Windschuttle argues that the principles of the Enlightenment, fused with the 19th century evangelical revival within the Church of England and Britain's rule of law had a profound effect on colonial policy and behaviour, which was humane and just, that together made the claimed genocide culturally impossible.

Announcing the publication, Windschuttle claimed that the film Rabbit-Proof Fence had misrepresented the child removal at the centre of the story.

In his The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, the first book of a projected multi-volume examination of frontier encounters between white colonizers and Aborigines, Windschuttle criticizes the last 3 decades of historical scholarship which had challenged the traditional view of Aboriginal passivity in the face of European colonisation.

Windschuttle did not claim that women had been sold ' into prostitution ' but that they were, as Breen admits, traded as commodities.

Manne, who called the book ‘ one of the most implausible, ignorant and pitiless books about Australian history written for many years ’, himself summed up the case against Windschuttle, noting that Windschuttle's evidence for Aboriginal deaths is derived from a scholar, Plomley, who denied that any estimate for them could be made from the documentary record ; that a scrupulous conservative scholar, H. A. Willis, using exactly the same sources as Windschuttle, came up with a figure of 188 violent deaths, and another 145 rumoured deaths ; that Windschuttle's method excludes deaths of aborigines who were wounded, and later died ; that all surviving Aborigines transported by Robinson to Flinders ' Island bore marks of violence and gunshot wounds ' perpetrated on them by depraved whites '; that Windschuttle cannot deny that between 1803 and 1834 almost all Tasmanian Aborigines died, and the only evidence for disease as a factor before 1829 rests on a single conversation recorded by James Bonwick, and that Aboriginal women who lived with sealers did not, however, die off from contact with bearers of foreign disease ; that Windschuttle likened Aboriginal attacks on British settlers to ‘ modern-day junkies raiding service stations for money ’, whereas both colonial records and modern historians speak of them as highly ' patriotic ', attached to their lands, and engaged in a veritable war to defend it from settlement ; that by Windschuttle's own figures, the violent death rate of Aborigines in Tasmania in the 1820s must have been 360 times the murder rate in contemporary New York ; that Windschuttle shows scarce familiarity with period books, citing only 3 of the 30 books published on Van Diemen's land for the period 1803-1834, and with one of them confuses the date of the first visit by the French with the publication date of the volume that recounted their expedition ; that it is nonsensical to argue that a people who had wandered over an island and survived for 34, 000 years had no attachment to their land ; that Windschuttle finds no native words in 19th century wordlists for ' land ' to attest to such an attachment, when modern wordlists show 23 entries under ' country '.

Windschuttle shows, she argues, a predilection for old colonial explanations, and Darwinist values, as though nothing had happened in between.

In the wake of the 2011 Norway attacks, Windschuttle did not deny that perpetrator Anders Behring Breivik had read and praised statements he had made at a symposium in Zealand in 2006, but stressed that he was " still at a complete loss to find any connection between them and the disgusting and cowardly actions of Breivik.

" Windschuttle went on to add that " it would be a ' disturbing accusation ' if people thought that he had ever used deliberately provocative language that might have caused Breivik to take up a rifle and shoot unarmed teenagers in cold blood.

Windschuttle argues that, in the years prior to Stanner ’ s 1968 Boyer lecture, Australian historians had not been silent on the Aborigines although, in most cases, the historians ’ " discussions were not to Stanner ’ s taste " and the Aborigines " might not have been treated in the way Reynolds and his colleagues would have liked ".

' Péron would have disagreed, Boyce believes, with Windschuttle ’ s claim that ‘( t ) raditional Aboriginal society placed no constraints on the women ’ s sexual behaviour with men, ’ for he was repeatedly rebuffed when he tried to make physical contact with Aboriginal women.

For Windschuttle, Breen and others can say things that sicken no one, because they contextualise it within a model of British invasion and Aboriginal resistance, whereas he is taken to task for being ' pitiless ' for making what he argues is the same point, ' within a historical model of aboriginal accommodation to a comparatively nonviolent British settlement.

Windschuttle argues that no word list records an Aboriginal term corresponding to the English word " land " in the sense that Europeans use it, " as a two-dimensional space marked out with definite boundaries, which can be owned by individuals or groups, which can be inherited, which is preserved for the exclusive use of its owner, and which carries sanctions against trespassers ", but states that " they certainly did identify themselves with and regularly hunted and foraged on particular territories, known as their ' country ', which I openly acknowledge.

The political scientist Kenneth Minogue and other historians such as Keith Windschuttle disagree and think that no genocide took place.

Windschuttle also examined the nature of those violent episodes that did occur and concluded that there is no credible evidence of warfare over territory.

The controversy continued into the new millennium after historian Keith Windschuttle in 2002 questioned the accuracy of accounts of massacres and high fatalities, arousing intense controversy in Australia.

In January 2009, Windschuttle was hoaxed into publishing an article in Quadrant.

Contributors included well known researcher into the frontier conflict, Professor Henry A. Reynolds, and Professor Lyndall Ryan, whose book The Aboriginal Tasmanians is one of the main targets of Windschuttle ’ s work.

While some individuals made an oceanic voyage into Australia (~ 50-60 thousand years ago ), giving rise to the Afro-Negrito ancestral component of the Australian Aborigines ( Windschuttle & Gillin, 2002 ), others continued their coastal migration north into East Asia.

However, while it is indeed true that the descendants of the first major wave of modern humans to leave sub-Saharan Africa migrated to all of these places and passed on these genetic patterns, it would be a misnomer to call such people " proto-Australoids " given that this evokes a phenotypic image that is not aligned with the most parsimonious explanation of the current evidence ( Windschuttle & Gillin, 2002 ); indeed, these descendants evolved into Australoids ( Archaic Caucasoids ), who in turn evolved into Caucasoids.

James Boyce, a Tasmanian historian, dismisses Windschuttle ’ s argument as " uninformed slander " based on a failure to read the only documentary sources that matter, the journals of French and British explorers recording the first contacts with Tasmanian aborigines before the colonial period.

He argues that Aboriginal rights, including land rights and the need for reparations for past abuses of Aboriginal people, have been adopted as a left-wing ' cause ' and that those he perceives as left-wing historians distort the historical record to support that cause For Windschuttle, the task of the historian is to provide readers with an empirical history as close to the objective truth as possible, based on an analysis of documentary, or preferably eye-witness, evidence.

Boyce argues that their observations, including those of the captain Nicolas Baudin, do not support Windschuttle ’ s claims.

Windschuttle argues that, in order to advance the ‘ deliberate genocide ’ argument, Reynolds has misused source documentation, including that from British colonist sources, by quoting out of context.

Participants in the debate including Keith Windschuttle and Robert Manne are frequently described as " culture warriors " for their respective points of view.

Windschuttle challenges the idea that mass killings were commonplace, arguing that the colonial settlers of Australia did not commit widespread massacres against Indigenous Australians ; he drastically reduces the figures for the Tasmanian Aboriginal death toll, and writes that Aborigines referred to by both Reynolds and Ryan as resistance figures, included ‘ black bushrangers ’ and others engaged in acts normally regarded as ' criminality '; arguing that the evidence clearly shows that attacks by Aborigines on settlers were almost invariably directed at acquiring goods, such as flour, sugar, tea and tobacco, and that claims by orthodox historians that this was a form of guerrilla warfare against British settlement aren't supported by credible evidence.

Windschuttle holds that the willingness of some Tasmanian Aboriginal women to engage in prostitution with convicts, sealers and settlers and the Tasmanian Aboriginal men who ‘ actively colluded ’ in the trade in their women aided in the transmission of venereal and other introduced diseases to the indigenous population.

* Stephen Garton, Professor of History, Provost & Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Sydney University, argued that the ‘ the flaw in Windschuttle ’ s argument is his belief that history can only be based on the evidence that survives.

Smithers, an Australian comparativist working on native histories, argues that Windschuttle's political agenda shows a ‘ discomfort with the way the " orthodox school " by inflating Aboriginal deaths, impugns Australian identity and its virtuous Anglo-Saxon origins .’ Windschuttle's book plays to ' the white wing populism of white Australians, who feel their racially privileged position is under attack .’ By reaction, Smithers argues, Windschuttle highlights ' the nation ’ s virtues ’, privileging the opinions of settlers and colonial officials, ' while rejecting Aboriginal oral histories.

He argues that the book is ‘ a therapeutic history for white ( Anglo-Saxon ) Australians that distorts and distracts ’ and that in denying the reliability of historical evidence of racialized groups, Windschuttle employs a tactic used by historians to discredit historical accounts that do not fit with their presentist morality .’

When challenged on his lack of compassion, Windschuttle is reported as replying: ' You can ’ t really be serious about feeling sympathy for someone who died 200 years ago.

' For Macintyre, '‘ It is the absence of any sense of this tragedy, the complete lack of compassion for its victims, that is surely the most disturbing quality of Windschuttle ’ s rewriting of Aboriginal history.

" However in the Trevorrow case, Windschuttle argues that the decision shows " that the actions of the Aborigines Protection Board in placing Bruce in foster care without his parents ’ agreement was actually illegal at the time " and not the result of a policy of removal but rather the illegal actions of welfare officials who believed, rightly or wrongly, that Bruce Trevorrow was neglected and that his health and life would be in danger if they returned him to his mother.

In Foster ’ s opinion, the evidence produced by Windschuttle did not prove his case that the " Great Australian Silence " was largely a myth.

Others who dispute the validity of the term include: Peter Howson, Minister for Aboriginal Affairs in 1971 – 72, Keith Windschuttle and Andrew Bolt Others argue against these critics, responding to Windschuttle and Bolt in particular.

The estimates of the death toll were disputed by Keith Windschuttle and by Leo Casey, who said the figures were " fabricated out of whole cloth ".

In The Fabrication of Aboriginal History and other recent writings on Australian Aboriginal history, Windschuttle criticises historians who, he claims, have extensively misrepresented and fabricated historical evidence to support a political agenda.

Vicki Grieves argues that Windschuttle regards Aboriginal men who traded their women's services as pimps, although Windschuttle does not use the term.

Windschuttle refers to accounts by the French zoologist François Péron ( who is credited with the first use of the term anthropology ), by George Augustus Robinson in his journals, and by the early Australian writer James Bonwick, of the violence and cruelty with which many Tasmanian Aboriginal men were observed to treat women.

It was positively reviewed by Geoffrey Blainey, who called it ‘ one of the most important and devastating ( books ) written on Australian history in recent decades ’, although Blainey notes that not every side-argument in the book convinced him and that his ' view is that the original Tasmanians were not as backward, mentally and culturally, as Windschuttle sometimes depicts them '.

Other writers, such as Keith Windschuttle, have argued for a much lower figure.

In the same book, Windschuttle maintains that historians on both sides of the political spectrum have misrepresented and distorted history to further their respective political causes or ideological positions.

Windschuttle argues that encroaching pastoralism did not cause starvation through the loss of native hunting grounds as some historians have proposed, as their numbers were being drastically reduced by introduced disease, and large parts of Tasmania were not then, or now, occupied by white settlers.

In reply to Boyce, Windschuttle argues that Boyce could not have read the whole book, or even properly checked the index, which cited ' this very evidence ', i. e. the journals of early French and British explorers.

* Bain Attwood of the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies at Monash University dismisses him as a ' tabloid historian ' however Attwood concedes that ' Boyce is unable to demonstrate ' that the documents he says Windschuttle ignored ' would have provided factual killings of Aborigines ' and that ‘ ' revisionist ' critics have demonstrated that the academic historians lacked documentation for most of the killings represented in their accounts ’.