Australian history

The past 18 months of pandemic bungling have seen me staying closer to home, and pondering stuff. I'm not getting any younger, so I have been getting my back-burner cleaned up and tidied. Basically, I don't want to fall off my perch without saying quite a few things.

I'm not an historian, even if lots of people call me one: I am an enquirer after facts who writes accounts of history, and there are tiny minds out there who are fearful of the truth. Good: I like frightening tiny minds so they shrink and blink out.

Conservative politicians whine that standards are dropping, that children are no longer taught the important dates and names (meaning the names of those same conservative politicians). They want unquestioning and regimented learning of the names of lots of dead white males.

If you push them to define Australian history, their version comes down to Bushrangers and Convicts (all scum, of course), Diggers (the military ones), Explorers (brave openers of untamed wilderness), Farmers (who turned the sterile wilderness into riches at no cost) and Gold (ours by right of conquest). I call this the BCDEFG model of Australian history.

If you question these politicians about their favoured categories, they may be able to name three of the more than 2000 bushrangers who once flourished (Ned Kelly, Ben Hall and Thunderguts, usually); their understanding of the convict’s lot is pitiful; they could not locate a single battlefield on the world map; they would be lucky to name more than four explorers worthy of note (and no, “Captain” Cook and Burke and Wills don’t count); they have no notion of the harm done to country by agriculture; and their “history” of gold is codswallop.

So their BCDEFG history of Australia is a set of worthless scribbles, and only one in fifty of them will amend that to the ABCDEFG, because the ‘Aborigines’ don’t come into it for most of them—and don’t confuse the poor dears by amending it to a more polite IBCDEFG. Mention the role of Indigenous Australia in our history, and they will look at you like a Speewah back paddock bull that’s just run at full tilt into Crooked Mick of the Speewah. (Yes, I've done a book about him, as well.)

Then I had a brainwave and adopted Inga Clendinnen's name that she gave the original custodians in Dancing with Strangers. I call them Australians, so now I have my ABCDEFG, all stitched up, though I also look at the  homes we made, immigration and journeys, so I guess it's really ABCDEFGHIJ, but I have drawn the line there. Until I work out how to wedge in kaolin, liniment and medicine...

The sort of history I write is about How Things Worked, based heavily on contemporary descriptions. In my works, you learn about the things that don’t get mentioned in school, almost all of them things that happened after the white invasion in 1788, and from a legal point of view it WAS an invasion.

I like to explain how all the early Australians swam naked; wrote dreadful poetry; played strange sports; were fooled into believing in bunyips; feared foreign invasions (French, Russian or American); how convicts came to Australia; how free settlers travelled in the days of sail; what they ate, drank and wore; what the shops were like; town life and bush life; what diseases they got and how they treated them; how they used animal, wind and steam power; how they travelled across the land; coaches, trams, omnibuses and bicycles; ferries and ships; inns and pubs, and we’re only just half-way.

I look at how “explorers” followed established foot tracks (they called them “native roads”); how farms got started; how homes were made and managed; how society worked; how justice worked (not very well); punishment; race riots; the coolie system which exploited Indians, long before the Chinese were here; how Indigenous people were treated; newspapers, telegraphs and communication (some early Melbournites used smoke signals, and Port Arthur had a semaphore station!).

Getting the bit between my teeth, I look at education, democracy and science in a colonial setting; the people who visited, the plants and animal pests that came in; bushfires, floods, droughts and storms; the materials the early settlers used; the minerals they dug up (including the real story of gold in Australia, which is very different from what the school books say).

I also romp through the rogues, scallywags and conmen, and examine the armed forces and wars that changed Australia and the Australian myth.

I did that through four editions of The Big Book of Australian History, an exercise in truth telling for younger readers, published by the National Library of Australia, but the NLA seems to have fallen silent on a fifth edition, and I have, in any case, moved on to write for a more adult readership.

Update mid-September 2021, there may still be a new edition...

That brings me to my most recent effort, where I have cut loose from the apron strings of traditional print publishers, because I can do the job faster and cheaper. You Missed a Bit is a large collection of stuff I have written over the years in a number of books, all pulled together in one volume. On the left, you can see the cover of the ebook version.

And on the right, the cover of the necessarily more pricy print version, both available from the link above. At 813 pages and 1.4 kg, it's almost two inches thick (46.7 mm, if you want precision).  This is in-your-face history, boots and all, warts and all history. I have taken in stuff from this blog on occasions, but also from many of my earlier and now out-of-print books. This is a conscious effort on my part to keep the inconvenient truths out there for people to find.

Please, shed the word.