According to Manne, Keith Windschuttle argues that escalating violence in Tasmania in the 1820s ‘had nothing to do with’ escalating white settlement. The truth is, as I state in Washout: ‘Fabrication doesn’t dispute that white occupation increased frontier violence, rather it presents a different interpretation of the nature of that violence.’

According to Manne, James Boyce’s ‘brilliant’ essay shows that ‘Windschuttle is almost entirely unacquainted with the history of early Tasmania’. (Presumably, Fabrication’s 1000 footnotes citing 240 publications constitute the ‘almost’.) The truth is that Boyce’s bluff and bluster about the ‘hole of such magnitude’ in Fabrication’s bibliography names only a dozen or so publications, and hardly any of them can be found in the orthodox historians’ bibliographies, either. Leaving aside the erroneously interpreted evidence of Rosalie Hare, they yield three Aboriginal fatalities.

According to Manne, I am ‘incapable of seeing’ how Boyce’s argument undermines Windschuttle’s case by pointing out ‘the relative peacefulness of early settlement’. The truth is I am indeed ‘incapable of seeing’ how the relative peacefulness of Tasmania from 1803 to 1823, coupled with Boyce’s observation that during the ‘Black War’ from 1824 Aborigines were more effective combatants than whites, produces a ‘bloody story’ of extermination that leaves Fabrication ‘in tatters’.

According to Manne, I ‘obsessively’ use Ryan’s ‘conscious policy of genocide’ quote. The truth is that I distance other historians from Ryan’s statement and explain why attempts such as Manne’s to excuse it won’t wash. Manne is wrong when he insists that Ryan’s book ‘uses the word genocide only once’. It uses it three times explicitly, and she implies it constantly.

According to Manne, my ‘anti-postmodernist rant’ falsely targets Whitewash academics who are, with the exception of Greg Lehman, ‘almost stubbornly traditional’. The truth is that I repeatedly acknowledge that the academics Manne mentions are not postmodernists, and draw a clear distinction between them and the ‘new breed’ of historian such as Lehman.

While Manne makes sport of Washout’s first-printing typos, he steers clear of the substantive findings of its seven chapters: ‘The Catches’, e.g., how Boyce misrepresents Windschuttle and contradicts himself; ‘The Fabrications’, e.g., how Henry Reynolds says nothing to rebut revelations of his fabrications; ‘The Rationalisations’, e.g. how Shayne Breen tags the 1820s colonists with Social Evolution theory formulated by Darwin and Spencer in the 1850s; ‘The Fictions’, e.g., how Ryan digs the hole in her credibility ever deeper; ‘The Chorus’, e.g., how academics try to silence their critics; ‘The Fallacies’, e.g., how Mark Finnane manipulates figures and Dirk Moses concocts comparisons; and ‘The Fantasies’, e.g., how the new breed ‘conjure up’ history.

When Australia’s ‘leading public intellectual’ evades so much, manipulates so blatantly and is so cavalier with the truth, we can only behold how low our intellectual culture has descended.

John Dawson, McKinnon, Vic.

 Rocking the boat

Dear Editor,

Robert Manne’s article about John Dawson’s Washout: On the Academic Response to the Fabrication of Aboriginal History (ABR, May 2005) shouldn’t have got a run in a magazine that claims to review books. The piece spent more time attacking the author than critiquing his book or its ideas, calling Dawson ‘heroically unperceptive’ and having ‘an almost uncanny ability to grasp any stick placed in front of him by the wrong end’. Manne even has the cheek to call Dawson ‘a partisan’ who came to the issue ‘with his mind already closed’, though his own head-kicking suggests that he has anything but an open mind. All submitted ‘reviews’ filled with personal attacks on authors should go back to the writer with the instruction: address the book and the ideas the book raises.

My other worry is that Manne seems to find controversial ideas irritating instead of stimulating. For example, he starts his refutation of one of Dawson’s arguments by saying, ‘the implausibility of his claim is obvious’. Why? In this instance, I agreed with the point Manne made, but I didn’t think it was obvious – it required knowledge of the attitudes and actions of Aborigines over a century ago. I suspect Manne didn’t really think the answer was obvious; he just said so to discourage people from asking awkward questions.

Like trees, ideas need to take a buffeting, so they can either put down roots or fall over. Screening orthodox liberal thinking about ‘sensitive’ issues like the mistreatment of Australia’s Aborigines from debate by personally insulting critics only serves the liberal viewpoint in the short term. In the long term, it produces conformist thinkers who adhere to ideas because they don’t want to rock the boat and fear career-damaging personal criticism. Rocking the boat is essential to enlightened thought, and every time we get grumpy with boat-rockers and put them down personally, we surrender to the most infantile, prejudiced part of our minds.

Mike Houghton, suburb, Vic.

Paucity of women

Dear Editor,

In the April issue, ‘Advances’ bemoaned the lack of letters you receive from women and asked for a response on why this is so. I think there are two reasons: 1. most women don’t have time; 2. most women would rather use their energy on other things.

With reference to point 1: I am atypical, I guess, in that I am unmarried, young, have no children and hold a professional job. However, it still seems that I have a never-ending list of things to do. How many men have to shop, cook, clean, pay household bills, remember family birthdays ... and this list doesn’t include anything to do with child-raising. Despite four decades of ‘second wave’ feminism, it is the women in most of the couples my age (and older) that I know that shoulder most of the burden for household-running tasks.

With reference to point 2: If I have a choice between writing to a journal and (judging from most of the letters in your last issue) either browbeating or point scoring from other contributors; or writing or calling someone I know, in most cases (this letter excepted), I prefer to spend time on the latter. I hope this inspires some other women to write in.

Melinda Denham, West Brunswick, Vic.

Privileging the literary

Dear Editor,

John Rickard’s review of Patrick White’s The Ham Funeral (ABR, May 2005) takes issue with some of the comments I made in my review of the production in The Age on April 11. He is right, in a sense, to question whether White’s theatre was in fact ‘the road not taken’ by Australian drama, although this would emphatically have seemed to be the case when the New Wave of Australian drama began its work at La Mama and the Nimrod Theatre nearly twenty years after White’s first play was written, or even earlier, when Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll appeared. White’s expressionistic style – something that Leonard Radic maintained makes him a playwright written about far more than he is performed – his symbolism and anti-naturalism, allied him with a European tradition that seemed anathema to the larrikin realism of most New Wave plays.

Interestingly, White’s line of descent, if we can call it that, runs through several Australian women playwrights, feminists who also saw themselves marginalised by a masculinist national culture. Dorothy Hewett, Alma de Groen and Jennie Kemp employ poetry, symbolism, dream, myth, psychoanalysis and paintings to depict female desire in particular, but also often the female artist, and the problem of becoming subject not object in life and art. Kemp, in particular, explores Jungian ideas and images in her complex and richly suggestive plays such as Call of the Wild, The Black Sequin Dress, Remember and Still Angela. But their project was above all radically feminist and therefore intensely political.

These playwrights have indeed ‘moved on’ from the position occupied by White in 1947, even if they employ some aspects of his expressionism. Michael Kantor’s postmodern approach to The Ham Funeral abandons much of White’s symbolic logic (such as his deliberate layering of the set into upper and lower levels, representing the psychoanalytic hierarchy of body, mind and anima), and embraces a more heterogeneous style that even includes a touch of cabaret in the scavenging street women. This in turn weakens the play’s irony, its saving grace (along with its magnificent language) and all that finally redeems the young man and his cultural pretensions.

It was a brave move to choose White’s earliest but by no means best play, one that signalled his lifelong rebellion against cultural conformity. It is a powerful correlative to the new Malthouse declarations of difference in their new programming. Its artistic success, however, remains problematical, but at the very least it is providing an opportunity for Melburnians at large, and particularly younger theatre-goers, to see this landmark play. Whether it is ‘canonical’, it seems to me, depends on judgment that privileges the literary over the dramatic.

Helen Thomson, Glen Iris, Vic.

Indonesian clanger

Dear Editor,

Though broadly accurately describing Anthony Reid’s An Indonesian Frontier: Acehnese and Other Histories of Sumatra, John Monfries’ review (ABR, May 2005) clangs on a few points. The appeal of Reid’s book is based on him being the world’s premier historian of Aceh, especially following the tragic death of Isa Sulamein in the Boxing Day tsunami. A further part of the appeal of Reid’s work is that there is simply so little available on Acehnese history, or that of Sumatra more generally. It is therefore a rare work on an increasingly observed subject.

Monfries appears bemused by Reid’s ‘telling’ use of the term national ‘project’, yet this has been a commonplace among Indonesianists since the state came under internal challenge from 1999. Monfries further misinterprets Reid on Aceh’s involvement in the Darul Islam rebellion of the 1950s, which Monfries says was purely Islamic. While underpinned by Islamic association, the rebellion was in direct response to Aceh’s loss of provincial status and the ending of Indonesian federalism.

Similarly, Monfries’ claim that the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) is ‘assertively Muslim’ is incorrect. Virtually all GAM members are devout Muslims, but, observed by one who knows the organisation fairly well, GAM is an explicitly nationalist movement and formally opposes the current imposition of Islamic law (syariah).

Damien Kingsbury, Brunswick, Vic.

Helen Ennis replies to Juno Gemes

Dear Editor,

I was intrigued to read that Juno Gemes (‘Letters’, ABR, May 2005) considers images of social dissent to be rarities in my book Intersections, recently published by the National Library of Australia. It obviously depends on exactly how one defines dissent. I responded to it in broad terms: to encompass the work of indigenous photographers (Ricky Maynard, Destiny Deacon), wilderness photography (Peter Dombrovskis), social activism and social comment (Ern McQuillan’s photographs of the anti-Vietnam demonstrations and Matthew Sleeth on Timor) and much more. It would be far too tedious to list all the examples that I think qualify – in the exhibitions In a New Light and the book on which they were based – but, rest assured, I do take social engagement and the representations of it very seriously. So does the National Library; it aims to cover the varied forms of activist politics occurring around Australia, and often despatches its own photographers to gather appropriate images.

It was never the intention that Intersections would be filled with known and predictable imagery and comforting viewpoints about Australian history and politics. That is why so many of the photographs reproduced have never been published before, and why, as Julie Robinson perceptively noted in her review of Intersections (ABR, March 2005), I eschewed the conventional approaches of art history and social history in favour of ‘a more fluid and creative approach’. My hope is that people will be amazed not only by the photographs in the National Library’s collection (this is the first book to look at it in depth) but also the power of their own responses to them.

Gemes was incredulous that I referred to documentary photography as ‘describing the real’, but context here, as always, is crucially important. It bears reiterating that Intersections deals with the National Library’s photography collection: for libraries around the world, ideas about visual accuracy and authenticity remain crucial, despite the prevalence of postmodern theory and digital photography.

Finally, I disagree with Gemes that ‘a snapshooter in photography is the same as a finger painter to Matisse’. As I see it, the National Library’s collection proves otherwise, with its complex layers of professional and vernacular imagery. In the visitors’ books to each exhibition, innumerable comments were made about the energy and interest of ‘ordinary’ images made by ‘ordinary’ people. Perhaps it is here that dissent really flourishes – challenging orthodoxies about who is qualified to visually represent Australian history and about what should be represented.

Helen Ennis, Canberra, ACT

Nitpickingia academentia

Dear Editor,

Having read, enjoyed and loaned to interested friends Gisela Kaplan’s Australian Magpie: Biology and Behaviour of an Unusual Songbird (reviewed by Nick Drayson in ABR, March 2005), I was surprised to read Andrew Ley’s criticism (Letters, ABR, April 2005), until I recognised the species to which it belongs: Nitpickingia academentia. Let the academics squabble to their hearts’ content over typos and minor errors of fact, I say, while we backyard bird-lovers continue to enjoy Kaplan’s bird books, including the wonderful children’s book Famous Australian Birds.

We backyarders read Australian Magpie to learn more about the birds we observe and relate to: the morning songsters; the garden-strutters, Martha and Mitch; Sore-eye who strides into a neighbour’s living room demanding a treat, while his mob hangs about on the pathway …

Kaplan writes that her book ‘aims to make this special Australian more accessible to the many people who have an abiding interest in magpies’, and, for me and my neighbours, she achieves that aim well. She has a particular ability to make accessible to a general readership the fruits of scientific research (although it is a pity that some of that research involves killing and dissecting birds and invading their nests with tiny cameras). Her book answers many of the questions that arise from our observation of local birds, and gives us insights that enrich our own observations. Most importantly, she communicates a real love of and respect for these birds. A highlight of the book is the set of joyful photographs on page 123, which, as she writes, illustrate ‘the gentle and loving nature of magpies’.

Janet Grevillea, Wangi Wangi, NSW