This is Australian social history. Conservative politicians whine that standards are dropping, that children are no longer taught the important dates and names (presumably including the names of those conservative politicians). They want unquestioning and regimented learning of the names of lots of dead white males. If you push them harder to define Australian history, their version comes down to 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 the politicians about these, they may be able to name five of the more than 2000 bushrangers who once flourished, their understanding of convicts 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 codswallop.
This is the Good Oil, from the author of the National Library of Australia's The Big Book of Australian History. (It's a secret, but the original version of this work was my assemblage of all the Australian history I had written since 2000. That was the marble slab from which I carved BBAH. Don't tell anybody, please!)
This is how people lived, loved, ate, dressed. recreated, travelled and much more: social history writ large (and large means 773 pages, 1.4 kg on thin paper). There is no index in the dead tree version, so get the much cheaper ebook version and use the search function, OK? This is an untapped goldfield, a giant assemblage of original sources.
An ebook in full colour for Kindle; $8.38 and
A print-on-demand paperback. $60
You'd have to be mad to want the dead-tree version!!
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