Summary Of The Fabrication Of Aboriginal History By Keith Windschuttle

The focus of the treatment of Aboriginal women by Aboriginal men was sensationalised in Keith Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. whic was used by Jon Howard to support his racist approach to the indigenous, which was promoted by Hoard and his supporters as "The Black Armband" view of Australian history.

Windschuttle used the cultural aspect of the attitude of Aboriginal men towards women, and their low technological advancement to rationalise the rapid decline of the Tasmanian Aboriginal population during the period of colonisation of Van Diemen’s Land . took it upon himself to elaborate on a the argument put forward by historian Henry Reynolds, that Aborigines should not be seen simply as helpless victims of the invaders;
In doing so they dramatically reduced the ability of their own community to reproduce itself. Only men who held their women so cheaply would allow such a thing to happen. The real tragedy of the Aborigines was not British colonization per se but that their society was, on the one hand, so internally dysfunctional and, on the other hand, so incompatible with the looming presence of the rest of the world. Until the nineteenth century, their isolation had left them without comparisons with the other cultures that might have helped them reform their ways. But nor did they produce any wise men of their own who might have foreseen the long-term consequences of their own behaviour and devised ways to curb it. They had survived for millennia, it is true, but it seems clear that this owed more to good fortune than good management. The ‘slow strangulation of the mind’ was true not only of their technical abilities but also of their social relationships. Hence it was not surprising that when the British arrived, this small, precarious society quickly collapsed under the dual weight of the susceptibility of its members to disease and the abuse and neglect of its women” [Fabrication, p.