The Australian

September 24, 2003

The furore blazing in The Australian and elsewhere since the publication of Keith Windschuttle's The Fabrication of Aboriginal History proves how far we have come since Paul Keating lost office.

On the eve of losing the 1996 election, Keating ushered in the Howard Government with the warmest of welcomes. "Welcome to the nerdorium," he said. According to historian Don Watson, Keating lamented how the country would change if John Howard won.

Keating was right. More than seven years of living in the nerdorium has produced a vigorous debate about issues once banished from the national conversation. Dare one call it a golden age? Under Howard, the nerds have started asking questions. And historians like Stuart Macintyre want it to stop. Yet he should be chuffed at how history is filling our newspapers, sparking debate, piquing our interest.

According to Macintyre's latest book, The History Wars (co-authored with Anna Clark), 1996 marks the official arrival not of the nerds but of the History Warriors. If we must persist with Macintyre's war-like imagery, the most you can call it is Revenge of the Nerds.

As new Prime Minister, Howard had the audacity to criticise "the attempt to rewrite history in the service of a partisan political cause". Macintyre takes great offence at this. It suggests historians have betrayed their duty to objectivity, he says. Yet Macintyre stakes out a deeply partisan position as he invokes the language of war.

Macintyre's partisan battleground ledger reads like this – Howard's "wedge politics" v Keating's "diversity and tolerance". Howard's "strategy of refusal" v Keating's "egalitarian generosity". Howard's "necklace of negatives" up against Keating's Big Picture.

By the concluding chapter, the History Warriors have become "neo-conservative ideologues", the "right-wing polemicists", the "Australian deniers" of the stolen generations, the bullies who "intimidate" and "impugn motives", the opinionated columnists (that's me), those who write with the ring of a Stalinist ideologue (Gerard Henderson), the History War Crusaders, the "fundamentalists" who hand down "arbitrary edicts" and "ridicule and abuse" their opponents. The History Warriors launch "pre-emptive strikes" and use "weapons of mass destruction". This is not the language of a dispassionate historian. This is political advocacy dressed up as history.

Macintyre embraces war talk to suggest something wrong is happening. This is not a fight among equals. It is not a just war, not a war of liberation. Rather, it is a war of oppression because, according to Macintyre, all the weapons are in the hands of the History Warriors.

The war talk – first a culture war, now a history war – is part of the Left's usual agenda to curtail free speech while presenting themselves as loyal defenders of free debate. It allows them to parade their "Stop the War" placards not on the streets but in books, articles and speeches. If only their opponents would pack up their weapons (that is, arguments) and just go home.

Let this History Warrior suggest that conjuring up the imagery of war – an immoral war – is misplaced. This is a healthy and long overdue exchange of views, sometimes heated, sometimes vitriolic, but a debate. Nothing more, nothing less.

If it feels brutal, like war, it is because in their antebellum world historians like Macintyre were free from real debate for too long. They have forgotten what it feels like to have your arguments probed and challenged and, in some cases, destroyed.

The aggressors in Macintyre's war refuse to subscribe to the black-armband view of history. Geoffrey Blainey coined the phrase black-armband school of history to describe those who believe that Australia's historical failures outweigh its successes. Blainey did not deny past atrocities. But neither is he willing to deny the great successes, how Australia was an "experimental pioneer of democracy", one of the first countries to give women the vote, a country that decided internal disputes by debate, not war.

When Howard used the same phrase three years later, he carefully acknowledged the tragic and shameful nature of our past. "Injustices were done in Australia," he said, "and no one should obscure or minimise them." Howard's critics ignore this. Instead, they talk of a history war.

But why is it war to argue that the positives in Australian history outweigh the negatives?

In Macintyre's history wars, the aggressors refuse to accept, holus-bolus, Ronald Wilson's claim about a stolen generation of indigenous children. They are aggressors for suggesting flaws in Wilson's Bringing Them Home report – flaws that were exposed when the Federal Court rejected the test cases of Peter Gunner and Lorna Cubillo.

The next aggressor in Macintyre's war is Windschuttle, who challenges the orthodox view of genocide of Tasmanian Aborigines and the extent and nature of frontier warfare in Fabrication. How astounding that Macintyre, the historian, offers only a passing nod to Windschuttle's profound contribution in checking sources and uncovering serious errors of fact that for too long have shaped the teaching of indigenous history. Admittedly that nod is more than academics such as Robert Manne can manage.

In response to Windschuttle's expose, Lyndall Ryan admitted to Channel Nine's Sunday program on May 25 that "historians are always making up figures". Why is it war to expect that, if historians are going to make guesses about events and the number of Aboriginal deaths, they tell us they are guessing? Watson told The Weekend Australian: "Windschuttle should be put in a bag and thrown in the Murray." So much for free debate. John Stuart Mill would hand out F grades to these intellectuals.

Macintyre is surely entitled to think us nerds for the views we have, but he is not entitled to try to close down debate by casting it in terms of an unjust war. Indeed, he'd better get used to it. The nerds are here to stay.