Along with Geoffrey Blainey, author of the classic The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History (1966), Keith Windschuttle, who died earlier this month in Sydney, was not only an eminent Australian historian, but one whose achievements put him in the first rank of historians internationally.
Windschuttle’s book The Killing of History: How a Discipline is Being Murdered By Literary Critics and Social Theorists (1994) is a masterpiece in the library of anti-Marxist demolition. (I will say something about The Killing of History, drawing on some earlier writings, below.) His multi-volume The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, the first volume of which appeared in 2002, is a masterpiece in patient, meticulously documented historiography. Alas, he still had a volume or two to go when he died.
Windschuttle was adept at looking through established, politically correct narratives to the empirical truths those narratives obscured. As far as I know, Windschuttle never quoted Samuel Johnson. But this observation, preserved by Boswell, might have stood as as his personal motto as an historian: “Accustom your children constantly to this; if a…
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