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.
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.
This is a book about How Things Worked, based heavily on contemporary descriptions. Here, you will learn about the things that don't get mentioned in school, almost all of them things that happened after the white invasion in 1788, and from a legal point of view it WAS an invasion.
You will learn how all the early Australians swam naked; wrote dreadful poetry; played strange sports; were fooled into believing in bunyips; feared foreign invasions (French, Russian or American); how convicts came to Australia; how free settlers travelled in the days of sail; what they ate, drank and wore; what the shops were like; town life and bush life; what diseases they got and how they treated them; how they used animal, wind and steam power; how they travelled across the land; coaches, trams, omnibuses and bicycles; ferries and ships; inns and pubs, and we're only just half-way.
You will read how farms got started; how homes were made and managed; how society worked; how justice worked (not very well); punishment; race riots; the coolie system; how Indigenous people were treated; newspapers, telegraphs and communication (some whites used smoke signals!); education, democracy and science in a colonial setting; the people who visited, the plants and animal pests that came in; bushfires, floods, droughts and storms; the materials they used; the minerals they dug up (including the real story of gold in Australia, very different from what the school books say); rogues, scallywags and conmen, and the armed forces and wars that changed Australia and the Australian myth.
Peter Macinnis has a science degree, an incomplete Arts degree and a Master's degree in peculiar statistical matters. He learned his craft as an historian in the 1960s, and knows his material intimately. He began working with computers in 1963; has been a park ranger; science teacher; surrealist/anarchist bureaucrat working on computer systems; a management consultant specialising in fraud work; a radio broadcaster; a museum educator showing young people how to interpret bones; a teacher of computing; and since 1998, a professional writer writer who writes mainly about social history, biology, mathematics, technology and colonial Australia. His published works for adults include the following. For more information on these books, see this link.
This file is http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/writing/you-missed.htm
It was created on 3 October 2020 and last revised on 3 October 2020.
The home page of this set is here.