Numbers are conjured out of thin air, quotations misleadingly edited, tall tales presented as fact. With forensic thoroughness, Windschuttle exhumes the footnotes of several influential histories and finds, in dozens of cases, that the evidence has been tampered with. But in The Fabrication of Aboriginal History Volume 1: Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847, he argues that it is a myth. Keith Windschuttle used to believe the "genocide" story, he says. Referring to the bicentenary of settlement last week, Tasmanian Aboriginal leader Michael Mansell said: "The British had more impact on Aborigines than the Holocaust had on the Jews." That story, shorthanded as genocide in the media and many history books, exerts a dark hold on the Australian imagination and haunts indigenous politics to this day. Most historians blame their demise on the British: the settlers invaded the Aborigines' land the Aborigines waged a "Black War" of resistance the settlers did their best to exterminate the Aborigines the settlers won. Follow killed the Tasmanian Aborigines? When British colonists arrived in 1803, the island's indigenous people numbered a few thousand.
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