To anyone acquainted with Australian anthropological writing over the past two decades, Sandall’s is a familiar refrain. Numerous anthropologists have noted how official policies have required Aboriginals to live up to stereotypically romantic images of themselves that originated in the European colonial imagination. These images place Aboriginals in an eternal pre-contact idyll that remains inexplicably impervious to what Justice Olney, in dismissing the Yorta Yorta people’s recent native-title claim, termed ‘the tide of history’. The result is a pernicious two-way loss whereby Aboriginals’ adaptation to the dominant culture, a process that is necessary for their survival as an independent people, becomes proof that they have surrendered their identity. Anthropologists such as Jeremy Beckett, Sandall’s senior colleague in the anthropology department at Sydney University, Gillian Cowlishaw and Andrew Lattas, who were also from that department, Marcia Langton, John Morton and others have been making this point since the 1980s, as have non-anthropologists such as the geographer Jane Jacobs and Aboriginal scholars from a range of disciplines: the historian Tony Birch, the sociologist Ian Anderson, the legal scholar Wayne Atkinson and the anthropologist Langton, to name but a few. The principal difference between these scholars’ analysis of the situation and that of Sandall is not the problem of romantic primitivism, which had been commonplace for many years before Sandall discovered it, but its implications. Whereas anthropologists who worked with Aboriginal people in the field were in a position to report on the destructive effects of official policies that required Aboriginals to live up to impossible fantasies about themselves, Sandall blames Aboriginal people for having these fantasies imposed upon them, his remedy being a return to one of the most discredited and diplomatically incriminating chapters in our history: the policy of Aboriginal assimilation.

The derivative analysis and regressive politics of Sandall’s book are by no means its only defects. It is, in fact, a very poor book indeed. Sandall’s scurrilous personal attacks on a number of distinguished thinkers – in particular Raymond Williams, who is dead and unable to respond – are truly shameful. Why, then, take up valuable journal space (let alone valuable reading time) by discussing such a book? Isn’t it the case that there is no such thing as bad publicity? Whilst I acknowledge the dilemma, the book has been treated to an orchestrated chorus of praise from a small but powerful group of right-wing ideologues. To pass over defective writing in the silence that it deserves would be to leave the field to them. Moreover, beyond the failings of a single book, there lies the troubling national issue of how easy it is to gain public prominence by denigrating Aboriginals.

To start with the book itself before moving on to the campaign to promote it: by academic standards, both the method and the level of argument are bizarrely inadequate. A distinctive feature is the slender evidence that the book presents for Sandall’s having read the texts on which he pronounces. Rather, he relies on secondary accounts: Paul Johnson on Rousseau, Michael Ignatieff on Isaiah Berlin, Ernest Gellner on Wittgenstein, and Fred Inglis on Raymond Williams. The more absurd the reduction, the more hyperbolic Sandall’s praise for it. Consider, for instance, the following: ‘With awesome panache Gellner says that the whole of [Wittgenstein’s] the Tractatus can be summed up in a single proposition: “There is no such thing as culture”.’ A related characteristic is the citation of ludicrously insubstantial – often anonymous – sources for major claims. Take, for example, the ‘one Aborigine’ on page 6, ‘a young man’ of page 20, or the single edition of National Geographic of pages 152–3.

Sandall’s book abounds with propositional defects such as these. It is also inconsistent when it comes to factual detail. For instance, despite attributing romantic primitivism to the Cynics and ‘designer tribalism’ to Plato, his repeated insistence that romantic primitivism originated with Rousseau is a facile cliché of pop ideography. In terms of the Enlightenment philosophes alone, if one had to nominate a single classic source for the doctrine, Denis Diderot’s acerbic D’Alembert’s Dream would have priority over the writings of Rousseau. To trace its ideological journey historically, rather than contenting himself with the crudest of caricatures of the ancients, Sandall had only to look up ‘Noble Savage’ in a library catalogue to find works such as Hoxie Neale Fairchild’s The Noble Savage: A Study in Romantic Naturalism (1961). A little more work would have brought him to Charles Frankel’s 1948 classic The Faith of Reason: The Idea of Progress in the French Enlightenment. Even in the more particular context of European colonialism (and given his preference for secondary sources), he could have followed the romantic-primitivist genre from Columbus on with the help of any number of well-known accounts of the historical representation of Native Americans, e.g. Robert Berkhofer’s The White Man’s Indian (1978).

Texts such as these, of whose mere existence Sandall betrays not the slightest awareness, are not specialised, obscure or esoteric. On the contrary, they are among the standard introductions, the preliminary ground that a novice covers before commencing an investigation. An undergraduate essay on the topic which failed to discuss them would lose marks accordingly. Thus it is ironic that Nicolas Rothwell should have dubbed Sandall’s book ‘the summation of a life’s thinking about the place of tribal culture in today’s world’, since Sandall can only have been thinking – he certainly has not been doing much reading. The extravagant plaudits that Sandall’s book has received from the likes of Rothwell and Ron Brunton illustrate how easy it is to succeed as a right-wing intellectual in Australia. By what conceivable intellectual standard, for instance, are we expected to overlook the inanity of statements such as the following: ‘Cultures are good: civilisation is bad. Those six words tell all you need to know about the moral judgments we have inherited from Herder and Rousseau’?

Mention of Rothwell takes us to the campaign to promote Sandall’s book. In an adulatory review in the opinion section of The Weekend Australian, Rothwell claimed that the book had been ‘blackballed’ by the Culture Cult. Though its ideas were ‘jaw-dropping’, the most startling thing about the book was Sandall’s ‘inability to get his theories published or even distributed in his own country’. Sinister stuff, indeed. Sandall himself, writing in The Age, asserted that the book was written under contract to Macleay Press in Sydney. According to Rothwell, however, the book ‘was offered unsuccessfully to local publishers before being released in the USA and making something of a splash in New York’s neo-conservative intellectual circles, where it has been taken up as the latest piece of unconventional Australian brilliance’. ‘New York’s neo-conservative intellectual circles’ is code here for the far-right journal New Criterion. A path had earlier been beaten to the door of this journal by Keith Windschuttle, whose endorsement of Sandall’s book features on its back cover, and whose contribution to Australian frontier historiography has been compared to David Irving’s contribution to Holocaust historiography.

Rothwell’s dark hinting at Orwellian suppression raises some obvious questions. Is he suggesting that right-wing Australian publishers – the Institute of Public Affairs, for instance, who publish the work of Sandall’s ideological fellow-traveller Brunton, and whose standards could hardly be called exacting – refused the book? We may never know. It is, however, noticeable that Sandall’s book fails to cite or mention Brunton. This is the case even though the book deals at some length with the Hindmarsh Island bridge affair, in which Brunton figured prominently. This curious omission could suggest that Sandall does not count Brunton as an anthropologist. A tactical decision to emphasise independence is more likely, however. For Sandall to have been published by the IPA might have looked collusive. As it is, adopting a posture of airy detachment, the ever-reliable Brunton could echo Rothwell’s approval of the book (albeit in a more qualified manner) a few days after Rothwell, and again in the pages of The Australian. Even The Age followed belatedly in The Australian’s footsteps, according Sandall’s book pride of place in its Saturday Extra supplement under the flattering subheading of ‘Roger Sandall’s theory [my emphasis] on designer tribalism’.

In a manner reminiscent of Sandall, Brunton writes: ‘Jaded clerics, whose faith has long ebbed away, discover a profound spirituality in Aboriginal religious beliefs’, ‘bureaucratic, legal and social incentives – including requirements necessary for successful land rights claims – have induced the retribalisation of some previously assimilated Aboriginals’. In echoing Sandall, however, Brunton was merely returning a favour. For, despite Sandall’s silence in regard to him, Brunton had anticipated Sandall’s allegation that the Culture Cult transmitted romantic primitivism to Aboriginals, most notably in regard to the Coronation Hill mining enquiry and the Hindmarsh Island bridge affair. Unsavoury though Brunton’s writing on Aboriginal matters is, though, even he does not sink to the invective of Sandall who asserts that, according to the received anthropological understanding of culture, ‘picking the finest string quartet, picking tomatoes, and a politician caught thoughtfully picking his nose are all regarded as much the same thing’.

A further feature of Sandall’s writing is a persistent tendency to rebound on itself. Take, for instance, his attack on anthropology. Though dismissing the modern discipline out of hand, Sandall relies on his own anthropological credentials to lend intellectual respectability to his book. One has to go no further than the cover blurb for evidence of the awkwardness in which this contradiction involves him. Though described as a writer rather than an anthropologist (which, on the book’s own terms, would be to discredit him as a bohemian romantic), he is not just any old writer, but a writer who wants it both ways: ‘Roger Sandall is a writer who recently retired as Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney, Australia.’ This vulnerability to his own polemic, which recurs throughout the book, is particularly striking when Sandall’s end-of-career resentment at anthropologists’ failure to acknowledge his worth is projected onto his various nemeses. The bohemian theories of Rousseau and Herder, for instance, are attributed to the suspicion that ‘France was not giving them the honour which was their due’. The most striking instance of Sandall’s falling victim to his own trap is, however, the very trait for which the book has received its ill-deserved publicity. On inspection, his much-touted hostility to traditional Aboriginal culture is not a core feature of the book at all, but a spin-off from his resentful attack on a profession that undervalued his talents. In an interview on Radio National’s ‘Life Matters’ programme on 25 June 2001, Sandall confided to Geraldine Doogue that the Aboriginal material, which makes up the first chapter, had not originally been in the book and that he had only included it at the behest of his publisher. Without detracting from the publisher’s Pythagorean eye for a promising angle, it seems that there is more to the story than this. For Sandall was not always hostile to traditional Aboriginal culture. During the 1960s and 1970s, he even made a living from it as an ethnographic film-maker. In fact, the cultural material that he filmed was so traditional that the distribution of some of his films was restricted on the ground that the rituals depicted were secret-sacred and should not be made public. In the event, Sandall’s attitude to traditional Aboriginal culture came to evince the self-same characteristic as his attitude to anthropology. In both cases, he came to bite the hand that had fed him. This may be excusable. Under the circumstances, it could even be understandable. It does not constitute a theory.

Rothwell depicts Sandall as a victim of censorship who wants no more than the chance to present and defend his views. Nothing could be further from the truth. So far as I can discover, no anthropologist in Australia was given the opportunity to blackball the manuscript of Sandall’s book. As if radio interviews, opinion-page columns and Saturday Extra front pages were not enough, Sandall was invited, at some months’ notice, to participate in a public forum devoted to his book, which is to take place at this year’s annual conference of the Australian Anthropological Society, to be held in September. Most anthropologists would kill for this kind of exposure. The few scholars to be favoured with such opportunities often cross the globe to take them up. Sandall declined the invitation, claiming that his book was not, after all, about anthropology.

The appearance of this book is a significant event in Australian publishing. Its significance does not, however, reside in its intrinsic merits, which are conspicuous by their absence. Rather, like some protocols of the elders of anthropology, the book’s significance is extrinsic. Its extravagant reception should serve to alert us to the power that right-wing organisations can exert over the channels that inform Australian public opinion. This is especially the case when the ultimate target of their propaganda is a disempowered racial minority.