Along with Geoffrey Blainey, author of the classic The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History (1966), Keith Windschuttle, who died earlier this month in Sydney, was not only an eminent Australian historian, but one whose achievements put him in the first rank of historians internationally. 

Windschuttle’s book The Killing of History: How a Discipline is Being Murdered By Literary Critics and Social Theorists (1994) is a masterpiece in the library of anti-Marxist demolition. (I will say something about The Killing of History, drawing on some earlier writings, below.) His multi-volume The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, the first volume of which appeared in 2002, is a masterpiece in patient, meticulously documented historiography. Alas, he still had a volume or two to go when he died.

Windschuttle was adept at looking through established, politically correct narratives to the empirical truths those narratives obscured. As far as I know, Windschuttle never quoted Samuel Johnson. But this observation, preserved by Boswell, might have stood as as his personal motto as an historian: “Accustom your children constantly to this; if a thing happened at one window, and they, when relating it, say that it happened at another, do not let it pass, but instantly check them; you do not know where deviation from truth will end.”

Where is Dr. Johnson when we need him? How well could we profit from his scruples when it comes to the question of truth. For we live at a time when truth is everywhere under attack. I am not talking about anything arcane or polysyllabic: just plain, factual truth, as in “The battle of Agincourt took place in October 1415” or (more generally) “The documents support my claim and do not support his.”