David Hunt - True Girt: The Unauthorised History of Australia

Praise for Girt

Hilarious and insightful Hunt has found the deep wells of humour in Australias history.

CHRIS TAYLOR, THE CHASER

A sneaky, sometimes shocking peek under the dirty rug of Australian history.

JOHN BIRMINGHAM

There is barely a page in Girt that wont inspire a chortle. Its our early history told by a writer with a wit sharp enough to slice tomatoes.

THE HERALD SUN

Girt cuts an irreverent swathe through the facts, fools, fantasies and frauds that made this country what it is today, hoisting sacred cows on their own petards and otherwise sawing the legs off Lady Macquaries chair. I was transported.

SHANE MALONEY, THE AGE

Historiography as practised by Mr Hunt is an exceedingly clever way to skewer the rapier of truth through the carcass of officious mendacity Hunt quickly had his wicked way with me.

BARRY GITTENS, EUREKA STREET

Australian history never looked like this! Beneath the humour is an interesting analysis backed by extensive research, which has uprooted some little-known historical gems.

BOOKS+PUBLISHING

This book taught me that our history is full of dodgy, booze-peddling charlatans. Somehow I found this reassuring.

DOMINIC KNIGHT

By David Hunt

The Unauthorised History of Australia

GIRT

TRUE GIRT

For children and the young at heart

THE NOSE PIXIES

How to enjoy the footnotes in this eBook

The words footnotes and enjoy are rarely found in the same sentence. Reading footnotes in most books is akin to being slowly bludgeoned to death with the complete set of the Encyclopdia Britannica before it went digital.

The footnotes in this fine eBook are more like a Barossa red, a barbecue on a lazy Sunday afternoon, or the wafting scent of Grandmas freshly baked lamington on a crisp spring morn. The footnotes are meant to be savoured with the text besides which they appear. Gently tap each footnote number as you encounter it and you will be transported to the relevant footnote text. After enjoying the footnote, tap the number and you will be returned to the main body of True Girt.

Dont worry, youll get the hang of it.

Published by Black Inc.,
an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd

Level 1, 221 Drummond Street

Carlton VIC 3053, Australia

www.blackincbooks.com

Copyright David Hunt 2016

David Hunt asserts his right to be known as the author of this work.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Hunt, David, 1971 author.

True girt: the unauthorised history of Australia / David Hunt.

9781863958844 (paperback)

9781925435320 (ebook)

Frontier and pioneer lifeAustralia.

AustraliaHistory.

Book design by Peter Long

Typeset by Duncan Blachford & Tristan Main

Cover: image of Andrew George Scott (Captain Moonlite) from the Victoria Police Historical Collection, National Portrait Gallery of Australia; image of cockatoo Isselee, Dreamstime.

Image p.116 courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery of Australia.

For X. & V. B.

Truth is stranger than Fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isnt.

MARK TWAIN, FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR, 1897

Farewell, Australia! You are a rising child, and doubtless some day will reign a great princess in the South: but you are too great and ambitious for affection, yet not great enough for respect. I leave your shores without sorrow or regret.

CHARLES DARWIN, NARRATIVE OF THE VOYAGES OF H.M. SHIPS ADVENTURE AND BEAGLE, 1839

Australia seems all right. There is an awful lot of it. Every city seems to despise every other city.

IRIS MURDOCH, LETTER TO BRIGID BROPHY, 1967

This book contains references to deceased Aboriginal people, their words, names and images, all of which are in the public domain. Many Aboriginal people follow the custom of not using the names of those deceased. Individuals and communities should be warned that they may read or see things in this book that could cause distress.

PREVIOUSLY IN GIRT

Introduction

Looking back is a bad habit.

Reuben J. Rooster Cogburn, True Grit

T HIS WAS THE WILD SOUTH, THE FURTHEST FRONTIER OF Empire, an unforgiving land for Britains unforgiven. The pick-pockets, prostitutes and handkerchief thieves who unwillingly called Australia home, and those who guarded them, had no interest in the vast alien landscape that pressed upon their tiny settlements.

Australia was a sentence and its reluctant inhabitants were waiting for the full stop. And so they desperately clung to the coast, hoping for a ship to take them anywhere.

The point of a prison is to keep people confined, yet the convict colony had no walls. Its genius was not confinement of the body, but confinement of the mind. Those who ventured into the bush, untrained in the arts of hunter-gathering, were confronted by a lack of food and water and a surplus of hostile natives keen to debate the fine points of British colonial policy with the fine points of their spears.

And the animals! When God was handing out venom, He started with Australia and then got bored. There were poisonous snakes, spiders, ants, wasps, bees, ticks and centipedes even the cute little river beaver with the ducks bill had venomous spurs on its hind legs. And you wouldnt think about swimming in the sea, which was a playground for fish, rays, stingers, shells and octopi equipped with enough nerve toxin to take out half of Yorkshire and Yorkshire folk are tough. Then there were the sharks

The children of the first colonists did not share these fears. For them, the rolling green pastures and ordered hedgerows of England were as foreign as Gullivers Lilliput. This was the only land they knew and they wanted to know it better, as did the growing number of free settlers. Australia was more than a prison it was a land of untapped opportunity. Some of the convicts and their guards also began to see Australia in this light.

Freed convicts were granted land and opened businesses, competing with the soldiers and officials whod once dominated farming and trade. Some of the unshackled became fabulously wealthy and, under the patronage of Governor Lachlan Macquarie, were appointed to high office. Many of those untainted by the convict stain were unhappy with these arrangements and spent decades pointedly not inviting former convicts around to dinner and demanding their exclusion from public life.

Britain reluctantly approved the spread of settlement, partly because of its growing addiction to the fine wool produced by southern sheep and partly because the French were once more sniffing around the continent and giving bits of its coast ridiculous French names. But expansion would be strictly controlled to balance the objectives of: