I haven’t yet got a copy of Windschuttle’s book, but this paper at the Sydney Line contains the guts of his accusations against Ryan. Having just looked at Ryan’s book, I can confirm that Windschuttle has, as she says, run the last sentence of one para into the next, then taken the footnotes of one para as referring to a sentence in another. At the very least, Windschuttle is guilty of the same sloppy treatment of sources that constitutes his main gripe against Ryan and others.

To make matters worse, Windschuttle then truncates the para, omitting a direct quote from Robertson (the leader of the roving parties hunting the Aborigines) that states that the Aborigines saw themselves as engaged in a national war against white invaders. This is directly contrary to Windschuttle’s key thesis and if the quote were fabricated, he would presumably have pounced on it. Instead, he ignores it, which seems to be his standard practice when dealing with evidence from the other side that he can’t refute.

I think it’s pretty clear that Windschuttle’s book is little more than a full-length version of the kind of “Fisking” we’ve all (most of us, anyway) come to be tired of in the blogosphere, in which the work of opponents is searched for trivial errors and opportunities for cheap point-scoring, while anything inconveniently hard to refute is clipped. But Windschuttle is not just a blogger letting off steam. He’s making a serious accusation of academic fraud and he has the backing of many leading participants in the policy debate. When making such serious accusations, you can’t get away with bloglike sloppiness. Both Windschuttle and his backers should be called to account.

On the other hand, Ryan’s response doesn’t fully resolve the issues. It’s still unclear, for example, what basis she has for her claim that the roving parties killed 60 Aborigines. Hopefully, she will restate her current position and the evidence she has for it. The fact that Windschuttle’s work is sloppy and dishonest doesn’t remove the need for clear attention to evidence.

PS: Here’s a profile of Henry Reynolds. What I like about Reynolds is that he is genuinely seeking the truth and is not embarrassed to say so. This contrasts favorably both with the pomo mush coming from many on the left and with Windschuttle, who is vehemently anti-pomo in theory but a proponent of both extreme relativism and socially constructed reality in practice.

PPS: Gary Sauer-Thompson has more, including some useful contributions from Cathie Clements, the Mistake Creek historian whose work was used (without attribution and via a secondary source) by Windschuttle.