I'm ba-a-ack!

 While I have been notably missing from here since early September, I have been flat out seizing back the rights to out of print books and republishing them.

You can find out all about them on this link, but today, I start on the last of them, the book that got me started as a writer of mainstream history. Australia's Pioneers, Heroes and Fools was in iconoclastic look at the tales of 'explorers' that Australian kids are fed at school.

Well, it's about to get a lot more iconoclastic: I wrote this foreword this morning:

There is a set of conservative politician who thunder that educational standards are dropping, that children are no longer taught the important dates and names (presumably including the names of the conservative politicians). The educational standards are indeed dropping — among the critics.

If you ask them to define Australian history, it comes down to a fluffy list: Bushrangers and Convicts (both scum), 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.

If you question them about these headings, they may be able to name five of the more than 2000 bushrangers who once flourished, their understanding of the convict system 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, Burke and Wills don’t count), they have no understanding of the harm done to country by agriculture, and their history of gold is complete rubbish.

So their BCDEFG history of Australia is just worthless scribbles, but one in fifty of them may 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, and they will look at you like a mallee bull which has just run at full tilt into Crooked Mick of the Speewah.

Having thought about it, let’s leave Aborigines as A (after all, they were here first!), but add H for Home (Britain), because for too long, that is where everybody looked for leaders to rule us. Then tack on I for Invasion. That gives us the ABCDEFGHI model of Australia.

This book is about the realities of what is in the E file, how exploration was done, what it achieved, and who the active players were. Mainly, ‘exploration’ was about drawing and labelling maps with new names.

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Now I have almost completed Project Resuscitation, I will be surfacing more often.