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THE SUCCESS STORY THAT IS AUSTRALIA By Geoff. Muirden. Talk given at Central Hotel, Beaconsfield, Victoria, on 12 August, 2004 to the Australian League of Rights.
Ladies and gentlemen, let’s be of good cheer. There’s evidence to suggest that much of Australian history is a success story.
You might not think so, if you listened to the black arm band theory of history in fashion among the elite that David Flint talks about in his book, Twilight of the Elites. We’ll get to that later.
But the point I want to make now, is that, in order to discredit Australia as a success story, the black arm band mob and the elite have to lie in their teeth. They have to falsify evidence, which they do continuously. Optimism stems from the fact that so many of the dismal history tales being told are false or exaggerated.
At a time when there is pressure for a republic, it is surely grounds for optimism, that the 1999 referendum to foist a republic on us did not succeed, and this was itself a healthy sign of distrust for politicians. As the saying goes, you can’t trust a politician, you never know where they’ve been. But also that this year a lot of public interest was shown in the marriage of a Tasmanian woman to a Danish prince. It was a sign that many appreciated the mystique of monarchy, and that they were not just ideological robots who would dance to the tune of the manipulative elites.
The triumph of Australian inventiveness is celebrated in today’s Australian,12 August, 2004, in a section commemorating 40 years of Australian Innovation. But of course, Australian innovations can be traced further back than that, to the stump-jump plough and the MacKay Harvester. The Australian liftout also mentions the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, celebrating 125 years of innovative change in technology.
By and large, Australia is a success story.
That’s not just my opinion. It’s the opinion of some leading Australian historians who have examined the evidence.
One of them is Max Hartwell, a former professorial fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford and former editor of the Economic History Review, writing in the Australian magazine, Business Review Weekly, dated Dec. 18,1987-Jan 14,1988 under the heading "First entrepreneurs flourished in freedom" (pp. 58-62)
He mentions the work of a black arm band historian, Robert Hughes’ book, The Fatal Shore , highlighting the worst features of the convict system and but points out that, in spite of this dismal version of history, overall, the history between settlement in 1788 up to the Gold Rush was "a remarkable success story".
About the book, The Fatal Shore, it may be commented that it is a classic case of the "black arm Band" system, since it presents Australia as the world’s first totalitarian state.
It’s true there were injustices in the convict system, but in terms of settlement in Sydney and more accurate and less sensational work is D.R. Hainsworth’s book, The Sydney Traders, which shows that convicts became active in Sydney’s life and by 1790 were largely controlling it. When the terms of the original convicts expired, only 7% wanted to go back to England. Many convicts were able to succeed more in Australia than in England.
In general, the Australian colonies were flourishing under what historian Edward Shann called "the free activity of the free". Settlers worked without too much government interference, and created a prosperous and growing society.
The British Empire was generally seen as a beneficial influence, and Australians were generally happy to work within it up to the Second World War.
An attempt was made to undermine this generally optimistic vision of Australia in 1939, when Brian Fitzpatrick produced a vision of Australians as manipulated and oppressed by British interests. The Fitzpatrick thesis was rejected by most as implausible, and it gave no credit to the British for establishing principles of democracy and personal autonomy which applied in Australia, so the generally optimistic view of history won out at this time. Hartwell concluded that Australian history was "a success story of individualism and enterprise in a free society."
Max Hartwell is not the only Australian historian to see Australia as a success story. Geoffrey Blainey, published in Quadrant, Vol. XXXVII, # 7-8,July-August, 1993, from his Latham Memorial Lecture, commented that he was raised on the "Three Cheers" view of history, which saw Australian history as mainly a success, a view which prevailed until the 1980’s but acknowledged the attacks on this view, which he called the Black Arm-Band History, his first use of this phrase.
Later he developed this theme in an article published by the Samuel Griffith Society volume 12, Chapter 11 titled "A Black Arm-Band for Australia’s 20th Century?" http://www. samuelgriffith. org.au/ papers/html/volume%2012/v12chap11.htm
Here, Geoffrey Blainey suggests that "the nation’s successes, in its first century as a federation, outweigh its failures by a large margin." He stated: "it was almost certainly the first nation in the world in which women possessed both the right to vote and to stand for Parliament. During its first century as a united nation Australia solved its internal disagreements and disputes by discussion and debate, not by force, Measured by the modern and non-Athenian sense of the word "democracy", it was the world’s first."
"Along with New Zealand, Australia was a pathfinder in the welfare state and the idea of caring for those who, largely through no fault of their own, could not care for themselves...Australia’s relatively small population achieved a remarkable sporting record ... in the 20th century, as in earlier decades, the nation could take pride in its inventiveness ... in the global history of metallurgy, which is one of mankind’s most valuable skill, the three or four great innovations of all time would include the flotation process. Mainly invented and applied at Broken Hill in the years 1902 to 1914(this process) is now used on a large scale in every corner of every continent to extract minerals."
He speaks of the outstanding record of Australian fighting men during WWI and WWII, and concludes that "Australia since 1901 has been more of a success story than a failure."
This is out of fashion to the black arm-band historians, who whine and moan about Australia’s terrible past.
Part of the basis for this is the form of political pathology called "political correctness". Neither Blainey nor David Flint seem to have mentioned that it derives from the Communist basis of the Frankfurt School, a neo-Marxist group that developed in the 1930’s and has spread since, that seeks to undermine capitalist society by emphasizing race conflict and real, or invented, wrongs done to other races, to imply that they operate from a high moral tone. The fact that so much of what they say is an exaggeration or a lie, and is designed to give power to the control freaks, is what we need to be aware of. They are not concerned about truth and accuracy. They are concerned about moral denunciation as a method of control. A view of a flourishing capitalist ethic did not go down well with Communists determined to undermine it.
Blainey mentions the elitist claim of his critics that the term "black arm-band" was "racist", allegedly derived from the Aborigines as a derogatory phrase. In fact, Blainey did not borrow it from Aborigines and did not intend it to be anti-Aboriginal. It was converted into an anti-Aboriginal phrase by commentators who tried to discredit Blainey and ever since then, it has been widely used.
Blainey says he took the term from the custom in Australian Rules Football, of players wearing a black arm-band to honour a player or official who had died. This symbol of mourning was used by white, not black, Australian traditions.
The term was given prominence when it was used by John Howard, soon after he became Prime Minister in 1996, in the annual Sir Robert Menzies Lecture at Monash University.
In terms of the treatment of Aborigines, Blainey’s view is that Aboriginal and British cultures were so far apart, that misunderstandings were inevitable. One factor was that the British realized that Aborigines were a nomadic people, a fact documented by Blainey in his Triumph of the Nomads. For this reason, they were not seen as owners or cultivators of the land, so no treaty could be made with them. Nor can it be said that the Aborigines lived an idyllic life, as they were frequently at war with each other, and used some customs such as infanticide and cannibalism, which now have to be concealed and swept down the memory hole. In the fighting that went on between the whites and blacks, the elite want us to bemoan the loss of Aborigines, but not to shed a tear for the whites, whose families were destroyed.
It has been widely publicised that, until 1967, Aborigines did not have the right to vote. Many Aborigines had the vote in the 19th century and many Aborigines had the right to vote in the first federal election.
Not many Aborigines did vote in these late 19th and early 20th centuries, but they were not alone. In 1900 most adult people in Australia did not have the right to vote. When the Commonwealth Constitution was shaped, most women, whether white or black, could not vote. Aborigines were not singled out as unable to vote as an act of discrimination against them alone.
In the first Commonwealth electoral Act of 1902 many white civil servants could not vote. However, some concern was shown to give welfare rights to fullblood Aborigines. This historical evidence is replaced by a falsified assertion that aborigines were denied the vote until 1967 and this was "racism".
We are then told that the White Australia Policy was "racist" and a criminal act. This is done nowadays by the ALP who were initially key exponents of it. But there is a remarkable silence on so-called "racist" policies of other countries, such as Malaysia, which has a "bumipatra" policy favouring Malays. There is no mention of the way China and Japan have immigration policies favouring their own kind, which must be "racist" nor any mention of the apartheid wall built in Israel, which creates a barrier between Jews and Arabs.
Whereas it is never politically correct for whites to use any term derogatory of Aborigines, it is OK for whites to be denounced. Just as long as the Double Standard continues to apply.
Doubt has been cast on the black arm-band claim that whites were responsible for killing off the blacks in Tasmania, by historian Keith Windshuttle in his book, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, which suggests that the Aborigines there were already dying out at white settlement, that they were few in number-maybe 2000- and that stories of white massacres have been greatly exaggerated and in many cases, actually invented. But he notes that there were far more murders of whites by blacks seeking food and goods.
Some of the evidence from books such as Cape York-The Savage Frontier, by Rodney Liddell; The Aborigines of Australia, by J.W.Bleakley; A Despised Race, by F.R. Gribble and others. Rex Gilroy, Director of the Pre-Aboriginal Research Centre, PO Box 202, Katoomba, NSW 2780, mentions archaeological research but also Aboriginal traditions, that the Aborigines killed off a former white-skinned race and a race of giants, just as the Maoris killed off the race occupying NZ before they arrived there. The Aborigines massacred the Tasmanian type of Aborigines, pushing them over to Tasmania.
It remains to be seen whether Windschuttle will take up themes such as this, in his own high-powered, heavily concentrated and strongly academic style. In the meantime, he has given a hearty blow to the fashionable anti-white racism.
The fact that this is still very much a "live issue" is shown by a recent article from The Australian.
I’ll read extracts from it. It seems that Windschuttle has become a Shrek: an historian’s "ogre".
The Australian 22 Jul 2004, Page 9, "Who's still afraid of Keith Windschuttle" by Ean Higgins Academics are busily gearing up for yet another battle in the history wars, writes Ean Higgins.
I might interpolate here that the very phrase "History Wars" is from a book by Stuart MacIntyre published in 2003 which fully recognizes the clash between the Left-wing versus the so-called Right wing in Australian history.
AS the elite of the nation's academic historians met in the stately rooms of the Newcastle Town Hall, fear and loathing lurked the corridors.
The Australian Historical Association spent virtually an entire day trying to work out strategies to deal with the menace. Would there be safety in numbers if academics stood together? What should be done when the terror struck again? How could anyone survive when the mass media was in on the conspiracy?
Over 18 months after Keith Windschuttle published his book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, the academic world is still anguishing over its impact. It is terrified of what he will do next. Windschuttle struck at the heart of the accepted view of Australian colonial history in the past 30 years -- that the settler society had engaged in a pattern of conquest, dispossession and killing of the indigenous inhabitants. The facts, he said, did not stack up.
The Sydney-based writer, among other things, questioned the references used by academic historian Lyndall Ryan to justify her claims that the British massacred large numbers of Aborigines in Van Diemen's Land in the early 1800s. Her footnotes supporting the claims did not do so, he wrote.
He also took on Henry Reynolds, the venerable historian of the Left, whose depiction of a brutal British conquest of Tasmania had been the accepted norm. Reynolds's work on the concept of terra nullius -- that the British seized Aboriginal land based on a policy that it was owned by no one -- developed such currency that it is believed to have influenced critical High Court judgments on land rights, including the Mabo decision. The thrust of Windschuttle's thesis was that political correctness had triumphed over historical fact.
With the passage of time, the academic history profession is far from over the history wars. An extraordinary number in its ranks believe they have been been damaged by populist history propounded by Windschuttle. They are searching for a way out. Only a few seem brave enough to speak up, arguing that freedom of expression is the primary issue.
At the recent conference, Ryan made some effort, though ultimately unsuccessful, to avoid media coverage for a talk she gave entitled "How the Print Media Marketed Keith Windschuttle's The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Implications for Academic Historians."
She said the media had taken up Windschuttle as representing the real history of colonists' relations with Aborigines, grabbing the view that Australians had been hoodwinked by the academic left-wing historians' version. ``I don't think the media owns free speech,'' Ryan said. She had also been shocked, she said, that Stuart Macintyre, the influential left-leaning University of Melbourne historian, had appeared to criticise her over footnote inaccuracies.
She did admit to five footnote errors, but said the primary sources verified her thesis and ``the simple fact is that footnote errors do occur''.
Her abstract said: ``The AHA and universities need strategies and protocols in place to address future assaults on academic historians.''
Ryan was not alone in promoting the Windschuttle-media conspiracy. The AHA president, David Carment, said The Australian had deliberately timed the publication of its review of Windschuttle's work for the summer of 2002. During holidays more academics were on leave, Carment said, and ``less able to defend themselves,'' and it was ``a time when people were reading newspapers''. In fact, newspaper circulations fall away over summer holidays.
It might be time, Carment said, for the association to ``defend its people on the basis of their professional integrity'' while not taking sides in the debate.
Carment also raised, though he did not fully support, the concept put forward by West Australian historian Cathie Clement for a code of ethics that would gag historians from criticising the integrity of their peers in public. Several in the audience said everyone had to be ready to counter-attack when Windschuttle came out with his next book.
Richard Waterhouse from the University of Sydney, said academics took Windschuttle too seriously. ``Sometimes we have tended to treat him as an intellectual equal,'' Waterhouse said, adding that sarcasm might be more appropriate.
Windschuttle earned a first-class honours degree in history from the University of Sydney in the 1960s, lectured in the subject, earned a masters in politics and left Macquarie University in 1992 when he set up a publishing house.
Other historians have expressed alarm at the attitude of their peers, including classical studies historian Ronald Ridley at the University of Melbourne. ``The way they have shut down the debate, if they have made some errors, is really appalling,'' he says.
``I don't think any historians of Greek or Roman history would make these mistakes. And when you deal with issues such as indigenous history, the politics are red hot. You don't just have to be a competent historian, you have to be top class.''
The question is why academic historians are so concerned about the impact of Windschuttle.
Macintyre, while he does not accept Windschuttle's suggestion of a fabrication, does warn that mistakes can have a broader effect.
``There is an understandable public concern about the accuracy of historians' work,'' he says. At the same time, Macintyre maintains, Windschuttle fits with a conservative agenda to lift a burden of national shame from Australian shoulders over the Aboriginal issue.
Macintyre told the conference the history wars fitted in with broader "political dimensions'' of the Howard Government's "abandonment of reconciliation, denial of the stolen generations, its retreat from multiculturalism and creation of a refugee crisis''.
``Windschuttle was the first conservative intellectual to base his case on substantial historical research,'' he says.
Windschuttle says this is precisely why the academic community is still so scared of him. ``There is a whole generation who have invested not just their academic capital but also their political capital in the Henry Reynolds view,'' he says. And, says Windschuttle, he has made Australian history interesting again for high school students who are more likely to go on to study it in universities.
While not referring to the Windschuttle debate, NSW Premier Bob Carr, a longstanding history buff, said much the same thing at the conference.
``History is an argument and the more argument there is in it the more young people will read it,'' he said.
THE WINDSCHUTTLE CASE
Examining the primary sources cited by historians, including Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan, Windschuttle said "much of their case is poorly founded, other parts are seriously mistaken, and some of it is outright fabrication''.
Among other contentions, he argued that claims of large massacres of Aborigines in the early 1800s were not supported in the evidence. Conflict was sporadic and not systematic, he said.
Windschuttle said British colonisation of Australia was "the least violent of all Europe's encounters in the New World''.
His work was taken up by conservatives who argued against the "black arm-band'' view of history that promoted national guilt.
Now, as they say in a certain advertisement, 'There’s more, but that will give you some of the flavour'. They’re very worried. Part of the elite historical lies have been exposed. At the same time, an interest is being taken in Geoffrey Blainey. In the latest Quadrant, July-August,2004,there’s an article by Rafe Champion, which mentions a new book about Blainey entitled The Fuss That Never Ended: The Life and Work of Geoffrey Blainey published by Melbourne University Press.
The article notes the rise of Left-wing ideology since the 1980’s and mentions, as examples of the fight against it, "Pauline Hanson, then Paul Sheehan’s Among the Barbarians, then Keith Windschuttle and most recently David Flint’s The Twilight of the Elites."
Comments like this help to put Twilight of the Elites in context and to recognize it as part of an ongoing attack on the elites.
Ladies and gentlemen, it’s often customary to dismiss warnings about hidden influences in society working to impose their policy behind the scenes as "conspiracy theory". This is the tiresome catch phrase that’s so often used, as if it were a sufficient dismissal, and it’s used even in the face of hard evidence. It’s an attempt at academic sleight of hand to imply that the warning is coming from people that don’t really have the insights that those of superior wisdom have. And the elite are good at portraying themselves as mental giants.
This kind of arrogant non-reply, dishonest though it is, is harder to use in the case of David Flint. He was educated at the universities of Sydney, London and Paris, and is an emeritus professor of law, he was chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Authority until this year, 2004, Associate Commissioner of the ACCC, National Convenor of the Australians for Constitutional Monarchy from 1987-1997 and Chairman of the Australian Press Council. With a background like that, he’s been put in a good position to analyze subjects with full academic understanding.
In view of his qualifications and experience, David Flint was well qualified to write his book, Twilight of the Elites, with its thesis that there is a group of insiders with influence in government that are pushing an elite viewpoint which is anti-democratic and tries to push an agenda that is Left-wing and subversive, pursued by surreptitious and dishonest means.
Some of his comments haven’t worn well: for example, his support for the invasion of Iraq and the hunt for so-called WMD. By now, most people recognize the WMD chase as a complete farce, and are not impressed by the whitewash job, when Prime Minister Howard was able to pass the buck to alleged intelligence failures in the security forces, which is another farce in itself.
But in many ways his comments are spot on. It is part of a cause for optimism that there are still men of this kind willing to stand up for the truth. Not only has he written a thought-provoking book, many of his points have remained valid. For example , he points out that Howard was right to move against the "Tampa" incident to prevent a mass invasion of immigrants which, if it had been allowed to continue, could have led to a Camp of the Saints situation.
He also mentions the dangers of a plebiscite as a gimmick to introduce a republic and is well aware that Australian Founding Fathers were well aware of the dangers of a plebiscite to create a deceitful and lying con job on voters who were expected to be asked a question and be given the details later. The Founding Fathers had done their homework well and knew it would be possible to foist a totally misleading policy on voters, who were entitled to know all the details first, instead of signing a political blank cheque.
He’s a lucid writer and one of the contributors to the Samuel Griffiths’ Society, a think tank that has kept alive a tradition of free speech and debate in society. Its papers on various issues are generally presented very clearly and thoroughly from its offices and from its website.
His comments on the Australian Constitution show that he doesn’t feel a need to set it in stone, but at the same time, he fully appreciates the desire of the Founders to make any changes only after proper consideration and with the consent of the people. On pages 215-216, he tentatively suggests 10 changes that cou ld usefully be made to the Constitution.
For one thing, he’s in favour of a monarchy rather than a republic. He wrote a book called The Cane Toad Republic which could be counted as a factor, which led to a public rejection of a republic in the 1999 Referendum But if there’s one thing the politicians in general don’t want, it is a monarchy. Despite the fact that the 1999 Referendum rejected a republic they have not, for a single minute, accepted that finding as the end of the matter. Behind the scenes, illegitimately and unconstitutionally, they have called for a republic. They decided, for the "grassroots", that it was not really that they didn’t want a republic , it was just that the model chosen was the wrong one, and they will now help them out by choosing the right one, as an act of generosity on their part. The fact that the public acted against this has not influenced their decision one bit, nor does it worry them that this make a farce out of the peoples’ will, supposedly the basis for a so-called "democracy". Nor does it bother them that they deeply offend those in our society who want to preserve Anglo-Saxon roots with a monarchy that brought white society into being in this country.
And this is part of the mentality behind the group that Dr Flint calls "the elite" who are the Hidden Hand behind what is going on. They have been responsible for a group of policies, of which the republic is only one. Mostly Left-wing, they govern behind the scenes where their policies will not be subjected to electoral scrutiny, and they use cheap tactics, such as labels of "racism" and other politically correct buzzwords to discourage dissidents. They want to use so-called democracy as a cloak to mask their activities.
And, where their policies inconvenience themselves personally, they keep out of areas where they will be affected.
In his chapter "Any Republic, Whatever It Takes", he understands that political niceties are to be discarded in the rush to create a republic for its own sake, without any concern for preservation of what remains of our liberties.
David Flint mentions the elitist manufacture of the "guilt industry", for the hoax that all whites today have a huge collective guilt for all the evils visited upon the Aborigines to the present day, leading to such abberations as "Sorry Day." We’re not supposed to have a "Sorry Day" for whites killed by Aborigines. The rule is to be applied always in a one-sided way, always aimed against whites.
In his chapter on "A Treaty for the Dissolution of Australia", he rightly sees the danger of ATSIC, which he labelled a "bureaucratic monster." Since his book was written, ATSIC has been officially abolished. Tom Pearson wrote his explanation in "The Guardian", April 21,2004 and came up with the usual Left-wing explanation, it was abolished because of "racism"! Indigenous Affairs Minister Amanda Vanstone made a public announcement on May 28,2004, in which she denied this charge and said she had visited several Aboriginal communities and had heard no complaints against the abolition of ATSIC. She said that a taskforce of 10 ministers had been formed to co ordinate services for Aborigines.
David Flint rightly sees the dangers of moves for an Aboriginal Republic but he seems not to be aware of the fact that Geoff. McDonald wrote long ago in Red Over Black, that this was a well-established Communist policy to divide Australia and take control.
The general policy of David Flint is clear: He is a man dedicated to a popular recognition of the debt we owe to our forebears, who devised a very effective and workable constitutional system and who understands fully the need to fight to preserve it. I think that is a matter he can’t take up alone. We need to take out of this room the determination to strive for the truth while we still can and realize how much each of us can do to promote it. In the end, it comes down to us. We can take comfort from the achievements of those who built Australia, in many ways successfully, and acknowledge the strength of the swing against the black arm band historians. |
©-free 2004 Adelaide Institute
