Most Australians would be taken aback to find that whenever academics in the field of genocide studies discuss history’s worst exam­ples, their own country is soon mentioned. The March 2001 edition of the London-based Journal of Genocide Research indi­cated the com­pany Australia now keeps. That edition carried six arti­cles, in the following order: “The German […]

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[Part One is here…] The Origins of the Myth  The empirical underpinnings of Bringing Them Home derived largely from the work of white academic historians. The Human Rights Commission did no serious research of its own into the primary historical sources. Co-authors Ronald Wilson and Mick Dodson also declined to hear any evidence that might […]

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No state or territory in Australia ever wanted to steal Aboriginal children from their parents in order to eliminate the race or put an end to Aboriginality. No Aboriginal children were removed as part of an agenda driven by racism or genocide. There were no Stolen Generations.

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Frank Devine performed his last editorial duty from the hospital bed of his cancer ward. He read and corrected the page proofs of a book of his best essays from Quadrant. Former editor Paddy McGuinness recruited Frank to be a regular columnist in 2002. By the time of his death on July 3, 2009, Frank […]

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In 2005, the Australian National University commemorated the centenary of the birth of one of its late professors of anthropology with a conference discussing the lifetime achievements of W. E. H. (Bill) Stanner. This was an uncommon honour for an Australian academic who died 24 years earlier, as was the volume of the conference papers […]

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In the past twelve months, Quadrant has increased the size of each edition to 128 pages. This is 33.3 per cent more than our previous monthly editions and is the same size as our former double issues in January-February and July-August. We did this partly to accommodate an increase in the number of good articles, […]

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One of the inevitable consequences of the placement of a bogus article in the January-February edition of Quadrant by a team associated with the online publication Crikey and its writer Margaret Simons is that, in future, we will scrutinise more closely the personal credentials of authors who submit freelance contributions to the journal. Indeed, as […]

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An author calling herself ‘Sharon Gould’ has tricked Quadrant into publishing in its January-February edition an article about popular scares on biotechnology issues. ‘Gould’ now claims her article is a hoax. However, there is something funny going on here which readers should be aware of. A genuine hoax, like that of Alan Sokal and Ern […]

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Senate hearing opening remarks
…the underlying agenda of the academic field of “genocide studies” is not the study of genocide, let alone its analysis or prevention. It is to argue that our own society and those like it, that is, Britain and the United States, are every bit as bad as Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and Maoist China. The old moral equivalence argument from the Cold War is alive and well in genocide studies. Let me quote from the 2001 edition of the academic journal Aboriginal History, whose editors, Ann Curthoys and John Docker of the Australian National University wrote:

Curthoys and Docker are here quoting a claim by former Professor Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado …
See also: Aboriginal History ‘a live political issue’

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At the last federal election, Kevin Rudd promised an “education revolution”. However, the appointment last month of Stuart Macintyre to draft the national history syllabus for Australian high schools is anything but revolutionary. It is a return to the past with a vengeance. It is guaranteed to entrench within the teaching of history all the […]

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