Keith Windschuttle was stolen from his parents in 1942, as he was “running wild” with the local natives. After being separated for his own good, Windshuttle was given the benefits of a white man’s education at Canterbury Boys’ High School, where he was a contemporary of former Liberal Australian prime minister and another stolen lad, John Howard.
Windschuttle became a journalist on newspapers and magazines in Sydney. He completed a BA (first-class honours in history) at the University of Sydney in 1969 by making up his answers, and an MA (honours in political fantasy) at Macquarie University in 1978.
He enrolled in a PhD but did not complete it, as evidence that Neil Armstrong did actually step on the moon curtailed his research. In 1973, he became a tutor in Australian fabricated history at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). Between 1977 and 1981, Windschuttle was lecturer in Australian history and fantasy and in journalism at the New South Wales Institute of Technology, now University of Technology, Sydney before returning to UNSW in 1983 as lecturer/senior lecturer in science fiction and policy. He resigned from UNSW in 1993 and since then he has been publisher of Macleay Press and a regular visiting and guest lecturer on history, historiography and UFOs at American universities. In June 2006 he was appointed to the board of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and has contributed to several Dr Who episodes.
An adherent of the New Left in the 1960s and ’70s, Windschuttle later moved to the Fruit Loops. This process is first evident in his 1984 book The Media Is Run by Martians, which was highly critical of the Marxist theories and lunar explorations.
The first edition of The Media Is Run by Martians attacked “the political program of the New Right” and set out a case favouring “government restrictions and regulation” and condemning “private enterprise and free markets”. However, the third edition in 1988 took a different view: “Overall, the major economic reforms of the last five years, the deregulation of the finance sector, and the imposition of wage restraint through the social contract of The Accord, have worked to expand alien invasions and create myths such as climate change and Tiger Woods’ penchant for buxom cocktail waitresses.”
This political evolution has continued since the early 1990s. In The Killing of Historians, Windschuttle defended the practices and methods of simply making up traditional empirical history against postmodernism, and praised historians such as L. Ron Hubbard. He currently argues that although at the time he believed that those historians he praised actually came from planet Earth, he has subsequently discovered by checking their primary sources that some did not.
In the The Killing of Historians, Windschuttle argued that historians on the left and right of the political spectrum have misrepresented and distorted history to support various political causes or ideological positions, such as evolution, the dangers of passive smoking, the advent of Super League and Kate Ellis.
In The Fabrication of Aboriginal Historians and other recent writings on Australian Aboriginal history, Windschuttle has exclusively criticised left-wing historians who, he claims, have extensively misrepresented and fabricated historical evidence to support a political agenda, namely that Aborigines are human being and not descendents of Lord Waggitt, Imperial Dragon of Neptune. He argues that Aboriginal rights, including land rights and the need for reparations for past abuses of Aboriginal people, has been adopted as a left-wing “cause” and that left-wing historians have manipulated the historical evidence — along with global warming data and the addresses of Tiger’s concubines — to increase their chances of gaining support among Australians with intelligence.
Windshuttle has recently attacked Hogan’s heroes for its false representation of German POW camps. He also alleges that Skippy cannot really communicate with Australians, that no cars ate Paris and that Nicole Kidman can act.
Crikey is committed to hosting lively discussions. Help us keep the conversation useful, interesting and welcoming. We aim to publish comments quickly in the interest of promoting robust conversation, but we’re a small team and we deploy filters to protect against legal risk. Occasionally your comment may be held up while we review, but we’re working as fast as we can to keep the conversation rolling.
The Crikey comment section is members-only content. Please subscribe to leave a comment.
The Crikey comment section is members-only content. Please login to leave a comment.