When an opinion piece by Windschuttle appeared in the Australian, three academics wrote to complain that he'd been 'given space to attack the credibility of major Australian historians.' Some 30 of their colleagues have attacked Windschuttle's credibility, and his conclusions, in opinion pieces, book reviews, online forums, public debates, conferences and three books: Frontier Conflict, edited by historians Bain Attwood and Stephen Foster The History Wars, by historians Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, and Whitewash, edited by political scientist and commentator Robert Manne. By the time the book was published last December, enraged historians and social scientists were already on the counterattack. In the halls of academe, those assertions went down like a grenade at a garden party. The main killers of Aborigines were diseases to which isolation had made them fatally vulnerable, and the loss of women who were traded to or abducted by whites.

The real story, he argues, is there was neither organized resistance nor attempted extermination. Since the errors all tilt one way, Windschuttle concludes that they're deliberate - made by left-wing historians eager to cast whites as colonial oppressors and blacks as heroic freedom fighters. Numbers are conjured out of thin air, quotations misleadingly edited, tall tales presented as fact. With forensic thoroughness, Windschuttle exhumes the footnotes of several influential histories and finds, in dozens of cases, that the evidence has been tampered with. But in The Fabrication of Aboriginal History Volume 1: Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847, he argues that it is a myth. Keith Windschuttle used to believe the 'genocide' story, he says. Referring to the bicentenary of settlement last week, Tasmanian Aboriginal leader Michael Mansell said: 'The British had more impact on Aborigines than the Holocaust had on the Jews.'

That story, shorthanded as genocide in the media and many history books, exerts a dark hold on the Australian imagination and haunts indigenous politics to this day. Most historians blame their demise on the British: the settlers invaded the Aborigines' land the Aborigines waged a 'Black War' of resistance the settlers did their best to exterminate the Aborigines the settlers won.

Follow killed the Tasmanian Aborigines? When British colonists arrived in 1803, the island's indigenous people numbered a few thousand.

The History Wars by Stuart Macintyre