[Marxism] Rightwing Australian academic victim of Sokal-type hoax

[Ambrose Andrews]

http://www.crikey.com.au/Media-Arts-and-Sports/20090107-Windschuttles-gotcha-game-will-haunt-him.html

"""

Here's the thing, though: it's not just editors who blunder. Yet
Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History rested squarely on
the notion that when historians of frontier conflict -- in particular,
Henry Reynolds, Lloyd Robson and Lyndall Ryan -- were caught in error,
this was evidence not of an innocent mistake but of conscious and
systematic falsification.

Lyndall Ryan, one of Windschuttle's particular targets, began research
on her PhD thesis in 1970. In those pre-computer days, her notes -- on
archives that were yet to be properly catalogued -- were all on pieces
of paper. The book based on that thesis (The Aboriginal Tasmanians)
came out in 1981, by which time she no longer possessed many of her
original notes. For publication, the 1351 separate references in 1000
footnotes were reduced to 857 references in just over 500 endnotes. As
Ryan wrote: "In the process of such substantial reduction, some were
lost or scrambled. Every historian dreads this happening, but it is a
fact of life."

Put like that, her sins don't seem quite so egregious, do they? Yet
Windschuttle, who now pleads context in his response to Margaret
Simons, repeatedly accused Ryan of conscious misrepresentation. His
manifold boosters in the Murdoch press took up the call, to the point
where journalists called the Vice Chancellor at Ryan's university
demanding that she be sacked.

In the midst of the History Wars, Stuart Macintyre made the fairly
uncontroversial point that all historians err. He acknowledged that,
when he went back to his own footnotes, he often discovered that as
many as ten per cent contained errors. At the time, Windschuttle
seized on the point as an admission of the shoddiness of academic
engaged in "concerted invention".

"The degree of misinformation in the work of these authors -- even if
their colleagues want to excuse it all as error -- would be
unacceptable in any other profession, and certainly unacceptable in
journalism."

Well, apparently not.

It's in that context that the Gould hoax works. Had Sharon Gould
submitted a story to Quadrant documenting an Aboriginal massacre,
Windschuttle would have been all over the footnotes like a rash,
searching for anything to discredit her. But because he agreed with
her thesis, he paid them much less attention -- precisely the sin for
which he denounced historians.

"""

[full article at above URL]

-- 
Ambrose Andrews
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