Exhibit A in Keith Windschuttle’s case that Australian Aboriginal history has been ‘fabricated’ has been the famous Ryan footnotes. In a wide variety of contexts, including this piece in the Oz , Windschuttle has claimed that historian Lyndall Ryan presented three footnotes to back up a claim about killings of Aborigines by roving parties but that none of these footnotes actually included any mention of Aborigines being killed. Until now Ryan hasn’t replied, except with a piece of pomo stuff about multiple truths, so it seemed reasonable to assume that Windschuttle had caught her out badly. But her reply in the Letters column of Saturday’s Oz suggests that it is Windschuttle who is in trouble:

In The Weekend Australian (28/12/02), Bernard Lane repeated Keith Windschuttle’s false claim that none of the references in a footnote in a passage in my book The Aboriginal Tasmanians (1996) support my conclusion that: “Between November 1828 and November 1830 the roving parties captured about 20 Aborigines and killed about 60.”

If Bernard Lane had read this sentence himself on page 102 of my book, he would have found that Windschuttle, in quoting it on page 151 in his own book, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, had detached the sentence from its original paragraph and attached it to the next. In manipulating my text, Windschuttle has made the footnote appear dishonest.

This failure by Bernard Lane to check my text, has led him to repeat Windschuttle’s serious breach of academic scholarship.
The footnote that Windschuttle claims that I have used falsely comes at the end of the previous paragraph in my book. It contains references to the discussion in that paragraph about the formation of government and settler roving parties, their relations with the military parties and their potential to create conflict with the Aborigines. The last sentence in that paragraph contains my estimate about the number of Aborigines killed and captured by these parties. This is based on my wide reading and careful analysis of the sources available at the time I wrote the book.

I don’t have a copy of either book at hand, and Windschuttle will presumably reply, so it’s a bit early to rush to judgement. But if Ryan is right, this is fatal for Windschuttle’s credibility. After all, this is not only his biggest single point, but represents the core of his research strategy, which is based on checking footnotes to show that the ‘black armband’ school has misrepresented the primary sources. All this ought to be very embarrassing for his cheer squad, which includes quite a few bloggers, but on past form I suspect the majority of this crowd will not even blush.

I’ll be reading Monday’s Oz with more than usual interest – presumably this is one controversy that should be easy to resolve.

Link via Rob Corr

Update 06/01/03 Nothing from Windschuttle yet. Instead there’s another nail in the coffin from Bain Attwood (link via Tim Dunlop, who has more on this. Also, while I was on my travels there was a letter from Cathy Clement the main historian of the Mistake Creek massacre, complaining about Windschuttle’s misuse of her work and failure to acknowledge it properly. She didn’t use the “P” word, perhaps on legal advice, but Windschuttle’s claims to uphold standards of scholarship are looking weaker every day. As I pointed out a while ago, just listening to Windschuttle on the radio I picked up a series of misrepresentations and errors.

(Thanks to Chris Owen for clearing up my persistent confusion between Mistake Creek and Forrest River. For future reference, the primary Forrest River Massacre historian is Neville Green. )