On the morning of Saturday, 12 April in this 2025th horrible year of our lord, I rolled over to face my slowly waking partner to remark, “Keith Windschuttle is dead.” He had died days earlier, but I had only then been able to gather myself to the extent that I could voice the news.

She is across most of the right-wing nuttery I follow obsessively, but Quadrant is the usual stand-in for Mr Windschuttle, so she answered, “Who the fuck is that? What a stupid name.” She was right on both accounts — who is (was) this bespectacled hatemonger? And imagine giving a child with an already ridiculous last name the very awkward first name “Keith”. Keith. Keith Windschuttle.

Keith Windschuttle fancied himself an historian and was the editor of Australia’s favourite right-wing “literary” magazine, Quadrant. A CIA-funded cold war relic, Quadrant found a new champion for one of its many reactionary causes when Windschuttle joined as editor in 2008. He left in 2015 but was pulled back in for one more run in 2017. He stepped down at the end of 2024 to begin the rituals performed by all right-wing goblins as they prepare to die.

Keith’s cause was against Aboriginal Australia — a thorn in the side of every white-skinned, healthily-foreheaded G8 graduate since invasion. By the time Keith blessed Australia with his birth, in 1942, movements were forming to grant rights to Aboriginal people. And then by 1969, when he earned his undergraduate degree, Aboriginal people were no longer classed as flora or fauna. Even in these early years, Keith surely sensed the threat of the very existence of this country’s first people, his rights eroding as theirs’ increased.

Nevertheless, he persisted.

He published a few books between 1979 and 1996, notably The Killing of History, a polemic against what he saw as the degradation of knowledge at the hands of postmodernism. He was like a more anti-charismatic progenitor of fad-diet proponents and self-help authors such as Jordan Peterson. Unfortunately, he didn’t sound like Kermit. He sounded more like John Howard, who sounds like the kangaroo from Blinky Bill. One of the few reliefs in the modern West is that our worst thinkers have the funniest voices.

In 2002, he published his magnum opus The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen’s Land 1803 — 1847. Readers can probably assume its contents from the title, but they’d be wrong. It is, in fact, not a deconstruction of colonial fabrications of Aboriginal cultural development. It is actually a repudiation of historians such as Henry Reynolds, who illuminated the bloody founding of Australia’s now-least-literate state. It acts as a colonial document that is as historically illiterate as the state it describes became.

In The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, Windschuttle makes many arguments that minimise the violent impact of colonialisation and excuse the actions of the genocidal settlers while describing Aboriginal Australians as culturally backwards and primitive. He downplays the role of very real colonialist violence in the genocide by attributing it instead to the introduction of diseases by the unwashed Anglos who flooded the shores of the apple isle. Readers will be familiar with the deployment of this kind of excuse in discussions of the conquistadors’ genocide of the Americas. This view conveniently erases intent. For Keith, Aboriginal people simply got sick and died. The various Mcs and Macs who infected them knew not what they were doing.

Alongside the germ-blaming, Windschuttle generally minimises the numbers by arguing that the population of pre-colonial Tasmania was as low as two thousand. Many historians and genetic studies suggest that the number was much, much higher. But Keith trotted out this claim alongside his much kinder portrayal of the colonisers who, according to him, were invigorated with enlightenment principles and were thus incapable of committing genocide, especially on these “noble savages”. This idea of enlightened colonisers accidently genociding a small band of island-dwelling primitives is the result of mental gymnastics that can only be performed by a USyd graduate with a thorn in their side.

His next notable output on his favourite subject was published in 2009. Titled The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume Three, The Stolen Generations 1881–2008, it outright denies that the well-documented cultural genocide which has been acknowledged by both sides of politics ever happened. In this book, Keith calls the stolen generations a myth.

He deploys many of the same techniques in denying the idea of the stolen generations as he did denying the Tasmanian genocide: the number of children taken were nowhere near as high as claimed, Aboriginal people were too primitive and wretched to take care of their children, and Australia’s national character, then as during early invasion, was incapable of genocide.

He of course completely ignores the lived experience of people affected both directly and indirectly, as well as the 1997 Bringing them Home report which was the result of almost 800 submissions and conservatively-estimated tens of thousands affected children. The report was acknowledged and its findings led to apologies by premiers and government representatives from both sides of politics at or soon after its release. The Howard government notably objected to portions of the report and did not include the word “sorry” in its response.

And let’s not forget Windschuttle’s elevation of an idealised frontier nation. Rather than seeing the racial and cultural erasure at the core of Australia’s colonial mission expressed in the forceful removal of children from Aboriginal families, he writes about an enlightened state providing welfare to the most wretched sections of its society.

I’d like to think that I’m hesitant to piss on any grave, but at the dawn of the Second Trump Imperium it is important to drench some deserving gravestones. Windschuttle should not be remembered as a great thinker or historian, or even an uppity rabble rouser advocating for the devil in the interests of intellectual vibrance. He was an historically illiterate quack whose work provided talking points for hateful luminaries such as Miranda Devine, John Howard and Tony Abbot — all of whom have written obituaries on Quadrant’s website. I’m sure Peter Dutton would have contributed if it wasn’t for the election.

It is telling that Windschuttle was able to publish tomes that deny this country’s founding genocide and its “clean up” genocide of the stolen generations. In both Gaza and Australia, genocide only happens to white people. The rest are either collateral damage or painted as liars — Windschuttle helped make sure of that.

Much can and should be written about Windschuttle’s rotten legacy, which exceeds the bounds of his attacks on Aboriginal Australia. Instead of the comprehensive intellectual thrashing he deserves, this antibiturary is a modest commemoration of the passing of one of our worst thinkers. Vale Keith Windschuttle.