The Biggest Book of Australian History: 5th edition: augmented author's cut

By Peter Macinnis

The first four editions of this work were commissioned by the National Library of Australia (for overseas people, think US Library of Congress, but in Australia), as The Big Book of Australian History.The publishers had the idea, gave me a framework which I followed, except for adding steam engines. They wanted average ten-year-olds to handle it, so I had to cut lots of detail, and each version came in at just over 80,000 words. I have now put the curious and interesting parts back in, ending up with 265,000 words. Any ten-year-old like I was can still handle it, but I expect adults to like a lot of the stories as well, like how Scrammy Jack salted a pub, not a gold mine. Then there was the man who sold his wife, and a few interesting and decent bushrangers.

Conservatives want our history to be 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.

I mention a few usual suspects, but you will also meet 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.

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. Then 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. This is history as it should be, warts and all.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H9GKHG6C
• ISBN13: 9798187921225
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 460 Pages
• Weight: 2.33 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 8.5" x 11.0"