Too Cowardly To Defend Cowardice

GETTING ON for 10 years ago, Keith Windschuttle published a book, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, which prompted a reaction that was quite astonishing. The author’s crime was to highlight the slack and often imaginative, er,  scholarship which produced a vast bulk of titles devoted to the proposition that Australia’s early history was an endless bloodbath of genocidal racist savagery. By the simple expedient of going to the expounders of that view’s cited sources and checking them against their recappings, Windschuttle was able to demonstrate that a number of the country’s most prominent historians were inclined to play very fast and loose with both primary sources and the truth.  One need not have an opinion on the extent of white imperialist bloodlust to appreciate the author’s sleuthing, which demonstrated many things sadly amiss atop the ivory tower. As Windschuttle put it, the near-universal view amongst those who teach the young was that white Australians, regardless of how many generations had passed since an ancestor stepped ashore, need to be regarded as “a kind of a vermin that arrived after 1788 along with the rabbit, the common starling and the fox.”

The reaction to Windschuttle’s book confirmed this impression in spades. Rather than demand retractions and corrections, those who dwell in the closed little world of approved academic thought rose as one to denounce the man who dared to question their mates. It was a vicious, unrelenting and spiteful campaign, one that saw every available asset brought to bear on the smearing and shunning of Windschuttle and the blanket dismissal of his book.  As you might imagine, Robert Manne was at the forefront of the charge, there being no show without Punch, as they say.

Manne’s part in the slag-a-thon was particularly low and sleazy. In December, not long after Fabrication appeared, he compiled a dossier that purported to chronicle examples of Windschuttle’s alleged plagiarism. He fed this to a young, eager and ideological sound Age reporter by name of  Misha Ketchell, who would follow the approved pathways of a luvvy on the rise and build a nice media career for himself. From the Age to Media Watch and Crikey, Ketchell now roosts at The Conversation, where many cynical souls believe he is merely resting until the ABC’s head of Current Affairs, Bruce Belsham, has paid lip service to the advertised selection process and installed him as  Jonathan Green’s successor in the editor’s office at The Drum. There are standards to maintain at the national broadcaster, and Ketchell’s record and connections suggest he is just the man to observe them.

The Age published Manne’s accusations on the front page beneath Ketchell's proud byline -- the muscle behind the intended knock-out blow to Windschuttle’s research and credibility being the quoted opinion of American academic Robert Edgerton that Windschuttle had ripped off his work without attribution. Edgerton formed this view not on the basis of a direct comparison between his book and Windschuttle’s, but via the Manne dossier, which turned out to be rather heavily doctored.

Manne and Ketchell, the useful tool, also extracted an initial condemnation of Windschuttle from the Parkville Asylum’s Andrew Alexandra, an authority on plagiarism quoted in that first round of muck-flinging as regarding Windschuttle’s academic standards as “pretty slipshod.” As with Edgerton, Ketchell had sent him only Manne’s deviously twisted summary of Windschuttle’s alleged crimes.

Subsequent to the front-page hit piece, both Edgerton and Alexandra examined Fabrication, checked its footnotes and very hastily retracted their criticisms with profuse apologies. Here is what Alexandra wrote in a letter to the SMH: 

"I have now looked over Windschuttle's book, where extensive referencing to the sources for the relevant factual claims is to be found. Therefore, I apologise unreservedly to Keith Windschuttle for making the incorrect claim that he had not provided adequate referencing for such factual claims, and for any adverse inferences concerning his professional integrity that might have been made on the basis of that claim."

What makes all this ancient history worth recapping is Fairfax’s apparent non-reaction reaction to Economics Editor Ross Gittins’ transcription and re-publication of unattributed mega-chunks from a recent OECD publication. Gittins’ masters appear to have decided he did nothing wrong, as his most recent column appeared on Monday, as scheduled. The sole hint of a suggestion – and it appeared only in the Silly version of the column -- that Gittins might have been been asked to explain himself was an opaque rejection in the second paragraph of the charge that he is a lazy, light-fingered lifter of other people’s work. If you do not read the blogs, you would not know what Gittins was talking about (not that there is anything unusual about that, mind you).

The real shame in this instance belongs not to Gittins, a pompous hack too weary to think for himself and for whom pity is the appropriate response, but with his employer’s embrace of jaw-dropping inconsistency as its guiding principle on the subject of what is, and is not, plagiarism. As Windschuttle painstakingly documents and explains in a minutely detailed response to Fabrication’s Manne-fabricated  furor, Fairfax reporters displayed a unique talent for extracting damning quotes where other publications found only exoneration: 

The Age published [Alexandra’s] apology in its letters page, but did not give it any prominence. Despite the fact that Manne’s accusation had been a page one story, The Age did not accompany this letter with any follow-up news story. Moreover, The Age declined to publish a letter I had written to the editor about this matter.

A few days later, when The Australian newspaper contacted Edgerton himself at the University of California, Los Angeles, he denied the plagiarism charge. “I do not regard Windschuttle’s work as plagiarism and do not believe that he needed to cite me more than he did,” Edgerton told the newspaper.

However, the Sydney Morning Herald also contacted Edgerton and reported a different response. “It is true that Windschuttle several times paraphrases me in what could be seen as soft plagiarism,” the Herald reported him saying. But in a letter to me on January 24 2003, Edgerton denied he had said this: “I told them I wanted nothing to do with the issue and that I saw no wrongdoing on your part. They even misquoted me. When I was asked if I thought you had engaged in ‘soft plagiarism’ I emailed a reply that said, ‘perhaps but I can’t say because I don’t know what the term means’.” 

So, when Fairfax encounters a person whose work and views it finds disagreeable, the full arsenal of immoral and unethical weaponry is brought to bear in the cause of character assassination. But when one of its own columnists engages in plagiarism, not a whisper, let alone a front-page shout.

The incident and the inconsistency between then and now says much about Fairfax, none of it flattering. And perhaps it also explains something else – the generally kind view Fairfax writers often take of alternative medicine. With all those necks twisted so far and hard in order to avoid recognising the obscenely obvious, the company must surely be keeping an army of osteopaths and chiropractors in full-time work.