deaths, was found to record 4 for the former, and 2 for the latter. Checking a source for Brian Plomley's reference to "more killed", Windschuttle found that the original actually had "mare killed". — Geoffrey Blainey, "Native Fiction", The New Criterion, Vol. 21, 2003, p. 79. or the citation of sources that do not exist.The Hobart Town Courier for 1826 is twice cited by one historian as providing the evidence for killings, but was not printed that year. — Geoffrey Blainey, "Native Fiction", The New Criterion, Vol. 21, 2003, p. 79. His work on sources constitutes, according one critic, his most damaging contribution to the subject, though Stuart Macintyre argued that Windschuttle "misreads those whom he castigates".