- Title
- Who is the fabricator?
- Creator
- Ryan, Lyndall
- Relation
- Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History p. 230-257
- Relation
- http://www.blackincbooks.com/books/whitewash
- Publisher
- Black Inc
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2003
- Description
- When Andrew Stevenson, a reporter on The Sydney Morning Herald, telephoned me one morning in November 2002 to ask for a response to allegations of 'fabrication' in my book The Aboriginal Tasmanians, I had no inkling that I was about to become the subject of a media witchhunt. The allegations had been made by Keith J. Windschuttlein his new book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One, Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847. He accused me of fabricating footnotes to massacres that he claimed had never happened, and of providing false estimates of numbers of Aborigines killed on the Tasmanian colonial frontier. For his own part, he asserted that the Tasmanian Aborigines were among the most primitive people on earth, were too few in numbers at the onset of colonisation to survive this event, and lacked the political skills to engage in guerilla warfare. And he also claimed that they had killed twice the number of settlers for half the number lost on their own side. These claims seemed so ridiculous that I could not believe they were being taken seriously. The media, however, decided that I was the historian at fault and began a witch-hunt into my scholarship which continues to this day.
- Subject
- fabrication; media witchhunt; Aborigines; Tasmanian colonial frontier
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/803605
- Identifier
- uon:6442
- Identifier
- ISBN:0975076906
- Language
- eng
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