Historians and moral disgust

Abstract

The three articles by Keith Windschuttle published in 'Quadrant' late in 2000 aim to revise, in a fundamental way, our understanding of frontier conflict in Australia. This revisionist approach is partly shaped by a distinctive view of history as a whole and is seems to involve the indiscriminate rejection of methodological advances over the last 30 years. In a period when we have been struggling to make historical method stretch to comprehend the real diversity of human faith and understanding and the spiritual depth of human experience, and at the same time communicate those issues to the world at large, the revisionist approach seems to lead in the opposite direction. This amounts to a failure of genuine, energetic curiosity and a failure of imagination, both of which are fundamental to good scholarship. Most of what revisionist critics such as Windschuttle have argued so far in their account of frontier violence is informed by these failures.