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 imrpobable, 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.