The definitive book for finding out what a bunch of self-serving clowns have come to dominate Australian history academe is not The Fabrication of Aboriginal History nor The White Australia Policy. The definitive book is written by Australian writer and businessman John Dawson and is entitled Washout: On the Academic Response to the Fabrication of Aboriginal History.

In Washout, Dawson, expanding on some Quadrant articles he had written, critically examines the criticisms of Fabrication made by contributors to the volume Whitewash, launched with Club Virtue’s normal buttress of favourable reviews. It is not a pretty picture.

Dawson’s technique is to go through the various contributions, grouped together thematically, and compare and critically examine what is said about Fabrication with what Fabrication says and the available evidence. Fortunately, Dawson is a lively writer, so the reader’s interest is maintained through what could otherwise be a very dry journey.

Dawson finds there is a great deal of portentous quibbling in Whitewash, but precious little cogent criticism which stands up to close examination. As of he says of Henry Reynolds’ contribution (p.70): Reynolds’ silence in this official answer to Fabrications tacitly admits that the allegations are all true, but implies that he expects us all to acquiesce to his professorial disdain, disregard his falsehoods, fictions, fables, furphies, fantasies, fallacies and fabrications, and focus our attention on what he decides he should.
No politician, CEO, public servant or journalist could get away with a betrayal of trust of the order implied by Fabrication’s non-contested, non-retracted, non-corrected, non-acknowledged revelations.

It is very clear that the status games comes first, with questions of evidence strictly secondary.

Dawson assembles some priceless academic quotes. I particularly like this from Bain Attwood: that Windschuttle and Howard share an understanding of history as simply being composed of ‘the facts’ and assume there is an independent and objective perspective on the past. (p.69 n40).

Well, if not, why are we coerced into paying for these jokers? We can, after, make up our own historical fantasies for free. Instead, we get the academic never-never land that is the Australian Research Council.

The greatest victims of all this are indigenous Australians – for fantasy history backs up fantasy policy leading to real failure: to failed communities plagued by alcoholism, domestic violence, child abuse, shortened life expectancies.

My favourite weird flowering of the contemporary academic hothouse Dawson displays for us is one Greg Lehman who, on the basis of being 1/64th Aboriginal, claims to be Aboriginal. Clearly he believes this is an identity which gives him more academic street cred – that is, higher status. Lost up the proverbial post-modern, he declares I know they’ll hate this, but for me truth is simply a result of social negotiation (p.250).

Great, we can sack all academics and replace them with a skilled truth negotiators.

I have long felt that anyone who talks in the sad, loose way about there being not one truth, etc, should be responded by hitting them in the jaw, until they admit the very clear truth that they are being hit in the jaw. Dawson is a nicer man that me, and merely offers the image of crossing the road and negotiating truth with an oncoming truck.

Now, it is perfectly true that, poor things that we are, our grasp of the truth is irredeemably partial. But it is not irredeemably subjective. There is nothing usefully subjective about the oncoming truck.

There is quite a lot to laugh at, some to get cross at, but a lot more to get sad over, in Dawson’s depressing parade of academic legerdemain, circularity and fallacy where footnotes don’t mean what they say, where evidence can be conjured up (yes, but historians are always making up figures in Lyndal Ryan’s words [p.55 n95]), where the parade of lots of boo words is passed off as serious scholarship and history has dwindled in a private, academics-only, game sadly mired in a turgid, deadening, conformity.

Not a pretty sight but, thanks to Mr Dawson, a witty and revealing one.