New books for this year from Peter Macinnis

I am, as my cohort say, of advanced middle age. That means, like it or not, I am approaching my-use-by-get-in-the-box date, and my arms and hands are decaying with arthritis. For this reason, if no other, I have been busily polishing off partly-completed titles.

These works, I have to say, I am self-publishing, because I am tired of hawking my wares around to publishers who fail to share my vision — or any vision at all, in many cases. I think what happens is that they are failed scrubblers (I stand by that word) who feel that by inserting a herb border with snapdragons into a work, they are almost Authors.

My concern is to get ideas out there, where young or young-at-heart minds can get into them. Most of my more serious books need colour illustrations, and those rack the price up, so I am doing budget-level full-colour pics ebooks, and for those who must have a piece of dead-tree in their hands, they will have to settle for half-tone (black-grey-white) illos.

The first cab off the rank is The Biggest Book of Australian History, and that has been out for a couple of weeks, and if you want to kick the tyres, try this sample chapter.

To buy it, go here.

Now, because Amazon messed me about, I had to settle for their AI-directed cover for the e-book, and not this one on the left (I also had to change the title to say Biggest, long story). The National Library of Australia, after four sell-out editions of The Big Book of Australian History  lost their creative staff and lost their impetus, so I took back my IP, and wrote a book 3.3 times the size, and instead of costing $40, the huge ebook, with all of the interesting stuff added, costs $6. Even the paperback comes in under their cost, and you can get the two for $40.

My advice is: get the print book for libraries and gifts and the e-book for serious exploration or as a tool for education in its classical sense.

The next book is a bit from left-field, and it will suit a niche market, but those who need it will love it. This link will tell you more.

Most writers of Advanced Middle Age will have a commonplace file or book, where they store all of the pithy and ineresting quotes that they come across, and most of those files disappear when they fall off their perch, but I had a lovely set of quotes to share, so I decided to save them in two ways: both in a separate blog, and also as an ebook that is searchable and as a dead-tree book.

I decised to make it available when  I found a quote that appears in another entry, that I saw while prepping for a tour of southern Italy:

…one, the notoriously unreliable monk Radulph Glaber (the wildness of whose imagination was rivalled only by that of his private life, which gives him a fair claim to have been expelled from more monasteries than any other littérateur of the eleventh century)…
— John Julius Norwich, The Normans in the South, 1016–1130, 1992.

You can't make up stuff like that, and you can't Google this sort of clever malice up, either, and while in a cave in Matera, I started really working on my commonplace book, with beer for sustenance. For marketing reasons, I gave it a pun-loaded title, as you can see from the cover. Unless you are familiar with René Magritte's Ceci n'est pas un pipe, you will miss the more subtle play on words. My lips are sealed.

Then there is Australianisms, and I did some work on that as well, while schlepping from Helsinki to Malta in April to June with two bunches of Australians, and that one is now out in paperback and also as an ebook.

Look, if you want a damn thick square book for your shelves, buy the print version, but it is >280 000 words, and weighs 940 grams, while the ebook is almost weightless, and it is searchable: some of your best discoveries will be stochastic side-blows from a directed search, and the e-book is cheaper! Also, today, I added another 30 entries to both versions, but once you get the print version, you won't see any later bits. Buy it as a gift, but the e-book is better, and much easier to read in bed. When you sleep, dream of the carbon benefits!

I am not in this game for the money: I want to educate, to lead minds out into the sunlight, but the next book is one that your friends really should not be allowed near. Your enemies, on the other hand, should be encouraged to both read it and believe it. Think of Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary, written for the 21st century, with delirious and delicious definitions spanning from higher maths, lower maths, quantum theory, musicology, art, literature and ancient history, guaranteed to be ruthless and truthless.

The Lesser of Two Weevils is available as an ebook, and also as a dead tree book. Buy the ebook for yourself, and the dead tree version for your enemies. If you have no enemies, give this to your friends to boost your enemy ranks. It works like a dream...

Sixty years ago, I had a boss, named Doug 'Udson (he was the original 'Udson with a haitch, and sadly he is dead. I say "sadly" because, while he was malignant, he would believe anything. When I wrote in an official file that a matter was 'in train', giving a reference to another file where the matter was being dealt with, he charged me with leaving an unspecified file on a train. (If you don't know, in train is a legal term, meaning in the process of being done. It's a bit archaic now, but normal among the arts-educated.)

Now the thing is that he had looked up "train" in a tiny book called a 'Collins desk dictionary', whereas I advised him in the trial he provoked to at least consult the Shorter OED, a reference which he failed to understand, though my two Arts-graduate superiors/judges got iit mmediately. I, as a 20-year-old had dunked him in putrid smelly stuff with that one line.

The context: he was a Hard Right member of our union, I was soft left, but given to tripping him up at State Branch Council meetings, so he was out to get me. In the hearing, I explained that I was puzzled, and wanted to know which file he thought I had left on the train, and which train, he stammered and muttered, and the case was dismissed. My judges were urbane, and kept straight faces while dismissing the charge, then thanked me with a giggle after he had stalked out, but people like Doug need to be brought down, and reading this book will do just that, because there's one born every minute. Make sure they get it (the book), because they certainly won't (the joke)!

If any sort of AI ever scoops this one up, all sorts of Hell will break loose. As I maintain that AI means Artificial Inelegance, I have my hopes. Anyhow, here are some reviews for The Lesser of Two Weevils:

He would say that, wouldn’t he? —Randy Mice-Davies, Buxton Bugle.
Exceedingly dense. —F. R. Leavis, New Hearings in English Pottery.
Nobody ever erected a statue to a cricket. —Jean Sibelius (attrib.)
I wish I had as many dollars as this book has given me belly rumbles… —Gina Rinestone, The Young Exploiters’ Almanac.
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. —Franz Kafka, Cygnis ad Nauseam.

In that book, you will find, not A Beginners' Guide, but A Suckers' End. If you want a sample, I post a piece most days to this Facebook page. I also share them on Bluesky, where there is less clutter. There are also some samples here, or try these:

casse-noisette. A French device, whirled around on a string, which imitates the sound of a fart.

castigate. A small cast iron gate at the top of a high tower, overlooking the most noisome part of a castle moat. A problematic troubadour might often be ejected with great ceremony and heroic swearing from here, and being castigated has now come to mean rough treatment of almost anyone.

casting couch. Many are culled, and few are chosen.

castration. A eunuch experience.

casus belli. A Latin term for a male corset, used to hold a wobbly abdomen in a tight grip. In mediaeval Europe, revealing that a foreign ruler used a casus belli was seen as a declaration of war.

*   *   *   *   *

Also to be added in the months ahead, Tales My Mother Taught Me (but shouldn't have) and Keeeping People Is Wrong. The first is former-quiz-star smart-arsery about fondly-held myths, the latter is a very serious look at slavery in Australia. I will also be returning to a fairly technical book on echidnas and their genetics.

This is my problem, you see, I keep swapping genres, and that frightens publishers, who typically have one-dimensional brains. Speaking of which, I have also  just published a novel Sheep May Safely Craze, as both a book an e-book: here, you can find a taste of this intellectual minefield. 

Australian history as it should be: a new book

I have, this morning published an ebook and a paperback with the same content. One has full-colour illustrations and costs $6, but because of printing costs, the $34 paper version is monochrome.

The pricing if you buy both is exactly the same as any one of the four editions published by the National Library of Australia. The difference? 264,000 words here, as against 80,000 there. Now I have added in all of the improbable, unlikely but true details. You might call this the QI (Quite Interesting) of Australian history.

Two of my history teachers would approve my work, but I am sure that conservative politicians (ptui!) would not. For starters, I offer S. T. Gill's two views of  'squatter', 1788 and 1863, as evidence. These offer warts-and-all history, all the stuff that prim conservatives shriek and run away from. Here they are:

I detest those conservative fogeys who demand that History be LISTS OF PEOPLE ("like me", implied). History should not be endless lists, it needs to be stories that we can learn from.  

Those conservatives want our history to be tales of  BCDEFG: Bushrangers and Convicts (all scum), Diggers (the military ones), Explorers (brave openers of untamed total wilderness), Farmers (who turned the sterile wilderness into riches at no cost) and Gold (ours by right of conquest). They cannot name even five of more than 2000 bushrangers; their grasp of the convict system is pitiful (they can’t tell a ticket of leave from a pardon); they could not locate a single battlefield on a map; they would be lucky to name more four explorers worthy of note (and  Burke and Wills don’t count!); they don't know the harm that farming does  on our fragile soils, they know nothing about gold before Hargraves.

No lists of things, dates or people here. I had to learn lists in the 50s, like all the rivers Leichhardt crossed or followed in 1844 – 45, and performing that is my party trick among people who think. I enjoy watching them wince in horror as they realise (or recall) that such tasks were once thought to be education.

My version of Australian history is written by a science-trained story-teller, so it begins with geology and biology, then the first Australians and then the invaders. It also argues that Australia Day should be January 30.

I mention a few usual suspects, but you will also meet some Melbourne pirates; intellectuals; fools; geniuses; crooks, liars, hoaxer, frauds and cheats; eccentrics; runaways and women who wore trousers, swam naked or ran races in crinolines. I offer Governor King’s official thief and Moondyne Joe, pardoned for being good at escaping; a monster snake; a governor who owned slaves and a bureaucrat who saved Macquarie Street in Sydney; and teenage, girl and women explorers: they don't mention those in schools!

You will learn how poor people survived the Depression; their medicines, what they ate and wore, and meet a cannibal who died of plague—stuff that was left out of my school classes, as were the crimes against the first Australians. You will learn the true tale of gold discovery, which is not at all what you read, and how the Australian Light Horse annoyed Lawrence of Arabia. I also explain the first redback on a dunny seat.

Then there are bunyips, how to treat scurvy, how Eyre is usually shown walking backwards and Major Mitchell’s duel. Also, there are the scandals like the German’s fat-bellied fish: honestly it sound like fiction but it isn’t, and there are references to let you check.

Why did I write this book? I know where the bodies are buried, but more to the point, George Santayana said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In my view, those who seek to cover up our past must be wickedly determined to ensure that we all repeat it. We can do better than that, and for the good of our nation, we have to do better than that. The stuff here may trigger hissy-fits among the white-blindfold mob: so be it.

I have lived in Australia for just over one-third of the elapsed time from 1788, when Australia was invaded* by my people, up to now. Our population has quadrupled since I was born, and our ways of thinking have changed during that time, mainly for the better. In the past, I have talked to old Anzacs, old World War II POWs,19th century motorists, and people who knew the explorers. I used to sit under dining tables and behind lounges and heard unsuitable things, as the adults would have said.

This is history as it should be.

* For the cretins who think 1788 was not an invasion, chew on this: taken from David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, vol. 1, 2-3, published 1798.

It must however be observed, that at Botany Bay the natives had hitherto conducted themselves sociably and peaceably toward all the parties of our officers and people with whom they had hitherto met, and by no means seemed to regard them as enemies or invaders of their country and tranquillity*.

[footnote on page 3:]
* How grateful to every feeling of humanity would it be could we conclude this narrative without being compelled to say, that these unoffending people had found reason to change both their opinions and their conduct!

Or, consider William Westgarth, Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria, 15 (1844).

This was a grand corrobboree, arranged for amongst themselves by surrounding tribes, including the still considerable tribe of the River Goulburn. This was, as it were, one last aboriginal defiance, hurled in despair from the expiring native cause against the too-victorious colonial invasion.

These quotes are part of my 280,000-word collection Australianisms, to be released on Amazon, just a few days from now: go for the ebook which has colour, and is much cheaper.

Oh yes, I forgot: as part of my support for multiculturalism, here is the whole of chapter 21.