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Historical error versus historical invention: A reply to stuart macintyre and patricia grimshaw on the fabrication of aboriginal history

IN HIS RESPONSE to the Fabrication of Aboriginal History in the April 2004 edition of this journal, Stuart Macintyre acknowledges some of my book's claims about the historiography of race relations in Tasmania are plausible. He notes I have found historians have provided inadequate or non-existent evidence, they have relied on dubious second and third-hand accounts, they have confused names and places, and have exaggerated and misinterpreted . the sources. 'I am persuaded,' Macintyre writes, 'that some of these claims are justified'. Nonetheless, he does not discuss the particular points he finds proven nor how their inadequacies might affect the received interpretation of Aboriginal history. Rather than accept my claim of concerted invention, he suggests all historians are fallible and make mistakes. Macintyre says that even when he has checked his own work he has found that 'every tenth quote has lost a phrase, and every tenth reference has conflated the source or specified the wrong page'. Ten per cent seems to me an extraordinarily high error rate, unacceptable in most professions, but I do not want to dispute this disclosure. In fact, given the errors Macintyre makes in discussing my own work, his confession is credible. Macintyre says the tally of Tasmanian Aboriginal killings in Fabrication must be inadequate since it is based on an earlier survey by Brian Plomley, which did not attempt an exhaustive count. However, my own survey was not 'based on' that of Plomley. I explained my method clearly. I did my own independent archival research, which included checking all Plomley's claims, the same as I checked those of Lyndall Ryan, Henry Reynolds, Lloyd Robson and others. The outcome, however, was that Plomley's results were similar to mine: the credible evidence suggests the Aboriginal death toll was comparatively low and that many more settlers died by violence than Aborigines. Macintyre also reports me saying that since the Aborigines had no word for land, they had no notion of territory. This is the error of 'nominalism', he claims. The error, however, is Macintyre's. Patricia Grimshaw makes the same mistake. My argument is that the Aborigines did have a notion of territory but not of the exclusive use of that territory. That is, they had no concept of trespass to explain their violence against the colonists. My overall case against the 'guerrilla