In his Brief Description of New York (London, 1670), Daniel Denton says, in the quaint English of a son of a Presbyterian manse on 17th-century Long Island,

"To say something of the Indians, there is now but few upon the Island, and those few no ways hurtful but rather serviceable to the English, and it is to be admired, how strangely they have decreased by the Hand of God, since the English first settling of those parts; for since my time [Denton was born in 1644], where there were six towns, they are reduced to two small villages, and it hath generally been observed, that where the English come to settle, a Divine Hand makes way for them, by removing or cutting off the Indians either by wars one with the other, or by some raging mortal Disease."

Elsewhere in his panegyric of New York, which is really a plug for immigration, Denton praises its "sweet and pleasant Air, and a continuation of such Influences as tend to the Health both of Man and Beast." He notices no contradiction between the blooming health of the English and their livestock, and the fact that the Indians are dropping dead from raging mortal diseases. The remarkable decline in the Indian population that he reports has nothing to do with interracial conflict, for he describes the treaties and the trade that bind the communities as being mutually "serviceable." He would know all about that, because in 1662 and 1663 his job was to negotiate the purchase of lands from the natives. So the Divine Hand was encompassing the convenient reduction of the Indian population by means of (here Denton got them in the wrong order) internecine conflict between tribes, and diseases to which the English were immune and the Indians were not.

These two causes have continued to be the preferred explanation of the catastrophic decline in populations that attended all of Europe's encounters with the New World. Of course, there is a third cause to be invoked, the murder by Europeans of such of the natives as dared resist the loss of their land and its fruits. For those who press this argument, imported diseases are just excuses that spare the invader's responsibility on the grounds that, like Daniel Denton, he usually did not suspect what havoc his cough, his sneeze, his touch were wreaking. In this view, Denton's sanctimonious Divine Hand too often hides the bloodshed of the "wild frontier." And yet even when this powerful argument is pressed to the limit--and the limit is the cruel Spanish usurpation of established regimes in Central and South America--we are left with a massive loss of life that cutlass, musket and arquebuse could never inflict, least of all under a hail of spears and arrows.

The losses were enormous and by now beyond exact reckoning, because we do not know what the pre-contact populations were. Estimates for all the Americas range from 8 million to 112 million (and still rising); for America north of the Rio Grande from 900,000 to 18 million; for the Australian mainland from 300,000 to 1 million; and for tiny Tasmania from 500 to 7,000. In each case the bigger number comes from the critics of imperialism, who might be tempted to exaggerate the carnage, the smaller number from its apologists. (A scholar who analyzed these figures, David Henige, wisely called his book Numbers from Nowhere.) We do know that, starting from the most reliable estimates, native populations fell by about three-quarters in the first thirty or so years of contact (some by much more), and they continued falling steadily, because of disadvantage and alcohol, for 150 years, until an upturn began in the first half of the 20th century. Naturally, because of miscegenation, the descendents are genetically a quite different race from those who fell before the settlers, but they claim a cultural continuity that entitles them to reparation from the heirs of those guilty of the frontier murders (which engage responsibility more directly than the infections).

The study of these claims and responsibilities is a proper one for historians, though one constantly threatened by callous racism on one side and sentimental sloppiness on the other. It needs to be carried on in the light of two considerations: First, that it is a side issue, not the main matter; and second, that it is in a way irrelevant.

It is a side issue in that those "raging mortal diseases" were the main killer everywhere from the Valley of Mexico to California to the Australian outback. As to relevance, let us suppose that young Daniel Denton had stayed in the business of negotiating treaties and buying land, that he had made his peaceful way across the continent, a leonine treaty here, a shonky deal there, glass beads for priceless acres everywhere, and never a cross word. Let us suppose that when he had pacified California, the Canadians had borrowed him, and then (if only he had lived so long) the Australians, so that the British could build their second empire, all without spilling a drop of blood. Where would we be today? Just about exactly where we are. Three-quarters of the native peoples would have died on first contact with Europeans; sterility induced by venereal disease, alcohol, neglect and malnutrition would have reduced their numbers further; the invading herds and flocks would have displaced traditional food sources as the hunter-gatherers were everywhere pushed aside into reserves by the advancing cultivators and pastoralists. It did not happen that way, but this thought experiment is a reminder that any story of colonial settlement as first and foremost a series of massacres is bad history because it misses the main point. Murders were not uncommon, usually as revenge for livestock rustling or crop burning, but they are not the theme of the story of settlement.

But some stories tell it otherwise. Their favorite locale is Tasmania (Van Diemen's Land until 1855), where the British hastily founded a penal colony in 1803 for fear the French were about to claim it. Here, on empire's farthest shore, they proceeded, it is said, to massacre the natives. After years of warfare, in 1830 they formed a line of convicts, settlers and red-coated soldiers that advanced across the island and sought to corral the whole remaining population on to a peninsula. When that exercise failed ludicrously because they were no match for the blacks' bushman skills, they rounded the Aborigines up in small groups and shipped them offshore to windswept Flinders Island, where the last of the race died in 1876. In The Fatal Shore (Vintage, 1986), Robert Hughes called it the one instance of genocide in the history of the British empires. Others have called it a dry run for the Holocaust, a low-tech anticipation of concentration camps. Comparison with Pol Pot's killing fields has not been wanting. The doyen of Tasmanian historiography, Lyndall Ryan, authorized this rhetoric by declaring that the colonial government in Hobart had launched "a conscious policy of genocide."

In more temperate language, the Bullets-not-Bacteria school of colonial history has argued that the Aborigines of Tasmania were the legitimate defenders of their traditional territories against a violent British invasion; that many of them were killed in a long guerrilla war that was marked by repeated massacres of blacks; that the Aborigines demonstrated political savvy and, incidentally, good health throughout a brave but futile resistance; and finally, that unsupervised "borderers" (convicts working as shepherds and stockmen, sealers, bolters and bushrangers) raped, abducted or killed countless black women. That is why a precontact population of probably 2,000 (though some now say 5,000 to 7,000) had shrunk to 351 when they were rounded up for exile on Flinders Island.

Against this received version, a devastating attack has been launched by a Sydney historian, Keith Windschuttle, first in a series of articles in the Australian magazine Quadrant and then in The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Macleay, 2002). In 480 pages of meticulous and occasionally mind-numbing detail, he claims to show that Britain's colonization of Australia was Europe's least violent encounter with the New World; that it met no organized resistance, only sporadic conflict; that mass killing by either side was rare and involved tens not hundreds of souls; that sustained frontier warfare was a fiction; and that there never was anything even resembling a genocide. He arrived at these conclusions by a method that was simple but tedious: He checked the footnote references of the orthodox histories. He discovered a tangle of mistakes and misinterpretations, references to documents that did not exist, quotations that had been twisted and truncated to mean the opposite, numbers that had been plucked out of the air, and a whole series of "fictions", "fabrications" and malicious inventions by academic historians who were also political militants.

Whereas these pro-Aborigine activists argued that thousands of natives were killed in a full-scale war (and, mysteriously, none by disease), Windschuttle did a careful body count of all recorded violent deaths on Tasmania. He found trace of 185 white deaths between 1803 and 1834 and, in the same period, only 118 black deaths, or about four a year. This was no war, because the primitive Tasmanians were incapable of organizing one. It was a series of thieving, murderous raids in quest of the white man's coveted tea and sugar, followed by limited revenge attacks, usually unsuccessful for want of bushman skills. True, the full-blood Aborigines died out during this wave of violence, but that was because they persisted in inter-tribal warfare (usually disputes over women) and because they prostituted their womenfolk to sealers, convict shepherds and anyone who would give in return tea, sugar, flour, blankets--and a dose of venereal disease.

This sordid version of events seems designed to outrage every progressive sensibility. So, as comic relief, as it were, one might look at the political reception it got. As Windschuttle's book was launched, a crowd demonstrated outside a Sydney bookshop shouting "Racism!" A former Labour prime minister, Paul Keating, launched another book offering a left-wing account of the "history wars" and implied that the ruling Liberal Party was behind the slanderous new history. A professor of politics solemnly explained that American neoconservatives were to blame, for they had encouraged Prime Minister John Howard to declare war on what they called political correctness in questions of race and gender. The tone of outrage had already been set by a High Court judgement that colonization had been, as it wrote,

"a conflagration of oppression and conflict which was, over the following century, to spread across the continent to dispossess, degrade and devastate the Aboriginal peoples and leave a national legacy of unutterable shame."

One of the judges who handed down that condemnation of the civilization of Enlightenment Britain later went into the wilds to express to Aborigines a profound apology for one particular massacre that, it was soon shown, had never occurred.

One might have hoped that the academic response would be more measured. In fact it was pathetic, but it has an interest that goes beyond the primitive Tasmanians. It goes to the question of how postmodernist historians, who deny there is any one truth about the past, behave when they are accused of telling untruths. Like any other reasonable human being in an argument, they must want to say they are right and the other fellow wrong, but their philosophy forbids that. One replied to Windschuttle,

"For us the "truth" is made up of countless contradictory, ironic and provocative elements, woven together into an allegorical, sometimes fictive documentation of what it is to live our lives."

In other words, "No facts please, we're postmodernists!" Charged by Wind-schuttle with fabricating history, Professor Lyndall Ryan retorted that history was

"a complex terrain in which multiple stories and interpretations are represented [and not] a one-dimensional discipline in which all ambiguity must be removed. . . . Two truths are told, is only one truth correct?"

Asked about her fanciful black death tolls in Tasmania, she said, "Yes, but historians are always making up figures."

This sounds like a plea of No Contest, which was largely confirmed when the profession produced 19 replies by historians and related specialists (including one who lectures in Genocide Studies) and compiled them into Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Black Inc., 2003). Some of the most serious challenges, notably to supposed massacres and body counts, were simply ignored by their authors, as though they were walking away from positions they knew they could not defend. Other pieces of guesswork were insolently repeated with no new evidence. Asked how she got such a count as one hundred Aborigines and twenty Europeans killed in one place, Professor Ryan said, "I deduced it" without revealing her premises. Of another incident she said, "I surmised that a massacre of Aborigines had taken place . . . and had been hushed up", without revealing how, in the admitted absence of evidence, one surmises a massacre. In cases where Windschuttle advanced a smaller number of deaths, a common retort in Whitewash was, "We will never know with any certainty" (James Boyce), or "It is not remotely possible to find a precise figure for Aboriginal mortality" (Henry Reynolds), although they had been alleging big numbers for years past; the uncertainty, it seems, only affects other, lesser estimates.

Suddenly, too, "genocide" disappeared from the vocabulary. After years of talk about a holocaust and ethnic cleansing, the charge of genocide is nowhere pressed in Whitewash. Contributors concede they have moved away from "seeing the conflict as a series of one-sided massacres" (James Boyce) or from regarding racial conflict as "many large-scale massacres [rather than] pervasive but small-scale violence" (Dirk Moses). Henry Reynolds recalled that he had earlier warned that to exaggerate the carnage out of sympathy with the blacks just made them look stupid and the Europeans clever. In historical fact, by the time the European with his slow-to-reload musket got off his second shot, the native had put several spears through him and disappeared into the bush. The gory slaughters imagined in "genocide studies" were physically impossible 200 years ago in Tasmania. Windschuttle is entitled to crow in Quadrant,

"So, despite all the sound and fury raised by this debate, we have actually made some progress. The case for genocide in Tasmania has not been sustained. Indeed, its principal advocates have walked away from the topic, unwilling to defend it. So, my first thesis, there was no genocide in Tasmania, I now take as proven by default."

One point on which there has been no meeting of minds, and probably never will be, concerns the cultural relativism that is nowadays an article of faith in progressive history circles. In this view, one culture is as good as another, there is no hierarchy of civilizations, no development from one stage to the next. Thus there could be no room for Windschuttle's notion of a dysfunctional society doomed to be pushed aside by a more advanced one; no room, indeed, for my references to "primitive Tasmanians." Such reprehensible ideas, it is said, betray white supremacy or social Darwinism or plain racism. But no one is denying that the Tasmanians were intelligent human beings, quick on the uptake and inclined to be friendly (too friendly for their own good when it came to lending out their wives to visitors). Nevertheless, 8,000 years of isolation since the seas rose around their island had left their little tribal society divided, quarrelsome, ignorant, poor and perverse; they had lost abilities they once had, like how to catch fish or make fire easily, and the wheel was beyond their dreams. In the eyes of colonial officials, all children of the Enlightenment, they were the most primitive people on earth. Windschuttle still thinks so, and that is what offends his critics--all children, they, of 1968 and the Vietnam War.

In his Fate of a Free People (Penguin, 2004), Henry Reynolds depicts them not as primitive tribes but as a united people rising against the oppressors of their fatherland. He resiles from no anachronism as he idealizes them in language once reserved for "freedom-loving friends of socialism." He imagines them using guerrilla warfare tactics of a sort discovered by some third-world nations only in the 20th century, although the British governor of the day said they never once attacked a band of even three armed men, and only one red-coat lost his life in Tasmania. Staying closer to the evidence, Windschuttle says flatly, "The actions of the Aborigines were not noble; they never rose beyond robbery, assault and murder." That may be too harsh a judgement, but the resistance of the Aborigines did seem to the settlers so unpredictable and uncoordinated that it was more like individual acts of treachery than an organized military campaign.

The cultural relativists are especially affronted by the argument that the ready prostitution of the women impaired the survival of the Aboriginal race. Reynolds says this "crude analysis rests on censoriousness and sensation." Censoriousness? Is it prudish and fuddy-duddy to say that certain practices damaged fertility? Apparently it offends feminist beliefs of a particular sort, for Marilyn Lake says in her contribution to Whitewash that "Windschuttle simply recapitulates 19th-century moral judgements and sexist double standards" when he deplores primitive sexual mores. Double standards? So is there a single standard that actually endorses trading a wife's sexual favors for tea and sugar?

In Windschuttle's view there has been a veritable academic industry for the past thirty years manufacturing a false history of British colonization, designed to throw maximum discredit on the settlers and their descendants. It is staffed by Left-leaning academics who have gained control of history schools in most universities. If that sounds too conspiratorial, one would have to allow that Windschuttle has shown that the subject of Aboriginal history has become enveloped in an atmosphere of militant sentimentality, which has encouraged sloppy conformism and careless research bordering on dishonesty. How did this happen? After all, the facts and attitudes that Wind-schuttle adduces, which seem so disconcerting to the prevailing consensus, were all perfectly familiar to the settlers and officials of the day and were adopted by academic historians throughout the 19th century. Then, somewhere around 1900, the Aborigines virtually disappeared from the history books, not because there was a guilty cover-up (as now supposed) but because there were so few of them left, they had bequeathed not a single tangible monument to remind men of their culture, and they were thought to be doomed to total disappearance. What changed first were the population statistics, the recovery of the dispossessed races worldwide, or more accurately of their mixed-race descendants. By the 1960's these new forces were armed, again worldwide, with a combative ideology that mixed Marxism and romanticism with a shrewd awareness of the money value of land rights.

The valet's view, as Hegel would say, of the particular Tasmanian case points to the surprising fact that 130 years after the death of the last Tasmanian Aborigine there are today more than 15,000 people on the island who claim to be Aborigines and want compensation for the misfortunes of their race. These people are mainly descendants of European sealers who camped on neighboring islands and took up with native women who were only too glad to escape the rigors of tribal life. (Some of them, according to the community's own leaders, have no Aboriginal ancestry at all and are only there for the government assistance.) They have taken to the courts the university historians' stories of massacres and laid claim to the lands where the atrocity was supposed to have occurred. So far they have not been successful, but their community receives millions of dollars a year as compensation for disadvantage.

The only reason the courts grant native title is that they have already been convinced that there were atrocities, that the Aborigines were dispossessed in a cruel war of invasion and aggression. And that is where the academic historians come in: It was they who told the courts that this was historical fact. Their history has been a weapon in a political and legal battle, which is probably why they have not been too fussy about checking their sources and weighing the evidence. Henry Reynolds actually boasts of the role he played in preparing the cases that won landmark victories for the Aborigines in the highest courts, and Lyndall Ryan says that opponents of land rights are apologists for British invasion. There is not the least pretense of objectivity in this cabal of activists. They would no doubt say that the task of bringing about a "reconciliation" between white and black Australians is more important than writing accurate history (which, as we have seen, some of them do not believe is possible anyhow), but Windschuttle asks

"how a story about violence and warfare between blacks and whites, if untrue, can help reconciliation at all. What good does it do Aboriginal people to tell them the whites wanted to exterminate them, when they never did?"

The debate is far from over. Windschuttle's Fabrication is sub-titled Volume 1: Van Diemen's Land 1803â€"1847; he is preparing several subsequent volumes dealing with mainland Australia, where he will argue against Henry Reynolds's theses, namely that the "violence was ever-present along the ragged line of early interaction", that "invasion and conquest prepared the way for settlement", and that the Aborigines put up a brave but futile resistance through a century-long campaign of guerrilla warfare. Already, inspired by his example, dissident or counter-revolutionary historians have re-opened the files on several supposed massacres and found only invention or exaggeration. It has been noted above that the tendency of the most recent scholarship is to revalidate the views of 19th-century historians, who were nearer the events and yet to be affected by the Black Power romanticism of the 1960s. So it is with massacre stories. In 1875 James Calder wrote in The Native Tribes of Tasmania:

"That many hostile collisions occurred between the two races during the 30 years that succeeded the first colonization of the country is true enough; but I know of no trustworthy record of more than one, two, three or at most four persons being killed in any one encounter. The warfare, though pretty continuous, was rather a petty affair, with grossly exaggerated details--something like the story of the hundred dead men, reduced, on inquiry, to three dead dogs."

Not all the atrocity stories will turn out to concern three dead dogs. It is beyond doubt that there were brief episodes, notably in the colony of Queensland in the second half of the 19th century, of savagery on both sides: cattle rustled, punitive expedition, Aboriginal revenge murders and mutilation of women and children, and finally the Native Police called in. These were Aborigines who donned the uniform and combined native bushman skills with European arms and discipline. Unlike the red coats in Tasmania, they could be deadly. But they were also a sign that other things were happening on the frontier besides bloodshed, something the settlers called "coming in." Right from the start, some natives realized that the new and superior power was implacable, irresistible and in some ways attractive. They joined it, settling on its fringes, taking work from it, accepting many of its ways. This was the beginning of the process of assimilation that for long promised, and still promises, the best future for the tribes dispossessed of their vast hunting territories by the new civilization of shepherds and cultivators. The Native Police were perhaps not the most glorious of those who "came in" but they were the forerunners of a campaign of integration, religious conversion (three-quarters of Aborigines say they are Christian today) and adaptation to the modern world, which progressed solidly until it hit the slogan, "Assimilation is cultural genocide."

This cry was raised by devotees of the "culture cult", as Roger Sandall called it in his 2001 book of that name: people who want the Native Americans, Canada's First Nation, Australia's Aborigines, the Maori and all the dispossessed and detribalized of the world to hive off from modern civilization, to refuse assimilation and to cling to the tattered remnants of their ancient cultures. For the white academics who press this case, it is a cruel self-indulgence at the expense of the dispossessed. Windschuttle thinks it is also the secret origin of those massacre myths that the academic historians have accepted uncritically: missionaries, former missionaries and other self-appointed protectors of the natives were out to prove that assimilation would never work, that black and white could never get along together, and that the only solution was to isolate the natives in reserves under the authoritarian management of the "protectors." What better support for this campaign than the myth of the bloody frontier and inevitable racial wars, rumors of hidden atrocities and hushed-up massacres?

Like some of Windschuttle's other theories, this one remains to be tested. What is sure in advance is that laborers in this vineyard must henceforth meet standards of honesty and accuracy quite unfamiliar to the credulous, the sentimental and the political activists who have ruled too long. Truth, it seems, may yet win out in the marketplace of ideas.

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