Captain Thunderbolt – History or Myth? – Part Two

David Roberts, a senior lecturer at the University of New England the editor of the Journal of Australian Colonial History. His interest in Captain Thunderbolt developed out of the campaign against Carol Baxter’s history writing on the bushranger. The history of Australian bushranger Frederick Ward who became known as Captain Thunderbolt is surrounded by folk lore and myth. But in her Captain Thunderbolt and His Lady, writer and historian Carol Baxter, adjunct lecturer at the University of New England and a Fellow of the Society of Australian genealogists has uncovered the truth about the Thunderbolt story – and opened up a battle with the holders of the tale as told by hearsay and myth. At The Sydney Institute, on Tuesday 27 March 2012, David Roberts joined Carol Baxter to discuss the story of Bushranger Captain Thunderbolt and its myths.

CAPTAIN THUNDERBOLT – HISTORY OR MYTH?

DAVID ROBERTS

Carol has given a broad overview of the substance of the Thunderbolt conspiracy theory (or the lack of substance, as it were). And she has briefly outlined the grounds on which we demonstrated and declared it to be entirely bogus.

I’d like to elaborate with some further comments on how this theory has been propagated, and how it has been defended against our efforts to expose it as utter nonsense.

As Carol indicated, from the moment we began examining the nature and provenance of the Thunderbolt conspiracy, we found ourselves subjected to an extraordinary array of private and public attacks on our credibility and competence, and the experience has caused us to reflect on vital issues concerning the nature and practice of history, and on the role and obligations of the historian.

Essentially, what we are combating here is a form of what is broadly and pejoratively known as “Pseudohistory”. That is, a seriously suspect interpretation that postures as historical revisionism, involving the denouncement of well-known and firmly established historical facts and themes, which are refuted in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.  Pseudohistory takes many forms, and has many defining tenets – some of them extremely ugly – but they do tend to be pervaded by notions of conspiracy – that is, they are unmasking a conspiracy, and/or they are fighting to reveal knowledge and truths than are conspiratorially suppressed.

The Thunderbolt conspiracy has been disseminated and defended through a number of avenues, and I’ll offer some comments on these. I’d like to suggest that the medium and manner of its promotion has been particularly instructive, but also rather disconcerting in that it has been accorded a degree of credibility and recognition that is entirely undeserved – and this is worrying for what is suggests about the future of fact and truth in our current society.

First and foremost, there was the 2009 monograph, Scourge of The Ranges – this being the primary and best-packaged manifestation of the conspiracy theory.

It is actually a highly problematic target, in that it is deliberately and declaredly a work of “historical fiction” – and as such protects itself from many of our criticisms and concerns, which relate more to the practice of History, as a sober, scholarly discipline. But the novel does contain clear assertions that it is using the techniques of fictional narrative to advance a “true” story, and it was certainly positioned that way in the press. The authors claim to be pursuing a hidden and suppressed history employing fictional narrative as a convenient or persuasive medium. That medium was necessary, they say, to “fill the gaps” in information, caused by the government’s failure to release documents.[i]

These sort of mixed messages are interesting. In the United States, false history is protected as a freedom of speech under the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. However, there have been successful cases in State courts brought against publishers who fraudulently advertise fiction as fact, this being considered a type of commercial fraud or false advertising. There’s no space to explore this here, but it would be interesting to know how this particular book would stand up to such procedures.

The main point here is these claims – that the book is a quest for an historical truth that has been blocked by powerful, vested interests – is just errant and self-serving nonsense. The novel is entirely fantasised. It bears absolutely no relationship to anything that is known and provable, and there are not even any reasonable grounds for suspecting that the story is in any way accurate, or even close to accurate.

The most peculiar and persuasive means of promoting the Thunderbolt conspiracy theory was the act of having the NSW Legislative Council use Standing Order No.53 to demand the release of supposedly state-censored documents which would prove the conspiracy. This attracted enormous and long-running publicity, especially in the regional New England press, where it ran quite uncontested, doing much to cement the conspiracy theory in the public imagination, while also no doubt advancing sales of the book. Nothing was done by politicians or the media to verify the claims made by the conspiracy theorists. (I’ll return to this point in a moment).

Another means used to propagate and preserve the Thunderbolt conspiracy is more typical of the age in which we live – that is, the medium of a website. It’s an astonishingly inept and unattractive website. But type “Captain Thunderbolt” into a Google-search, and it appears third on the list of results. Top of the list goes to the reputable piece by the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Between the two is the Wikipedia entry, which itself has become something of a battleground for the conflicting versions of the Thunderbolt story, as those on both sides seek constantly to delete and replace one another’s updates.

The Internet epitomises, and is very much a primary cause of, a modern crisis of truth. It has accelerated the democratisation of history, but it has also magnified its perils and pitfalls. The Internet is the easiest, fastest and cheapest publication tool the world has ever known, allowing false information to spread more widely, and more quickly, than was ever possible or even imaginable at any previous time, free of the geographic, financial or institutional influences which once controlled the production and impact of knowledge. In revolutionising our access to information, it has also presented us with a cacophony of bullshit.

The final means of promoting and defending the conspiracy theory involves writing letters – both personal letters and emails, to Carol and myself; to our colleagues, and high-level administrators at the UNE; but also public letters to regional newspapers. They have also bombarded the peer-reviewed journal in which our work appeared. They continue to address members of parliament, civil servants, and anyone who they apparently believe has the authority to promote their case or to denigrate ours.

Through this medium, they doggedly maintain that there remains a grievous conspiracy to suppress the true story of Captain Thunderbolt. They claim that the rejection of the parliamentary motion to release archival documents was a perpetuation of that conspiracy, and that this has caused some sort of “Constitutional crisis”, where politicians are caught between the demands of the law and their constituents on the one hand, and the pressure to maintain the integrity of the state regime on the other. In fact, the issue has simply come and gone, and presumably those politicians who briefly humoured the Thunderbolt conspiracy now accept that it is just errant nonsense.

Moreover, they claim that we are now party to this conspiracy – that we are using the “mantle of academic respectability” to subvert the quest for truth, and to chook feed government misinformation to an unsuspecting public. We are thus aiding the process of keeping Australians under what one called “an insidious state of neo-serfdom” (whatever that is).

They continue to hammer away at a number of points that they regard as sacred and decisive: that the identification of Thunderbolt’s body was circumstantial and inconclusive; that the bushranger was sighted days after his death; that US census records show him residing in California in the late-nineteenth century. Other points seem strangely peripheral – small matters that they believe contradicts or complicates our bigger picture. But almost everything they say is demonstrably untrue, or is, at best, wildly speculative and not even based on reasonable surmise. The problem is that the conspiracy theorists tend to simply posit themselves are the arbiters of truth. Irrespective of what can be proven or disproven from the available evidence, we are simply wrong simply because they know better.

And ensuing from this, and binding their whole offensive together, is the constant refrain that we are simply “bad historians” who have brought ourselves, our institution, and the whole profession, into disrepute. We haven’t done our research; we based our findings on hearsay rather than archives; and we tailored our work to meet a preconceived and politicised outcome; and we used forged documents and have fabricated our references.

All of this has been levelled against us without any hint of irony or self-reflection. And also, with brazen hypocrisy, they claim that we have acted aggressively and offensively; that we have transgressed the genteel manners of scholarly debate, and have insulted their own personal and professional integrity.

So these have been the key means of propagating the Thunderbolt conspiracy: a self-published novel; the conning of a few NSW politicians; a website, and a barrage of letters and emails to anyone who is or is desired to be concerned with the matter.

What is missing, of course, is the subjection of these ideas to peer-review or any degree of professional independent editing. As we were informed when our findings were published by the International Australian Studies Association, a scholarly, peer-reviewed publication was ‘a rather strange way to qualify your research’.

In sum, the Thunderbolt conspiracy theory is based on an astonishingly poor grasp of the methods of historical research and practice. This includes the selective use of facts, the misrepresentation of facts, and indeed the invention of facts, to advance misleading and preposterous assertions.

And it’s propagation and perpetuation has involved a number of techniques: the misrepresentation of other’s people’s arguments; the avoidance of key truths via the complication of simple and often tangential facts; false claims of scholarly credibility; appeals to the broader public via the media; the bullying and badgering of critics; and accusations against us of incompetence and rudeness – the very things in which they themselves specialise.

Broadly speaking, these are the techniques common to most forms of pseudohistory, including its most abusive form – “negationism”, or history denial (as in Holocaust denial). Pseudohistory thrives on distortion and deception, if not delusion, and its proponents tend to exhibit common personality traits, including stubbornness, paranoia, grandiosity, aggression and hypocrisy.

I’m not suggesting that we are dealing here with anything so odious as Holocaust denial. The Thunderbolt conspiracy is not so unspeakably offensive; nor is it potentially dangerous in assisting the revival of political extremism. And whereas Holocaust denial has become eerily sophisticated in its ability to mimic the methods and practice of history, the Thunderbolt conspiracy, in contrast, is marked by its ineptitude and extreme implausibility.

It’s probably more reflective of the so-called “Dunning-Kruger effect” – a cognitive bias in which incompetent individuals maintain an illusory sense of self-superiority – causing them to be completely oblivious to their own ineptitude and mistakes, and wholly unable to accept the skill and expertise of others. That would explain some of the most bizarre, illogical, contradictory and impertinent reasoning and practices that I have ever encountered in twenty years as an historian.

Thankfully, in Australia we do not experience such cultural crises as might require us to criminalise the production of bad history – of the sort that has in numerous European countries, especially France, resulted in so-called “memory laws”. Even if we did, the Thunderbolt conspiracy could hardly seem so politically or culturally insulting as to require legislative or judicial intervention! That would give it a credibility it certainly does not deserve.

But it does have lessons, and perhaps reveals something unsettling about the state of truth in our contemporary world. That the Thunderbolt conspiracy should be entertained as plausible by anyone is truly shocking – although the culpability here lies with the con-artist, rather than the conned.

Of those who were conned, however, it is the media and the politicians who must take some share of the responsibility. Their gullible consumption of this conspiracy theory speaks badly of their willingness to promote and pursue titillating and populist nonsense at the expense of truth.

Sure, we are dealing here with a minor and inconsequential story from our distant colonial past, but there are many greater and more serious matters facing us where myth and misinformation are allowed to cloud our decision-making.

We face a crisis of truth in our society, epitomised, as I’ve noted, by the Internet, where fact and fantasy are separated only by the click of a mouse. It reflects also a broader cultural angst, where we are allowed to be unsure about whether human activity is changing our climate, or whether we are going to war on false pretences – in part because we cannot trust that our leaders are not prepared to embrace myth and misinformation, whether out of laziness, opportunism or just an appalling lack of judgment. We just don’t always know what to believe, and who to trust.

In a very minor but telling way, the Thunderbolt conspiracy reflects this crisis – both in its devious or deluded production of this false information, but also in the readiness of people to endorse it, and of others to believe it. In this climate, we should not easily disrespect and disregard the expert opinion of those who are trained to detect bullshit.

ENDNOTE

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[i] ‘Scourge was written as an historical novel to dramatise a story based on real events … I filled in the gaps in the Thunderbolt story to make a coherent and credible account of events, in contrast to the inept official version’. Armidale Independent, 14 March 2012, p. 14.