Girt

The Unauthorised History of Australia

David Hunt

• Publisher: Black Inc.
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781922231086
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

Girt. No word could better capture the essence of Australia...

In this hilarious history, David Hunt reveals the truth of Australia's past, from megafauna to Macquarie - the cock-ups and curiosities, the forgotten eccentrics and Eureka moments that have made us who we are.

Girt introduces forgotten heroes like Mary McLoghlin, transported for the crime of 'felony of sock', and Trim the cat, who beat a French monkey to become the first animal to circumnavigate Australia. It recounts the misfortunes of the escaped Irish convicts who set out to walk from Sydney to China, guided only by a hand-drawn paper compass, and explains the role of the coconut in Australia's only military coup.

Our nation's beginnings are steeped in the strange, the ridiculous and the frankly bizarre. Girt proudly reclaims these stories for all of us.

Not to read it would be un-Australian.

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

' Girt … cuts an irreverent swath 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 Macquarie's chair. I was transported.' — Shane Maloney, The Age Best Books of 2013

' Girt is a ripping read… a humorous history that is accessible enough to share with the eight-year-old. Hunt's writing interests span comedy, politics and history, a happy triumvirate when your subject is Australia.' — Stephen Romei, The Australian

1

For those who’ve come across the seas

We’ve boundless plains to share

Advance Australia Fair,

Peter Dodds McCormick, 1878

THE VERY LATE CAPTAIN COOK

It is the 29th of April 1770 and Captain James Cook, the greatest explorer of his age,3 strides across the deck of the HMS Endeavour while his pet botanist, Joseph Banks, scurries in his wake wittering on about seedpods. But Cook only has ears for the siren song of the land that lies spread before him like a welcoming lover. He has discovered her and all her secrets – and this day, at Botany Bay, he will name her and claim her for God, King and Great Britain.

This is, of course, complete nonsense.

Captain Cook wasn’t even Captain Cook in 1770, but Lieutenant Cook, a junior officer of no particular note. He arrived between 60,000 and 164 years too late to discover Australia (depending on whom you listen to) and claimed the continent’s entire east coast, which he didn’t like much, on Possession Island in the Torres Strait, naming it New Wales4 because it reminded him very much of sunny tropical Wales.

By the time Cook got around to not discovering Australia, Spanish eyes had gazed upon her emerald rainforests, a Dutch psychopath had bathed her beaches in the blood of his countrymen, and her northern shores had serviced China’s sexually adventurous and erectilely challenged for at least half a century.

So what of those who came across the sea before Cook? They certainly didn’t tell of boundless plains to share. The general consensus was that Australia was sandy, boring and full of hostile savages who weren’t interested in buying tea.

THE FIRST ENGLISHMAN NOT TO DISCOVER AUSTRALIA

Cook wasn’t even the first Englishman not to discover Australia. That honour fell to the murderously incompetent Captain John Brookes in 1622.

Brookes was one of the first children of a new golden age in which the English dreamt of empire. King James VI of Scotland had ascended the English throne in 1603, joining the two previously hostile countries together under a common monarch and changing his name to King James I. The Irish were crushed in the same year, after sixty years of war and an even longer period of jokes at their expense. The English jackboot had already trampled the Welsh daffodil and the much hardier leek and, with Scotland and Ireland now subdued, a truly great Britain was looking to make her mark on the wider world. Britain’s first permanent colony was established in 1607 and, when the Mayflower pilgrims went to starve and freeze in America in 1620, Britain was well on her way to becoming a great colonial power.5

But in 1622 Britannia did not yet rule the waves, with the Spanish, Dutch and French fleets challenging her naval supremacy. And while Great Britain is now a nation of shopkeepers, back then if Brookes wanted to buy a really good cheese, tulip, painting of a chubby nude chick with red hair or, most importantly, the latest must-have condiment, he would have had to ask the Dutch.

Europe had discovered that its traditional cuisine of turnip and lard was actually edible when heavily disguised with spices. Pepper was all the rage, the landed gentry held nutmeg parties, and gold was worth its weight in cloves. Most of these exotic treats could only be found in the East Indies (now Indonesia) and the Dutch East India Company held the keys to the spice rack.

And so it is we find Captain Brookes of the Tryall skulking off the North West Cape of Western Australia, en route to the East Indies, his hold full of silver to buy pepper from under the noses of the Dutch.

In fairness to Captain Cook, he knew he had run into Australia (or New Holland, as it was then known). Brookes had no idea. When Brookes sighted the Australian coast, he thought it a small island in the Indian Ocean. This was his first navigational mistake. His second was to run his ship into a small island in the Indian Ocean, which he thought to be open sea. The low-lying island, now known as Tryal Rocks, lies about 100 kilometres off the West Australian coast and is the site of the first proven European shipwreck in Australian waters.

Historians spend a lot of time doing useful things like debating the meaning of the word “discovery”. The consensus is that running into something without realising where it is does not constitute discovery, although this rule is not applied to Christopher Columbus, who maintained until his dying day that he had crashed into Asia and that America did not exist.6 Another rule of discovery is that you must leave X, find Y, and then return to X and announce, “I have just found Y.” You can’t stay in Y being hand-fed papaya by the sixty Polynesian virgins who have declared you to be a living god.

So Brookes saw Australia, Brookes crashed into Australia, but Brookes did not “discover” Australia.7

Brookes was not the sort of captain to go down with his ship. He was, however, the sort of captain to make off with its silver while his men drowned around him. Brookes and forty-five of his crew escaped in the ship’s longboat and skiff, which had room for many more men, leaving ninety-three of their fellows to succumb to hunger, thirst and high tide. He made it to Batavia (modern-day Jakarta) and told his employer, the British East India Company, that all its silver was lying at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. He promised that he had stuck to his allocated course and had been nowhere near the waters in which he had sunk. For centuries, seamen searched the wrong seas for the Tryall’s treasure. Only in 1969 was the wreck discovered and the first sighting of Australia by an Englishman confirmed.

THE FIRST ENGLISH BACKPACKER

The next Englishman not to discover Australia was William Dampier. Dampier was England’s first professional tourist and clocked up a phenomenal quantity of frequent-sailor points, being the first man to circumnavigate the globe three times.

Dampier was also a pirate, but he was a sensitive pirate with soulful eyes and long girly hair who kept a diary in which he recorded his feelings about the many lands, people, plants and animals he encountered. Dampier’s pirating gave him an opportunity to see the world and kill all sorts of new and interesting people, although, in his defence, he felt bad about it afterwards (unless his victims were Spanish).

The pirates of the Caribbean, of which Dampier was one, had many endearing qualities. They revived the democracy of the ancient Greeks, with crew members electing their captain and voting on where to travel and whom to kill. After an honest day’s raping and pillaging, they would divide the day’s spoils equally. They introduced the world’s first workers’ compensation scheme, with payouts determined by battle-wound severity.8 On the island of Tortuga, buccaneers lived in lifelong male pairs; partners were known as matelots and they did, sharing property, food, a bed and, in every sense of the word, each other’s booty. The English turned a blind eye to this bohemian lifestyle because the pirates were awfully good at burning Spanish towns, sinking Spanish ships and hanging Spanish sailors from the yardarm by their entrails, all of which the English regarded as jolly good sport.

So in 1688 we find William Dampier pirating off the Mexican coast aboard Captain Swan’s Cygnet.9 Swan was tired of killing Spaniards in the Americas and suggested to his crew that they might like to kill some different Spaniards in the Philippines. Dampier wrote that the crew of the Cygnet only had three days’ worth of rations by the time they reached Guam and “had contrived to kill Captain Swan and eat him when the victuals were gone”. Although Swan escaped un­devoured, the Cygnet’s Asian booty was restricted to rice and cotton, a far cry from the gold and silver of the Americas.

The Cygnet was now being hunted by the Spanish and the crew voted to lie low in New Holland for a while on the grounds that everyone said the place was a dump; no one in their right mind could think the English would ever go there. And so, on 4 January 1688,10 Dampier landed on the coast of Western Australia. His diary from his short stay shows that, like many Englishmen abroad, he didn’t like the climate, the people or the food. He wrote:

The inhabitants of this country are the miserablest people in the world. The Hodmadods of Monomatapa, though a nasty people, yet for wealth are gentlemen to these; who have no houses, and skin garments, sheep, poultry, and fruits of the earth, ostrich eggs, etc., as the Hodmadods have: and, setting aside their human shape, they differ but little from brutes … They are long-visaged, and of a very unpleasing aspect, having not one graceful feature in their faces.

After getting Anglo–Aboriginal relations off to such a promising start, Dampier left our shores, bought a tattooed East-Indian slave named Jeoly, returned to England, sold Jeoly to a travelling freak show, and published the diary of his travels. A New Voyage Round the World was, with the exception of the Bible, the most popular book of its era – part seventeenth-century Lonely Planet guide, part swashbuckling potboiler. Dampier could move seamlessly from a botanical description of the banana11 to a dissertation on the sexual mores of Filipino women, before launching into tales of rapine upon the high seas and enumerating the many failings of the various foreigners h...