If you’ve ever spent much time in Australia or followed Australian politics, you’ll have come across Quadrant, Australia’s major conservative publication. The editor since 2007 has been hard rightist Keith Windschuttle. Windschuttle started out socialist and steadily moved rightwards. His crowning glory is the book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One: Van Diemen’s Land 1803-1847 (2002), in which he accused some Australian historians of exaggeration and poor research into violence against Aboriginals.
Windschuttle’s tenure at Quadrant has been marked by two tendencies. The first is to critique his opponents for insufficient footnoting and ideological bias, and to rail against postmodernism and cultural studies in all their forms. The second has been to publish climate change scepticism and HIV denialism.
This odd combination of insisting that academics stick to the objective facts while publishing this kind of garbage has set Quadrant up for a solid fisking. Today, that fisking happened.
Margaret Simons at Crikey broke the story that someone using the pseudonym Sharon Gould had a hoax article published by Quadrant:
The Sharon Gould persona is entirely fictitious and the article is studded with false science, logical leaps, outrageous claims and a mixture of genuine and bogus footnotes.
“Gould’s” article uses a mélange of fact, misconstrued science and fiction masquerading as science to argue that science research, such as that behind genetically modified foods, should be above scrutiny by the media and the public. It criticizes the Rudd Government for “shameless populism” for inviting “ordinary” Australians to be part of the 2020 Summit.
The parallel to the Sokal hoax is immediately obvious (”Sharon Gould” even made a point of referring to it in her article). But “Sharon” clearly understood the significance of the Sokal Affair, where Windschuttle does not: Sokal didn’t just show the vacuousness of fashionable postmodernism - that was already evident - rather, he showed that in the absence of peer review and openness, ideologues can publish garbage. Which is precisely what Windschuttle has done.
Here’s hoping he starts checking his footnotes properly. I’m not holding my breath.
Full disclosure: Barry Saunders’ honors supervisor was professor John Hartley, with whom Keith Windschuttle has had a long, public animosity.
If you enjoyed this post, why not subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter? You might also consider making a donation to the Counterknowledge.com fighting fund.
Click here to sign up for free RSS updates.
Download the free 
Join 
16 responses
“to critique his opponents for insufficient footnoting and ideological bias, and to rail against postmodernism and cultural studies in all their forms.”
He’d love it here, then.
Quite frankly as an Australian I generally support Windschuttle. He is one of a few people in Australia who have stood up to the pseudohistory and revisionism that has been forced down Australian childrens’s throats over the last 25 years.
If you want clear examples of counterknowledge you need only look at education in Australia as a prime example.
That’s kinda the point. Windschuttle is as guilty of playing fast and loose with the facts to fit his worldview as anyone else. Quiggin has a good post about Windschuttle’s inability to back up his revised history of Australia with, uh, facts.
http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2009/01/07/the-great-windschuttle-hoax/
You’re just as guilty yourself there Barry! You claim Quiggin has a good post about Windschuttle’s inability to back up his revised history of Australia with facts, but when you read the blog the only ‘lack of fact’ that Quiggin picks up on is that Windschuttle hasn’t delievered a promised second volume of his book. The blog doesn’t support your point at all! Not one fact is refuted by Quiggin!
And It is you and Quiggin(?) who seem to be jumping to the conclusion that it was their blind ideology that led to poor editorial control. Again you have nothing to back you up. Biased they are/maybe. Poor editorial control seems to be shown, but one being the causation for the other is your unsupported assumption. You haven’t shown at all how one caused the other. It could have been just plain incompetence on their part without any misfeasance.
eh.. this site is asscoiated with Helen Darville, Dale, Demidenko is it?
which site is associated with Demidenko? She floats around the Oz blogosphere, but none of the sites linked to are associated with her as such. she blogs at, ah, http://skepticlawyer.com.au. She identifies as right-libertarian skeptic now, she’s involved with the libertarians at http://www.catallaxyfiles.com/blog/ and the people at http://clubtroppo.com.au/category/missing-link/
The point is that Windschuttle has been accusing everyone he disagrees with of acting in bad faith for years, while claiming to be objective. It doesn’t matter whether he was acting in bad faith or whether he is just incompetent (or both) - the point is that claiming to be objective and stringent doesn’t help you be one when you fail to check your facts, or provide them.
As for him not providing the promised book in which all the claimed facts will arrive, then putting it off and never delivering - that is a typical creationist/denialist tactic. Whether it’s because he never plans to write it or has simply failed to is immaterial. He is arguing on the basis of non-existent evidence.
oops, sorry, some odd italicizing there. I meant: claiming to be objective and stringent doesn’t help you actually be objective when you fail to check your facts, or provide them.
I would like to point out that this treatment could also have been applied, in his time, to William Cobbett’; not only was he apt to take all his opponents for unprincipled scoundrels, but he made some really remarkably silly statements. And yet, in most important things Cobbett was right and those he denounced, beginning with Hume, were not only wrong but often wrong on purpose and for ideological reasons. When you are fighting a consensus, you do not use flowers, and indeed you are not apt to be the kind of fellow who uses flowers. What is your objection to Windschuttle? His manners? But bad manners do not make counterknowledge. His opposition to consensus? Consensus is often the very mother and father (unmarried) of counterknowledge. That he tends to believe people who sound like they agree with him? So do you, and that does not make it counterknowledge. The man has made a fool of himself, But this does not prove that his views are wrong, let alone superstitious. Bad manners, and even occasional folly, do not come into the purview of what this site is supposed to be fighting, Were he as bad as Ann Coulter - which is plenty bad - it would still not be a proper subject for this blog, unless he were pushing some really absurd and evidently disproved nostrum; or unless counterknowledge.com had changed its mission statement to set itself up as a judge of manners. It sounds very much, in short, as though the fault of this man in your eyes is that he is a rancorous, fighting conservative opponent of a consensus that is as poisonous in Australia as in every other part of the West, and where, I can tell you, counterknowledge blossoms in a hundred rank and odious forms.
this is gotcha journalism at its word - `Crikey’ or whatever it’s name is, has every right to do it.
It doesn’t prove anything, however; it certainly doesn’t (necessarily) discredit `Quadrant’, any more than Jayson Blair discredited the `NY Times’ with his false reporting.
With respect to Windshuttle, I think there is a different agenda here.
Certainly, there is no `hoax’ involved in Windshuttle’s investigation of the claims of many Australian historians with respect to settlers’ treatment of aborginals.
I became aware of this some years ago, but from what I recall, Windshuttle had essentially exposed the documentary basis of the claims of widescale slaughter in the Tasmania province of aboriginals, as without foundation. that is, the testimony and other documentation from the time, showed that no such slaughters took place.
I followed the debate at the time; reading those who `refuted’ Windshuttle’s argument, I found that no `refutation’ took place. One historian even stated, in effect, `so there was no slaughter in Tasmania. This ignores the hundreds of other slaughters that took place…’
This is no refutation at all. Perhaps someone in the mean time has come with actual documentary evidence to show there were massacres. If so, I apologize in advance.
Again, however, it is no a hoax, and neither is the fact that Windshuttle has not followed up with books about the Queensland, New South Wales or other colonies, does not constitute a hoax either.
Again, it is dodgy as to whether this belongs on `Counterknowledge’ at all, especially given the axe-griding agenda apparent from the author.
thanks
I haven’t had time to read the article yet, but it would appear that this is not a clear repeat of the Sokal hoax. In that hoax a paper that was essentially complete gibberish wass submitted to an arts journal and the editors were dazzled by the fact that they had a scientist submitting a paper to them - even though they understood nothing of the contents of the paper. In the Quadrant case it appears that the article contained clear arguments and referenced, apparently accurately, the views and arguments of public figures. These were apparently used either as a stalking horse for the author’s intended coup or were consciously distorted by the author for that purpose. I tend to agree with Windschuttle that the article was simply fraudulent rather than it being an enlightening hoax.
For those who are not Australian it is worth learning a bit about Windschuttle and the left’s vendetta against him. He did indeed start out as a socialist, but then left the left after becoming disturbed about the dishonesty and distortions that he saw them perpetrating in fields such as history. This led to his publishing a re-appraisal, the first of a projected series, of the history of colonial interactions with the Tasmanian aborigines. An important theme of this study was that many prominent “progressive” historians were either simply fabricating evidence or wilfully misinterpreting and distorting evidence.
As a result the left viscerally hate Windschuttle - and they really are out to get him if they can and have run a vitriolic campaign over the last few years toward this end. I find it impossible not to view this incident and the comments being made on it by the left as anything other than a serious attempt at character assassination. It is part of a campaign to neutralise Windschuttle as a public intellectual. And the left in Australia has form in this regard - the smearing of Geoffrey Blainey and his subsequent forcing out of the University of Melbourne a number of years ago is a good example of this. When considering this apparent hoax this context should be kept in mind.
A further motive for the left is that they also dislike the fact of Quadrant’s very existence. They really, really hate the idea of the non-left having any voice at all.
On the theme of counterknowledge in Quadrant (which I strongly suspect the hoax does not fall in) I haven’t read the allegedly HIV/AIDS denying article, but I have skimmed one or two annoying articles by philosophers on evolution (in general I think philosophers are well advised not to try to do science at second hand - they are rarely good at it). It is worth taking the magazine to task for egregious counterknowledge, but to do it by a measured, rational and courteous response rather than by the partisan gloating and posturing we are seeing at the moment. Such an approach would benefit all of us.
It also shouldn’t be assumed that the publishing of an article means that the Quadrant editors agree with it. Under the previous editor, Paddy McGuinness, the magazine deliberately expanded its content to include what the editor thought were interesting articles that went against the editor’s own views. This seems to have been continued by Windschuttle in his tenure as editor.
One point on your article - why do you assume that “climate change denialism” - the phrase itself a rather vile rhetorical tactic of which you should be ashamed - is counterknowledge. I don’t particularly want to start a long argument about the topic here, but this simply is not counterknowledge - it is an area of real contention with ongoing research and discussion in the scientific community. To conflate this with “HIV denialism”, where there is as far as I know no such contention on the part of the research community, is at least disingenuous and, I think, contemptible. I’m afraid I have to agree with Wayne Whig’s observations about your axe-grinding agenda.
A correction to my comment above.
My quick reading of this article led me to think you wrote “climate change denialism” rather than “climate change skepticism” - you did not and for this I apologise. However, the the rest of that paragraph stands as is.
Windschuttle built his career on nit-picking. There is a good summary of the viciousness of the attacks on Lyndall Ryan (one of his targets) at Crikey. His acolytes at the Australian even tried to get her sacked from her university job. Windschuttle is an arsehole who deserves this. The fact that he was so deserving of it is what makes it news. As for Luke’s comment on how Windschuttle “is one of a few people in Australia who have stood up to the pseudohistory and revisionism that has been forced down Australian childrens’s throats over the last 25 years.”. Ahh… no Luke. Windschuttle would have us believe that Aboriginal prostitution caused their decline. As one commentator put it, this is a particularly vicious little argument, so totally unsupported by documentary evidence that you have to wonder how he got away with it. Well now we know.
an amusing, and revealing remark last:
*Windschuttle built his career on nit-picking. There is a good summary of the viciousness of the attacks on Lyndall Ryan (one of his targets) at Crikey. His acolytes at the Australian even tried to get her sacked from her university job. Windschuttle is an arsehole who deserves this. The fact that he was so deserving of it is what makes it news.*
Well, `nit-picking’, yes - also called `scholarly criticism.’ I will reissue the challenge from my earlier post:
Windshuttle exposed the lack of documentation for claims that white settlers comitted genocide against aboriginals in the Tasmanian territory: so far as I have read, no one (Lyndall Ryan included) has actually refuted these. Instead, Ryan and others launched `vicious attacks’ in place of scholarship; perhaps this is behind Windshuttle’s own counter-attacks (it was Ryan, I believe, who made the statement that, in effet, `So what if the Tasmanian massacres didn’t happen? There were hundreds of others…’, as though this is germane: talk about `Counterknowledge’)
Again, however, is someone has actually refuted what Windshuttle says, I would be glad to get the citation.
Windschuttle did expose not ‘lack of nitpicking’ but actual fabrication by Lyndall Ryan and Henry Reynolds. The counterattacks from the left’ led by Robert Manne have not changed that fact. What this hoax represents is a successful form of ‘poisoning the well’, as a result of which left-minded people can in good heart dismiss the inconvenient exposure of lies being part of the politicised history literature.
For all defending Windschuttle I noticed you seemed to be totally unaware of the significant data showing Windscuttle distorting and in my opinion lying. As for him proving ‘fabrication” only in the minds of true believers.
Incoming links from other sites