Comment

Late last year, to a strangely muffled fanfare from his friends, the third volume of Keith Windschuttle’s self-published magnum opus, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, appeared. Its subject is the stolen generations. Windschuttle must have regarded its publication as urgent. This is quite possibly the first occasion in the history of publishing where Volume Three of a single-authored history has preceded Volume Two. While from a narrow political point of view Windschuttle’s book is probably irrelevant – most Australians have accepted the justice of the Rudd apology; most of the right-wing commentariat, with the singular exception of Andrew Bolt, have “moved on” – from the historical and ideological points of view it ought not to be ignored. The question of the stolen generations has been one of the most important fronts in the Australian History Wars. Windschuttle’s book is the most ambitious statement of the right-wing case we are ever likely to see.

Windschuttle’s argument can be summarised like this. While there were many separations of Aboriginal children from their mothers, families and communities during the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the numbers have been wildly exaggerated by the “orthodox” historians and by the authors of the 1997 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s report Bringing Them Home. More importantly, the Aboriginal children removed by force were not “stolen”. They were removed for the same welfare reasons neglected white children were. While some of the compounds or “half-caste” institutions to which the children were removed were not ideal, others were no worse and indeed often better than the equivalent institutions that housed white children at the same time. Anti-Aboriginal racism played virtually no part in the removal process. Even though Windschuttle now accepts that the Protectors in interwar Western Australia and the Northern Territory advocated a program known as “breeding out the colour”, it was neither an instance of eugenics nor at any time a formal government policy. Nor was it even connected to their child-removal practices. Far from being concerned to destroy Aboriginality, let alone perpetrate genocide on the Aboriginal people, the removals were almost always justified and motivated by good intentions. For all these reasons, Windschuttle regards the idea of the stolen generations as an un-Australian left-wing myth, whose purpose is to defame both the many decent Australians who worked selflessly on behalf of Aboriginal children and, even more importantly, the nation.

Windschuttle’s book is based on astonishing ideological blindness, especially to racist ways of thinking. In one passage he quotes from a New South Wales Aborigines Protection Board report: “these children, a number who are half-castes, quadroons and octoroons, are increasing with alarming rapidity.” Nine pages later he tells us that “there is no evidence that the Aborigines Protection Board saw a growing Aboriginal population as a menace.”[i] Windschuttle must be the only historian who fails to see racism in the attitudes that prevailed in interwar Australia concerning the menace posed to the White Australian ideal by the high birthrate among the “half castes”, which one newspaper called a “sinister third race”.[ii] And he must be the only historian who is not repelled by the quasi-zoological terminology – “quadroons”, “octoroons”, “cross-breeds” – universally deployed. Almost all historians who use these words in their work place them in inverted commas, to distance themselves from their plainly racist meaning. Windschuttle does not. No doubt he would regard this as political correctness. It is as if in writing a revisionist history of the Jim Crow regime of the southern United States, a historian used the term ‘nigger’ without inverted commas throughout. In 1909 the Western Australian Travelling Inspector, James Isdell, wrote: “I would not hesitate for one moment to separate any half-caste from its aboriginal mother. They soon forget their offspring.” This comment takes us to the heart of racism. Yet Windschuttle chides the orthodox historians for “mocking” Isdell’s racism.[iii]

Despite its imposing-looking 600 pages and its many footnotes, Windschuttle’s case is actually based on surprisingly inadequate research. The only real archival work he has done is in New South Wales. The evidence of the policy and practice of Aboriginal child removal found in the Northern Territory, Western Australian, South Australian and Queensland archives is almost completely unknown to him. There are also scores of relevant articles, books and doctoral theses that he clearly has not read. Although, for example, he defames Sir Ronald Wilson, the president of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, on several occasions, he has not bothered to read the outstanding biography of him by Antonio Buti.[iv] In my own case, he has not read either a chapter on the question of genocide and Aboriginal child removal before 1940 that I contributed to a monograph published in New York,[v] or even a 40,000-word document collection on the stolen generations that proves many of his empirical claims to be misleading or entirely false, which has been available on the Monthly website for more than three years.[vi]

Even more tellingly, although he pronounces confidently throughout his book on the conditions confronting Aboriginal children in the institutions to which they were consigned, his book reveals that he has not bothered to read even one of the 340 mainly Indigenous stolen generations oral-history testimonies held in the Australian National Library.[vii] Nor has he read most of the relevant Aboriginal memoirs bearing on child removal – Bob Randall, Doris Kartinyeri, Donna Meehan, Rosalie Fraser, Evelyn Crawford, Ruth Hegarty and many more.[viii] One of the great contributions of the authors of Bringing Them Home was to give Aboriginal Australians a voice. In Windschuttle’s Fabrication Aboriginal voices are effectively silenced once again, except in those instances where they support his case. As a consequence, what he has provided is an apologetic pseudo-history of Aboriginal child removal written almost exclusively from the removalists’ point of view.

Much of Fabrication is false. Take the case of the numbers of removals, which Windschuttle regards as the most crucial question of all. In 1994 the Australian Bureau of Statistics conducted a survey among Indigenous Australians. It discovered that 1.6% of Aborigines under 14 years, 4.6% between the ages of 15 and 24, but more than 10% of those older than 25 had been taken away from their natural families.[ix] Anyone who studies Aboriginal child removal must be aware that every state and territory had a different set of policies and practices bearing on Aboriginal child removal, and that even in these states and territories, policy and practice varied from decade to decade. Because for very many of these removals records are not obtainable or do not exist, the ABS study remains the most reliable source of information on the number of removals. It suggests that between 1900 and 1970 approximately 20,000 to 25,000 Aboriginal children were separated from their natural families. By use of a methodology that is for the most part obscure, Keith Windschuttle calculates rather that only 8250 were placed “in care”.[x]

The poverty of his method is most easily demonstrated in the case of Queensland. In his doctoral thesis Mark Copland examined all the available evidence. He discovered only 660 removals of unaccompanied children to missions or stations. In Queensland there were no separate “half-caste” institutions. Even though Windschuttle claims to have read the thesis, he argues that Copland’s 660 figure includes dormitory separations. It plainly does not. Far more importantly, however, Copland calculated that there were 3572 separations in dormitories, 3353 removals to other child institutions and 10,729 employment separations. While Copland calculates 18,313 Aboriginal child removals in Queensland by 1971, Windschuttle guesses that 250 were taken into care.[xi] Because he has not gone near the Queensland archives, Windschuttle knows nothing about the very active removal policy pursued by the early Protector Walter Roth. As Roth pointed out in his 1905 report, in the past five years 167 “half-caste” children in Queensland had been removed to missions. This means that two-thirds of Queensland child removals acknowledged by Windschuttle had occurred by 1905. But the problems do not end there. Windschuttle is aware that under a Queensland law of 1865 having an Aboriginal or half-caste mother was in itself legal proof of “neglect”. In his characteristically confident tone he pronounces: “No one has found evidence that any child was removed simply because it was born to an Aboriginal mother”. If he had gone to the archive, he would have discovered that all the children Roth sent to the missions had been “charged” under the Industrial and Reformatory Schools Act of 1865 and found guilty of neglect simply because of the race of their mother. [xii]

Another example of Windschuttle’s ignorance of the archival evidence over numbers concerns Chief Protector AO Neville’s regime in Western Australia. Windschuttle claims Neville was unable to remove more than a handful of “half-caste” children each year because of lack of resources.[xiii] He is apparently unaware that in 1919 when Inspector Drewery of Broome complained bitterly about the way Neville was forcing police to play an “obnoxious” and “inhumane” role in the “seizing and removing” of children from loving mothers without “cause shown”, Neville replied: “If the duty of bringing in half-caste children is obnoxious to the Police, it is strange that this Department has not previously been advised of this, in view of the hundreds of cases that have had attention.”[xiv] Anna Haebich’s caution concerning the question of the number of Western Australian removals, which Windschuttle derides, is far more to be relied upon than his own ignorant dogmatism.[xv]

If anything, Windschuttle’s chapter on the question of the relation of the interwar Northern Territory and Western Australian policy of “breeding out the colour” and their child-removal policies is even more misleading than his discussion of the removal numbers. Windschuttle claims that the “breeding out the colour” policy was exclusively connected to marriage and had nothing to do with child removal.[xvi] This betrays astonishing misunderstanding. Both the Northern Territory Chief Protector, Dr Cecil Cook, and AO Neville were convinced that unless “half-caste” girls were removed early from the “degraded environment” of the blacks’ camp and raised to what they called “white standards”, they would not be suitable material for marriage, even to lower-class whites. Dr Cook, for example, explained in a letter to the Reverend W Morley of 28 April 1931: “The half-caste policy in the Territory embraces the collection of all illegitimate half-castes under the age of 16 years … the girls are taught domestic arts, and dress and clothing making, to fit them for a higher station as wives of higher grade half-caste males, or whites.”[xvii] In 1937 Neville explained to the Canberra Conference of Aboriginal administrators that the biological “absorption” of the “half-castes” was only possible if the children were brought in “at the age of six years. It is useless to wait until they are twelve or thirteen years of age.”[xviii] For both Cook and Neville the policy of “breeding out the colour” was premised on the policy of child removal. It beggars belief that Windschuttle seems not to grasp so obvious a point.

Windschuttle not only misunderstands the connection between biological absorption and child removal. He also claims that “breeding out the colour” was never a formal Commonwealth government policy covering the Northern Territory. In a memorandum of 25 May 1933, JA Carrodus unambiguously described “breeding out the colour” as Commonwealth government “policy”.[xix] So did the Minister of the Interior, JA Perkins, in a cabinet discussion paper of 31 July 1933 which Windschuttle reproduces but misrepresents.[xx] Indeed, until 1939 “breeding out the colour” remained formal Commonwealth government policy. In December 1938, in response to a South African question on “mixed marriage” in Australia, Carrodus explained that “half caste girls are encouraged to marry white men approved by the Chief Protector.” Pretoria was sent a copy of Cook’s “breeding out the colour” June 1933 memorandum.[xxi] Windschuttle believes that the supposed non-policy of breeding out the colour was vetoed by the minister in parliament in August 1934. This is based on yet another clumsy misreading. Perkins did not veto the policy. All he did was refute the false claim that had been made by a Labor parliamentarian that under Cook’s policy the half-caste girls were being “forced” to marry white males.[xxii]

Windschuttle argues that because the policy of “breeding out the colour” encouraged a certain form of miscegenation, it had nothing to do with eugenics. Those who think it did only display the “low standards” of Australian academic life. He is unaware that, while in Europe and the United States most eugenicists were opposed to miscegenation, in both Mexico and Brazil in the interwar years some eugenicists argued in favour of what has been called either constructive or positive miscegenation. Edgar Roquette-Pinto, president of the First Brazilian Congress of Eugenics, even advanced a breeding program for whitening the Brazilian racial stock.[xxiii] Cook was almost certainly the inventor of the Australian policy for “breeding out the colour”. Windschuttle thinks he was uninfluenced by eugenics. He is wrong. On one occasion Cook pressed unsuccessfully for the sterilisation of “mentally defective” Aborigines.[xxiv] On another he suggested that an admixture of even a small amount of Aboriginal blood would create a skin type resistant to cancer. Windschuttle also claims that Neville’s famous question to the 1937 Canberra Conference – “Are we going to have a population of 1,000,000 blacks in the Commonwealth, or are we going to merge them into our white community and eventually forget that there were ever any Aborigines in Australia?” – which combined the aspiration to breed out the colour of the “half castes” with the certainty that the “full bloods” were doomed, is no genocidal thought. He claims Neville did not “subscribe” to the belief that “the full blood Aboriginal population was destined to die out”.[xxv] Once more he is simply wrong. In May 1937 the Brisbane Telegraph reported that “Mr Neville holds the view that within one hundred years the pure black will be extinct.”[xxvi] I am not alone in interpreting Neville’s thought as genocidal. So did one of his contemporaries, the Western Australian missionary the Reverend RS Schenk. After reading the verbatim transcript of the Canberra Conference, Schenk described Neville as the author of the “die out” and “breed out” policy.[xxvii] Windschuttle chides me and other “orthodox” historians for failing to understand the impracticality of the “breed out the colour” policy. In 2004, I argued in some detail why the Cook–Neville absorption policies were always “fanciful”.[xxviii]

This is not the only occasion where Windschuttle either falsely represents the position of the “orthodox” historians or exaggerates their conformity. Many do not accept the way Bringing Them Home arrived at its genocide conclusion. Yet Windschuttle’s accusations concerning the orthodox historians’ acceptance of the charge of genocide operate throughout like a kind of nervous tic. Most accept that the child-removal policies were exclusively aimed at Aborigines of mixed descent. Most accept that many of the people involved in the Aboriginal “half-caste” institutions and the children’s homes were people of good heart. Many accept that Bringing Them Home did exaggerate the numbers.[xxix] Falsely, Windschuttle denies that any of this is the case. Without systematically parodying the positions of his enemies and turning them into a solid loathsome block, Windschuttle would not be able to compose his history. It is his source of psychic energy and his basic motivation.

Very many of Windschuttle’s claims are more straightforwardly simple misrepresentations. He argues that one of the main purposes of those who wrote Bringing Them Home was to familiarise Australians with the term “the stolen generations”. It is not a term its authors use except when quoting others.[xxx] Windschuttle argues that the Aboriginal singer Harold Blair was defamed by Bringing Them Home when it claimed that he was hoping to use his 1960s Queensland holiday scheme as a means for creating fostering opportunities. Windschuttle fails to mention that in his letter to Queensland authorities, which suggested the scheme, Blair wrote about the “possibility of, and procedure for, procuring children for fostering and adoption”.[xxxi] Windschuttle deals with the testimony of certain Northern Territory patrol officers in detail without mentioning that one of them called the child-removal policy “very traumatic”, another “a rather cruel sort of business”, while yet another spoke of women screaming and babies being pulled from the breast.[xxxii] While Windschuttle claims that removals were almost exclusively of primary school-age children, he fails to mention that the minister responsible for the Northern Territory, Paul Hasluck, set Northern Territory policy in 1950 on the principle that “the younger the child is at the time of removal the better for the child”.[xxxiii] Windschuttle records the opinion of Justice O’Loughlin that there was no general policy of “half-caste” child removal in postwar Northern Territory. Somehow he fails to tell his readers that in the 1930s, although the aspiration was not realised, the policy in the Northern Territory regarding “half-caste” child removal was indeed general and expressed time and time again according to the following formula: “It is the policy of the Administration to collect all half-castes from the native camps at an early age and transfer them to the Government institutions at Darwin and Alice Springs.”[xxxiv] What Windschuttle has written is in short a hopelessly partial and partisan account.

On 13 November last year Kevin Rudd apologised for the suffering experienced by the 500,000 Australians over the past century who had been separated from family and community and raised in institutions or foster homes. The apology was uncontroversial. Virtually no one contested the estimate of numbers or doubted the general truthfulness of the stories of loneliness and abuse they told or objected to the term that was applied to the victims – the “forgotten generations”. By contrast, because the question turns on the blind spot in the national psyche – the stunning injustice and racism meted out to the Indigenous people the British settlers dispossessed – for 12 years the struggle over the interpretation of the episode called the “stolen generations” has provoked one of the fiercest battles of the Australian History Wars. Windschuttle’s Fabrication Volume Three is the most recent right-wing cavalry charge on this front. I hope that it is also the last.

[i] Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume Three, The Stolen Generations, Macleay Press, Sydney, 2009, p167 and p176.

[ii] Cited in Pat Jacobs, Mr Neville, Fremantle, 1990, p160.

[iii] Fabrication, vol. 3, p451, “Other historians have taken the same line, mocking Isdell for his racism and his apparent obsession with half-caste girls.”

[iv] Fabrication, vol. 3: “Coauthors Ronald Wilson and Mick Dodson also declined to hear any evidence that might have contradicted their preferred interpretation.” p28; “Ronald Wilson excused himself for not having called as witnesses any of those responsible for the policy. He pleaded insufficient funds in his budget. However, at the time he could afford to employ a full-time media officer for twelve months to publicize hearings to indigenous and non-indigenous communities.” p48; “Wilson clearly preferred not to give a platform to views that might have contested those of his Aboriginal witnesses.” p130; [Ronald Wilson and the Human Rights Commission] “have criminally defamed the matron of Cootamundra at the time…” p267; “Wilson, in particular disgraced his reputation…” p542. The book Windschuttle has not bothered to read is Antonio Buti, Sir Ronald Wilson: A Matter of Conscience, Perth, 2007, chs. 13-15. According to Buti: “As to inviting to the inquiry those involved in shaping the assimilation policy and implementing it, such as patrol officers, Wilson said that the inquiry advertised for people to make submissions and appear before the commissioners.” p366. Buti argues however that while “the inquiry could have made a greater effort to have some of those who shaped and implanted the assimilation policy to appear before it” ... “as a matter of law, it could not compel people to appear before it…” p367.

[v] Robert Manne ‘Aboriginal Child Removal and the Question of Genocide, 1900-1940’ in A Dirk Moses (ed.), Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, New York, 2004.

[vi] Robert Manne, The Stolen Generations: A Documentary Collection, www.themonthly.com.au under Archives/Robert Manne.

[vii] National Library of Australia, Bringing Them Home Oral History Project.

[viii] Bob Randall, Songman: the Story of an Aboriginal Elder of Uluru, Sydney, 2003; Doris Kartinyeri, Kick the Tin, North Melbourne, 2000; Donna Meehan, It’s No Secret, Sydney, 2000; Rosalie Fraser, Shadow Child: A Memoir of the Stolen Generation, Sydney, 1998; Evelyn Crawford, Over My Tracks, Ringwood, 1993, Ruth Hegarty, Is that You, Ruthie?, St Lucia, 1999.

[ix] 1994 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Survey: Social Atlas, Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1997.

[x] Fabrication, vol. 3, p617. Windschuttle claims that his “Tables and estimates were compiled from earlier chapters of this book.” Only in the case of New South Wales is this apparent.

[xi] Windschuttle argues: “Since then, at least one true believer in the Stolen Generations thesis has gone through the same records [as the Queensland Government] to try to make the total look bigger. In 2005, Mark Copland submitted a PhD thesis to Griffith University in which he counted both nineteenth and twentieth century removals in Queensland. He said that from 1859 to 1971 a total of 660 unaccompanied Aboriginal children were removed to institutions. However, to get that figure he not only extended the time frame by forty years but also included ‘removal’ to mean children placed in dormitories on the same missions where their parents were located.” p603 (my emphasis). This is a nice example of the quality of Windschuttle’s scholarship. If Windschuttle had proceeded from page 305 of the thesis to page 306 he would have known that Copland did not include dormitory removals in his total. And if Windschuttle had actually read the chapter he would have come upon the Table (which actually begins in 1897 not 1859) where Copland lists his data base estimate of 18,313 dormitory, institutional and employment removals of children. Mark Copland ‘Calculating Lives: The Numbers and Narratives of Forced Removals in Queensland 1859-1971’ PhD Griffith University, pp305-6 and pp333-4. The claim that Copland tried to exaggerate the numbers is an unwarranted but not uncharacteristic slur. In order to compile his data base Copland spent several years toiling in the Queensland State Archives.

[xii] “From the mid-nineteenth century until 1906, child welfare provisions for both black and white children had been governed by Queensland’s Industrial and Reformatory Schools Act of 1865. This Act included an extraordinary clause that defined as neglected “any child born to an Aboriginal or half-caste mother.” However, the Act required neglect to be established by a court before a child could be removed to an industrial school or reformatory, and no one has found evidence that any child was removed simply because it was born to an Aboriginal mother.” Fabrication, vol. 3, p607. The relevant passage of the Dr Walter Roth 1905 Annual Report reads: “A half-caste under sixteen, whether male or female, is legally a ‘neglected’ child, and as such can be sentenced to an industrial school (sec.6, subsec. 7, of the “Industrial and Reformatory Schools Act of 1865”), most of the aboriginal missions being now so proclaimed … Acting under these powers at least 126 half-caste nomads under sixteen years of age – 45 boys and 81 girls – have been brought under the controlling influences of the Northern missions during the quinquennium ending June 1905. Another 41 half-caste children – 13 boys and 28 girls – have been similarly dealt with in the Southern districts during the eighteen months immediately preceding the same date …” Far from “no one having found evidence that anyone has found evidence that any child was removed simply because it was born to an Aboriginal mother” both Anna Haebich and I have discussed a dreadful case of the suffering of an Aboriginal mother and the anger at the injustice which overtook the magistrate at Cardwell when Nelly Bliss’s son Walter was taken from her by Roth. Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families: 1800-2000, Fremantle, 2000, pp289-292; Robert Manne, ‘In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right’, Quarterly Essay, Issue 1, 2001, pp7-10. This passage of Roth’s 1905 Chief Protector’s Annual Report appeared in Manne, The Stolen Generations: A Documentary Collection, pp24-28.

[xiii] Fabrication, vol. 3, p33 and ch. 8 passim. For example: Neville “never had the funds to remove more than a handful each year …” p33.

[xiv] Windschuttle claims that “the evidence shows they [the unattended children removed to Moore River] were not forcibly removed from loving families but were either orphans or those suffering the same kind of problems as white institutionalized children at the same time.” Fabrication, vol. 3, p441. Inspector Drewery argued: “… in submitting the attached report, I desire to submit that this seizing and removing of these children is obnoxious to the Police and I trust that some official of the Aborigines Dept. will be appointed to do it. I submit that behind the power of the Chief Protector to order such seizure lies the point ‘for cause shown’, yet, in these cases no cause has been shown, yet he can seize all aboriginal or half-caste children under 16 years of age. No neglect has been shown by the mothers in these cases that would bring these children within the clauses as regards neglected children under the State Children’s Act. The Aborigines Act does not demand that the Police shall carry out duty such as above, which I contend is not humane, the mother having cared for these children under similar circumstances where a white woman under similar circumstances would have found an easy solution out of the difficulty. The children have the natural love of the mother.” State Records Office of Western Australia, 652 Q73/1916, and Manne, The Stolen Generations: A Documentary Collection, pp85-88.

[xv] Fabrication, vol. 3, pp439-41.

[xvi] Windschuttle repeats this nonsensical claim, time and time again, Fabrication, vol. 3, p3, p11, pp346-7, p391, p398. For example: “One of the ploys used by those who support the Stolen Generations thesis is to find expressions of support for ‘breeding out the colour’ that refer only to marriage and then hold this up as evidence of a policy to steal children, which is quite a different thing. But to presume from a government’s control over marriage that it was also engaged in child removal is to make an unwarranted leap from one category to another.” p347.

[xvii] CRS NAA ACT A1/15 36/6595, Dr C. Cook to the Reverend W. Morley, April 28 1931. In a report written on 27 June 1933, ‘Marriages of Half-Castes’, Cook argued: “Experience shows that the half-caste girl can, if properly brought up, easily be elevated to a standard where the fact of her marriage to a white will not contribute to his deterioration.” CRS NAA ACT A659/1 40/1/408.

[xviii] Aboriginal Welfare: Initial Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities held at Canberra, 21^st to 23^rd April, 1937, pp10-12.

[xix] “The policy of the Government is to encourage the marriage of half-castes with whites or half-castes, the object being to “breed out” the colour as far as possible.” CRS NAA ACT, ‘Intermarriage of Coloured and Foreign Races with Aboriginals’, Memorandum, JA Carrodus, 25 May 1933.

[xx] “The following is the policy at present adopted in the Northern Territory…(c) Every endeavour is being made to breed out the colour by elevating female half-castes to white standard with a view to their absorption by mating into the white population.” Perkins outlined the present policy because he thought it was “open to debate”. CRS NAA A 659/1 40/1/408, JA Perkins ‘Marriage of Half-Castes’, Memorandum for Cabinet, 31 July 1933. The Secretary of the Department of the Interior, H C Brown, argued for a change in policy on 3 November 1933. Department of the Interior, Memorandum, HC Brown, CRS NAA A 659/1 40/1/408. The Minister disagreed. He minuted: “Present policy to continue.” I discussed all this in Manne ‘Aboriginal Child Removal …’, 2004, pp228–231. In a characteristic slur, Windschuttle claims I have not even looked at the relevant files: “… it is difficult to believe that Manne has ever read the complete file and more likely that he gained the reference second hand.” Fabrication, vol. 3, p386.

[xxi] “European and half-caste males are encouraged to marry half-caste girls. Half-caste girls are encouraged to marry white men approved by the Chief Protector. Attached for information is a copy of the report dated 27th June, 1933, by the Chief Protector of Aboriginals of the Northern Territory (Dr. C.E. Cook) which sets out the reasons for the policy adopted in the Northern Territory.” JA Carrodus to The Secretary, Department of External Affairs, ‘Union of South Africa – Commission to investigate mixed marriages’, 19 December 1938. CRS NAA A659/1 40/1/408. Oddly enough once sent to South Africa and published there, an extract from Cook’s memorandum appeared in the classic study of race, MF Ashley Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race.

[xxii] Fabrication, vol. 3, p37, pp395-6. The fact that Windschuttle saw the file in which Carrodus’ letter of 19 December 1938 is found but fails to mention it raises awkward questions for him. Cook continued to report on his success in arranging marriages between “half caste” females and white males in his Annual Reports after 1934. Does Windschuttle believe Cook was defying his minister?

[xxiii] “… international eugenicist opinion … was strongly opposed to miscegenation…When Robert Manne calls Dr Cook ‘a thoroughgoing eugenicist’ all he does is demonstrate his own ignorance of what eugenics meant and what eugenicists wanted.” Fabrication, vol. 3, pp379-80. The main works on Latin American eugenicists’ enthusiasm for miscegenation are Nancy Leys Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America, Ithaca, 1991 and Thomas Skidmore, Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought, New York, 1972. So far as I am aware it was Stepan who coined the phrase “constructive miscegenation” for one branch of Latin American eugenics. See also Veronica Armstrong, ‘Kept In, Kept Out: The Formation of Racial Identity in Brazil’, MA Thesis, University of Victoria, 1993. “Adopting the positive motto on the Brazilian flag, eugenicists declared, ‘Eugenia e ordem e progresso’ [eugenics is order and progress]. Yes, they agreed with foreigners, Brazil was sick, but its degeneration was curable. Whitening – positive miscegenation – was going to create a new society.” Despite my “low standards” I referred to Stepan’s idea of “constructive miscegenation” in the first essay I wrote on the stolen generations in the January–February 1998 edition of Quadrant.

[xxiv] Cook inquired in March 1933 whether he “could demand the compulsory sterilization of those half-caste children who were classified as ‘congenital idiots’ or ‘mental defectives’.” CRS NAA ACT A1/15 33/3589. His skin cancer suggestion is in his 27 June 1933 memorandum cited earlier.

[xxv] Fabrication, vol. 3, p352.

[xxvi] Windschuttle cannot be unaware of this now-famous report. It appears on p30 of Bringing them home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Torres Straits Islander Children from their Families. The full quote reads: “Mr Neville holds the view that within one hundred years the pure black will be extinct. But the half-caste problem was increasing every year. Therefore their idea was to keep the pure blacks segregated and absorb the half-caste into the white population. Sixty years ago, he said, there were over 60,000 full-blood natives in Western Australia. Today there are only 20,000. In time there would be none. Perhaps it would take one hundred years, perhaps longer, but the race was dying. The pure blooded Aboriginal was not a quick breeder. On the other hand the half-caste was. In Western Australia there were half-caste families of twenty and upwards. That showed the magnitude of the problem.”

[xxvii] “Manne interpreted this statement as an expression of Neville’s desire for an Australia ethnically cleansed of Aborigines. He claimed Neville believed this would occur because the full-blood Aborigines would die out and those half-castes remaining would be coerced into breeding only with whites ... Before the emergence of the Stolen Generations thesis, an older generation of historians, including Charles Rowley and Paul Hasluck, had seen things differently.” Fabrication, vol. 3, pp 345-6. And: “Just about the last thing [Neville] could have imagined was that one day his record would have to answer to left-wing historians who accused him of genocide.” Fabrication, vol. 3, p423. In fact, the interpretation of Neville’s speech of the missionaries at Margaret River in 1937 is identical to mine: “A copy of the report of the [Canberra] conference was sent to both Rod Schenk and Mary Bennett … Mysie found her eyes riveted to the statement on page 1 headed “Destiny of the Race”… There it was, in print, what had long baffled them about Mr Neville’s decisions; let the full bloods die out, and breed out the half-castes; or to use Mr Neville’s terms in Canberra: ‘merge’ and ‘absorb’. He predicted that by merging the part-whites into the white race, and allowing the full-bloods to die out, Australia could ‘eventually forget that there were ever any aborigines’…Rod [Schenk] took the report Mysie handed him and started to read. After reading through the long range policy to page 10 he could hardly contain himself … Everything that had been happening in the past few weeks fell into place …” Margaret Morgan, Mt Margaret: A Drop in a Bucket, Fremantle, 1986, pp212-3. Windschuttle claims to have read this book but does not mention the Margaret River response to the 1937 conference. The full passage appears in Manne, The Stolen Generations: A Documentary Collection.

[xxviii] “… Robert Manne and his colleagues would rather deploy loaded terminology like ‘scientific racism’ and ‘genocidal thought’ than describe this half-baked proposal in full, let alone admit its elementary unworkability …” Fabrication, vol. 3, p355. In 2004 I wrote: “There was, too, always something impractical, indeed fanciful, about the absorption plans. Although both Cook and Neville possessed the determination and the legal power to pursue their absorption dream, neither possessed remotely the financial resources, the bureaucratic machinery or, in the vast regions they administered, the kind of social control in depth that they needed if their schemes were to have any prospect of success.” Manne, ‘Aboriginal Child Removal …’, 2004, p238.

[xxix] My views on these questions are found in Robert Manne, ‘The Stolen Generations’ in The Way We Live Now, Melbourne, 1998, pp34-5 and Manne ‘In Denial’, 2001, pp28-31.

[xxx] Windschuttle claims that one of the main goals of the authors of Bringing them home was to make “the terms ‘stolen children’ and ‘stolen generations’ instantly understood by most Australian”. Fabrication, vol. 3, p50.

[xxxi] For example: “Colin Tatz, a professor of genocide studies, defamed the famous Aboriginal tenor, the late Harold Blair, by associating him with a scheme that ostensibly offered Aboriginal children Christmas holidays, by the sea, but whose purported secret agenda was to adopt them into white families”, Fabrication, vol. 3, p35 and also, pp554-8. Blair’s letter to the head of the Cherbourg Aboriginal Settlement included this paragraph: “Knowing little of the legal and other problems associated with adoption of these children and provision of holidays for them so far from home, the committee has asked me to seek advice on these matters. I immediately thought of you as the man most qualified to advise me of the best means of arranging these visits and of the possibility of, and procedure for, procuring young children for fostering and adoption.” This issue has been discussed in two sources Windschuttle has claimed to have read. Manne ‘In Denial’, pp86-90 and Copland ‘Calculating Lives …’, pp381-5.

[xxxii] Fabrication, vol. 3, pp521-5. The comments Windschuttle fails to notice were recorded in oral history interviews conducted in the Northern Territory in the 1980s and held by the Northern Territory Archives Service. They were summarised in ‘In Denial’ pp42-4.

[xxxiii] Memorandum, for His Honour the Administrator, Northern Territory, January 4 1950 cited in Manne, The Stolen Generations: A Documentary Collection, p69.

[xxxiv] Fabrication, vol. 3, p521. The general policy quoted is found in JA Carrodus , ‘Report on the Northern Territory, November 20 1934’ cited in Manne, The Stolen Generations: A Documentary Collection, p59. A similar formula is found in the Annual Reports of the Chief Protector throughout the 1930s.