One fine morning Australians woke up to find the credit rating of their country—the moral credit rating, that is—plummeting out of control. A damaging tale about “stolen children” had been invented. It was said that between 1880 and 1970, about 100,000 Aboriginal youngsters had been cruelly torn from their mothers and families and institutionalized, and that Australia had been guilty of genocide. Scholarly studies even compared this thriving liberal democracy to Hitler’s Germany.

Somehow the story didn’t sound right. Or not to ordinary people. It sounded more like university men playing fast and loose with language, inflating the meaning of the words “culture” and “genocide” for their own dubious purposes, while liberally employing suppressio veri and suggestio falsi to deal with awkward facts along the way.

And that was indeed the case. In today’s art galleries and universities, outrageousness pays. Back in 1980, a historian named Peter Read had written something attacking the removal of part-Aboriginal children from risky homes to give them a better life. He claimed that instead of benefiting from this removal, they had all suffered grievous loss. He called his pamphlet “The Lost Generations.” But that wasn’t dramatic enough, so his wife suggested “The Stolen Generations” instead. This small but momentous change insinuated that all such removals were forcible, resisted, and illegal, and that Australia’s indigenous communities had been the unacknowledged victims of malign “genocidal” theft. That certainly got attention—enough to produce a government