Whenever academic history and popular history intersect during a major shift in historiography we see intense debates about the study of the past. Often they become embroiled in a 'culture war' with Left-wing and Right-wing figures becoming associated with a certain viewpoint of history. For example, there were the volatile debates about 'truth' and 'accuracy' surrounding the testimonio of Guatemalan Maya activist Rigoberta Menchu; there were intense discussions in Poland on culpability in the Holocaust following the publication of Jan Gross's Neighbors in 2001, which detailed the Jedwabne pogrom; and, around the centenary of the start of the First World War there were debates in Britain over the war in British popular memory. One of the most famous examples of this clash is the History Wars in Australia. Especially prominent in the 1990s and 2000s academics and historians were split into two: those who argued that Australian identity is built on the backs of the genocide of Aboriginals, and those who argue this is an exaggeration.
Background
In World History we looked at the settlement of Australia, which you can read here, and reading it you can see which side of the debate I take. The 'History Wars' have had a long precursor, and what is most important to remember is that these debates were largely between white academics. Although, indigenous voices are present - especially in the accounts of the Stolen Generation resulting in a 1997 report - it is white academics and politicians who are making these debates. I want to emphasise this as Aboriginal Australians have been emphasising this aspect of Australian history throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In academia the seeds of the History Wars were planted in 1968 when anthropologist William Stanner used the term the 'Great Australian Silence' during a publicised lecture. He argued that a 'cult of disremembering' characterised Australian historiography and national identity, where the history of the Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders becomes a footnote. Furthermore, the genocidal violence done against them, and the continued repression were forgotten, and a consequent result was that Australian history was 'incomplete'. Stanner's lecture was clearly inspired by two major changes rocking both Australia and the world: the New Left and subaltern rights.
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| A portrayal of the Stolen Generation entitled The Taking of the Children on the 1999 Great Australian Clock, Queen Victoria Building, Sydney, by artist Chris Cooke |
The 1960s, especially around 1968, saw a resurgence in libertarian Left-wing thought which has become known as the New Left. This was an umbrella term for a wide range of activists and political theorists - this ranged from the hippy movement, anti-Vietnam War activism, post-modernism, a new wave of anarchist thought, and a new wave of Maoist thought. Linked to this was increased activism from subaltern peoples worldwide desiring greater rights - this included African-American activism, the rise of Second Wave Feminism, the gay rights movement, and the birth of the West Papuan independence movement. In Australia, there was also a movement by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders to challenge racism and discrimination which they faced in society. Among the claims were for a return of stolen land, respect for indigenous rights, and justice for the 'Stolen Generation'. The Stolen Generation was actually a series of generations, technically beginning under British rule in the 1860s and ending in the 1970s, where indigenous peoples were forcibly taken from their families to be 'fostered'. This policy was not limited to Australia - America and Canada also had similar policies. The indigenous rights movement and Stanner influenced a new wave of historiography which aimed to tell Australia's history from below; it aimed to write indigenous communities back into history.
Beginning of the History Wars
In the 1980s and early-1990s the History Wars started to begin. By this time Australian Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders were pushing for the return of land, equal rights, and justice for the Stolen Generation, but now they were getting gains. As expected, any movement of a subaltern is met with a reactionary movement, and there were pushbacks against these developments. It took form in quite unusual ways as well - in Crocodile Dundee (1986) the titular character says that Aboriginals and whites are both 'fleas on the land' about the return of land. This created a false equivalency between the two parties. What really kicked off the History Wars was the government of prime minister Paul Keating (1991-1996). Keating wanted to move further away from Britain, such as wanting Australia to put less emphasis on ANZAC Day as an example. Part of this was Keating's intervention in history by supporting the new line of historiography and emphasising that Australia had to recognise the continued repression of indigenous communities. Among this, was the creation of an inquiry in 1995 about the Stolen Generation policy resulting in the Bringing Them Home report of 1997 which aimed to highlight the trauma and consequences of the policy based on oral testimony. Part of this was a genuine attempt by Keating to foster a sense of 'One Australia' by encouraging an embracing of multiculturalism. However, it was also a cynical political move. Keating's Labor party had a long history of involvement in the Stolen Generation, and the White Australia Policy - a virulently racist immigration policy. Unfortunately, Keating was using the trauma of indigenous peoples to distance Labour from its culpability in the past. However, his involvement is what sparked the History Wars.
The History Wars
In 1993 conservative historian Geoffrey Blainey wrote an article which attacked both Keating and the new historiography. His coining of the names for the two 'sides' has since became the common terminology during the History Wars, so I will use the terms here. Blainey said that Australia was moving away from the 'Three Cheers View', which emphasised a positive rendition of Australian history, to an unwarranted 'Black Armband' history, which emphasised the legacies of racism and colonialism. This began a series of heated debates, which translated into popular mediums like TV and paper opinion pieces, between the 'Black Armband' and 'Three Cheers View' of Australian history. However, it fully became a 'war' when Keating's successor, John Howard, intervened. Howard was from the conservative Liberal Party, so he opposed the re-evaluation of Australian history by the new historiography. Howard fiercely criticised the 'Black Armband' and used the typical tropes of a Right-wing culture war stating that 'soft-left' political-correctness was 'infiltrating' universities. His Labor successor, Kevin Rudd, further criticised the 'Black Armband' history stating that:
Time to leave behind us the polarisation that began to infect our every discussion of our nation's past. To go beyond the so-called "black arm" view that refused to confront some hard truths about our past, as if our forebears were all men and women of absolute nobility, without spot or blemish. But time, too, to go beyond the view that we should only celebrate the reformers, the renegades and revolutionaries, thus neglecting or even deriding the great stories of our explorers, of our pioneers, and of our entrepreneurs. Any truthful reflection of our nation's past is that these are all part of the rich fabric of our remarkable story ...
Two key topics surrounded the History Wars: the question of genocide and Stolen Generation. Conservative historians argued that allegations of genocide were either exaggerated or entirely fabricated by more Left-wing historians. One of the key figures in this was Keith Windschuttle who wrote two books entitled The Fabrication of Aboriginal History - the first calling the genocide of Tasmanians an exaggeration or an outright fabrication, and the second that the Stolen Generation was a myth. His main opponent in the ring was Robert Manne who ended up accusing Windschuttle of genocide denial. Among the claims by Windschuttle, Blainey, and other academics arguments was the the sources used to 'prove' a genocide happened. However, key historians showed how flawed Windschuttle's book Fabrication was - Henry Reynolds highlighted how Tasmanian settlers regularly used terms like 'extermination' in their diaries, and Lyndal Ryan has corroborated this by showing how there are many sites where massacres took place. What is particularly insidious, 'Three Cheers View', mainly social commentater Andrew Bolt, went as far as to call Bringing Them Home was an outright lie! Robert Manne tore Bolt apart with a basic point - Bolt never actually used sources to back up his claim.
Since the 2000s
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| In 2016 the History Wars continue |
The History Wars have continued to periodically plague discussions of history. At the end of the first peak of the History Wars in 2003 Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark released The History Wars, a book which I used a lot in writing this post, to explain the debates. It is an understatement to say that the 'Three Cheers View' did not like it - Windschuttle accused it of making the 'Three Cheers' a 'caricature', while Greg Melleuish said the book comes from 'pro-communist polemics of the Cold War'. I would criticise Anton Froeyman's attempts to discuss the History Wars and German Historikerstreit, a series of debates on the Holocaust, who argued that the highly personal attacks by both sides in both debates meant that an 'objective' history could not be written. However, Froeyman does not acknowledge that this was not like other historical debates, such as whether the famous African Olaudah Equiano was actually born in Nigeria or the US, but about whether a genocide happened (in the case of the History Wars). This is especially a shame as his discussion on the History Wars is extremely insightful. An 'objective', meet-in-the-middle history cannot be written when one side was denying genocide. As Australia is facing a similar rise in xenophobia and Right-wing governments, the History Wars will still rage on. In settler societies the nation is always built upon the exploitation, and often the outright genocide, of the indigenous communities. Consequently, any history which wants to entirely portray the nation as spotless will result in the denial of genocide.
The sources I have used are as follows:
-Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars, (Melbourne: 2003)
-Lorenzo Veracini, 'A Prehistory of Australia's History Wars: The Evolution of Aboriginal History during the 1970s and 1980s', Australian Journal of Politics and History, 52:3, (2006), 439-454
-Neil Levi, '“No Sensible Comparison”? The Place of the Holocaust in Australia's History Wars', History and Memory, 19:1, (2007), 124-156
-Anton Froeyman, 'The ideal of objectivity and the public role of the historian: some lessons from the Historikerstreit and the History Wars', The Journal of Theory and Practice, 20:2, (2016), 217-234
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