‘For more than half a century, one of Australia’s most prominent historians, Keith Windschuttle, demonstrated how large parts of Australian historiography abandoned evidence in favour of politically useful invention.’
Robert Hill, Quadrant, Jan 17 2026
History is not a matter of feeling. It is constrained by numbers, capacity, logistics, and human organisation. When those constraints are discarded, history is not reinterpreted; it is fabricated.
For more than half a century, one of Australia’s most prominent historians, Keith Windschuttle, demonstrated how large parts of Australian historiography abandoned evidence in favour of politically useful invention. He showed how, once facts become inconvenient, they are quietly replaced with conjecture, inflation, and narrative assertion. The result is not a difference of emphasis, but the construction of an entirely fictitious past.
The modern claim that Australia was “invaded” in 1788 is sustained only by redefining invasion until it means nothing at all. It survives only by emptying the word invasion of all meaning and redeploying it as a delegitimising device: a term used not to describe what occurred, but to imply that the British settlement itself was unlawful or morally void from the outset.