The Value of Keith Windschuttle in promoting a sustainable culture: a benevolent analysis

This paper considers the interplay of history, culture and a sustainable environment through the lens of Australian national identity and Indigenous presence. In part 1 it revisits the so-called 'history wars' and considers the construction of a binary view of history and analyses this. It argues that a critical issue is the constructed national identity as a tool of social control for the ruling elite and that the threatened loss of that national identity and control it affords is feared more than the realities of Frontier history. Racism, murder and dispossession have never worried controlling elites. Part 2 indicates how the binary of Keith Windschuttle's work may be used as a catalyst to embrace complexity, a new way of shaping Australian environmental self as interconnected with reshaping Australian history. It indicates why complexity is important for the national being and environmental well-being. Through this the paper suggests moving beyond the revisionist history to a new genre, a 'History of Reconciliation'. Such a history would open opportunities for attempting to understand the complexity of the frontier's cultural, environmental and spiritual (national) self and context in which we are still embraced. This vision of national story moves necessarily beyond mere sustainability as a way forward.