Dispel myth of terra nullius and historians are on shaky ground

The history wars have nothing to do with truth or intellectual inquiry - they have everything to do with middle-class careerism, argues Michael Connor, honourary research associate in the school of history and classics at the University of Tasmania.

Just now, the Australian past is a dangerous place to be. I pointed out in The Bulletin (August 26, 2003) that there is an error in the historiography of terra nullius (a supposed rationale for settlement without indigenous compensation) - and I've been made out as a racist right-winger. I pointed to errors in the historiography of political narratives of the 1820s - and they gave me a PhD.

What is going on?

The history wars have nothing to do with truth or intellectual inquiry. The history wars have everything to do with middle-class careerism.

Terra nullius, which until recently teachers and academics really believed was the language of Captain James Cook and Governor Arthur Phillip, was a term almost unknown until the 1970s and did not come out of our colonial past.

All the history books, lectures, articles and courses that used it were in error. Taking it away is exciting, for it means a return to the archives; it calls for a complete reappraisal of our nation's beginnings. But for those historians who began all their books and papers with terra nullius, this means that the base on which they constructed their careers is faulty.

Question the validity of terra nullius and you query the authority of those historical narratives built on it. Take out terra nullius and the history writing of a generation has lost its certainty.

Keith Windschuttle's criticisms of Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan frighten Australian historians because so much has been borrowed from these two academics and built into the works of others, Shake any book of history and the Reynolds-Ryan footnotes fall like a blinding show. There is far more at stake than just the books of these two historians. By questioning two career historians, Windschuttle is threatening an entrenched generation.

Modern academic history writing combines archival selections and the writings of other historians. In a letter to The Bulletin, Professor Alan Atkinson wrote: 'We rely very much on those who have gone before us, until someone makes a point of checking out that particular piece of detail. So we move forward.'

This really is the way history writing is taught and carried out. We have got into the present mess by not checking the authorities on which we rely. This is the reason a book such as Stuart Macintyre's A Concise History of Australia is so full of mistakes. Historians deal with a mass of detail. It is normal to make slips, but grave problems occur when we add in the blunders of others.

In the history wars, new histories are opposing old historians. The key elements in the new histories are a return to archival research and the questioning of rigidly accepted theories. The academics most threatened by new histories are not lonely scholars sneezing away the archival dust, for these are people who have grants to employ research assistants to do the work. They are affluent careerists with useful and pleasant professional and social contacts with publishers, journalists, arts bodies, grants organisations and professional history bodies, and they exert dominating power over their students.

Old history attacks on dissident voices are taxpayer funded. The 'get Windschuttle' conferences were paid for by us. The articles, books, letters to the editor, are prepared in university time, on university salaries, using university computers. Those history academics involved in fighting the history wars may have a besieged mentality, but they are a well-heeled and well-connected nomenclature.

The subtext to all this is acutely apparent to any honours or postgraduate history student. If they have to work with an enthusiastic soldier in the history wars, their grades and a possible career demand conformity to the lecturers' line or the choice of a research topic so dull that the barriers won't be raised against them.

Much of the primary material collected by Windschuttle surprised Tasmanian historians. His original work in the archives is exactly what our history students should be taught to do and the simplest way of fighting his analysis is to produce archival evidence. When the dust settles, it will be obvious that Windschuttle's work on Tasmania has a thousand fascinating facets to be explored. it was stupid to call out allies and defensively circle the covered wagon.

Yet even within the university fortresses, there is muted dissent. Some of it, unfortunately, coming from old jealousy towards Reynolds and Ryan and some, fortunately, from those who see there is far more fascinating work ahead than the doctrinaire and dull old history allow it. As 20th-century history writing is dying, the future promises room for new voices.

The history wars are fixated on Aboriginal history but so much of our two centuries requires reappraisal for there are so many other places where we need to rework the archives, retell the stories. The rest is just as bad.

The old history academics demolished the reputations of those who came before them and ran up their own showy residence. Under multiple coats of shiny paint a shallow foundation. Now fissures have developed that threaten to bring the whole thing toppling down. Not surprisingly, there are signs that some inmates, while dodging pieces of theory, are heading for the exists. Our past is a dangerous pile to wonder into.