multiculturalism, Indigenous land rights, the stolen generations and national identity. In a 1993 lecture, Geoffrey Blainey made a distinction between a "three cheers" view of history which saw Australian history as largely a success, and a "black armband" view which claimed that "much of Australian history was a disgrace". He opined that the "black armband view of history might well represent the swing of the pendulum from a position that had been too favourable, too self-congratulatory, to an opposite extreme that is even more unreal and decidedly jaundiced". Three years later, the Prime Minister John Howard referred to Blainey's speech stating, "I profoundly reject the black armband view of Australian history. I believe the balance sheet of Australian history is a very generous and benign one. I believe that, like any other nation, we have black marks upon our history but amongst the nations of the world we have a remarkably positive history." He later defined black armband history as the view "that most Australian history since 1788 has been little more than a disgraceful story of imperialism, exploitation, racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination" and stated his intention to "ensure that our history as a nation is not written definitively by those who take the view that we should apologise for most of it." In 1997, Howard repeated his criticism of black armband history in the context of the political controversies about Indigenous native title and the Stolen Generations, stating that contemporary Australians should not be held accountable for wrongs committed by past generations. A number of historians, including Henry Reynolds, Elaine Thompson and Don Watson, responded publicly, variously accusing the prime minister of seeking to rewrite history to exclude the critical analysis of Australia's past and of misrepresenting recent Australian historiography for political purposes. However, historian Patrick O'Farrell, agreed with John Howard that the "guilt school of Australian history has gone too far". In August 1996, the Brisbane newspaper The Courier-Mail published a series of articles alleging that Manning Clark (who had died in 1991 and had been closely associated with the opposition Labor party since 1972) had been "an agent of influence" for the Soviet Union. The newspaper explicitly linked its allegations to current political debates about Australia's history. John Howard commented that he considered Clark an unduly pessimistic black armband historian. The Press Council later found that the newspaper had had insufficient evidence for its