Keith Windschuttle

According to Keith Windschuttle, history today is in the clutches of literary and social theorists who have little respect for or training in the discipline. He believes that they deny the existence of truth and substitute radically chic theorising for real knowledge about the past. The result is revolutionary and unprecedented: contemporary historians are increasingly obscuring the facts on which truth about the past is built. Windschuttle offers a devastating exposé of these developments. This fascinating narrative leads us into a series of case histories that demonstrate how radical theory has attempted to replace the learning of traditional history with its own political agenda.

This provocative work grapples with some of the most difficult issues in Aboriginal history, showing how they raise fundamental concerns about the nature of historical knowledge, truth, and authority. Discussions of such controversial questions as How many Aboriginal people were killed in frontier conflict and was this genocide? Was there ever a massacre at Risdon Cove in Tasmania? and Does Aboriginal oral history count as real history? attempt to shed some light an Australia's historical make-up.