This is about my attempts to disrupt the flow of historical bilge that was churned out to me when I was at school. For example, we were told that Edward John Eyre crossed the Nullarbor (he went around the coast), and the illustration given out was the left-hand one below, which shows him going east, rather than the right-hand one (where he is going west), and right up until the last few days, there was at least one horse.
This was Cod History! Children should not be given such rubbish.
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| How Eyre and his companion, a Noongar man named Wylie may or may not have travelled. Now be honest: did you know the companion's name? |
There was nothing in our lessons about everyday life, what people ate or wore, or drank, how they got around, or anything else that made the dead come back to life.
That is what I am fighting against. Then again, the myths about the discovery of gold, and the operations of the bushrangers are all nonsense. And the explorers? They discovered nothing, though they did map the land they travelled over.
So I am setting out to do a bit of truth-telling, and if I get up the noses of a few nasty old fogeys, so be it: there are several ways to get your hands on the facts, all fully documented.
This is almost 350,000 words, and if I say it myself, it is a remarkable resource. It was the first rough draft of the next version (the middling lump, below), which I reduced by 100,000 words so I could add more images.
The print version weighs 1.4 kg, and is 51 mm thick (I used very thin paper), the print size is small, and it still runs out to 820 pages. Don't buy it!
You see, I often come back to particular characters and topics again. later on. Print limitations mean there was no way I could get an index in, but if you use the e-book version, there is a search function waiting to be used.
In short: get the e-book, which needs that $6 price to cover Amazon's in-house costs.
The middling lump: Australia: a Social History
That work is still out there, seeking a publisher: it is 252,000 words, and it is an expanded version of my 80,000 word The Big Book of Australian History, four editions published by the National Library of Australia. At the end of that time, their publishing arm fell over, so I took the rights back, and wrote the version that I thought was needed.
So why all the extra text? Basically, I loathe the way fusty old fogeys want the history of Australia told: nothing before 1788 (aside from a few sailors cruising by, nothing about the geology, the biology or the original people. If you don't understand the geology and the biology, you will fall for the line peddled by the Peasants' Party that Abosrigines wewre dumb: they didn't invent a wheel.
Think about it: kangaroos and wombats cannot pull a cart. By the same token, with no local crop plants, western-style agriculture would not work, but there were still ways to work the land, simple gentle ways of managing and gathering crops.
The silly old grubs' history is about dead but once-important white males and lots of lists that must be learned off by heart.
I take a different view. The fogeys whine that standards are dropping, that children are no longer taught the important dates and names (presumably including the names of the conservative politicians). If you push them harder to define Australian history, it 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 (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.
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, and they will look at you like a mallee bull that’s just run at full tilt into Crooked Mick of the Speewah (a word of warning: Mick was definitely a legend, but as I tell it, he is highly believable if you aren't paying attention).
Mick also built a railway, and he was a superb cricketer.
For samples, see blog entries like these:
Who Really Found Gold in Australia? but see this as well;
The Strange Case of Samuel Burt;
Australia's slaves (yes, we had some);
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