Books, Manuscripts and Interesting bits (at least I find them iinteresting

The history we were taught is not necessarily the whole truth, often not even close to it:

History is an old tart, plaything of the rich and famous. Throughout the ages she's seen all the great people with their pants down or their skirts up, and all those who stood on other's shoulders to appear tall, and all those made to kneel so as not to.

She's had a hard life—abused by clerics of every stripe, mercilessly ravished by despots and presidents, royally fucked by kings and queens alike, wooed by lesser mortals and buggered senseless by every victorious army from Rameses' charioteers to Netanyahu's troops. Next time you see a battle scene look in the background for her, stripped naked and bent over a gun barrel waiting to be written by the victors.

But getting to know old tarts can be a rewarding experience. Speak kindly to them and you never know what you will learn.

My first book 'Under the Banyan Tree - In Search of the Lost History of Australia's North Coast' was published by Boolarong Press about five years ago now and has done pretty well, considering its limited distribution and minimal publicity. I've had very good feedback, all positive and without anything negative - there's certain to have been people that didn't like it, they just haven't told me.

My second, 'Football: A Bloody and Murthering Practise' was published by Boolarong Press in 2024.

In case anyone's interested, the title 'A Bloody and Murthering Practise' is a quote by a 16th C Puritan (hence the 'Murthering' instead of 'Murdering') named Philip Stubbs who complained endlessly about people playing football.

Next off the rank is 'The Pox Blanket; Australia's oldest cold case'. It's about the smallpox epidemics that swept eastern Australia shortly after the first fleet landed in Sydney. It's been an ongoing bone of contention in the 'history wars' - on the one side there's people saying 'the first fleet were good guys and couldn't have done it, so it was introduced by Asians in the north', and on the other there's people saying 'the bastards did it'. I became interested when they started blaming the North, that's my territory.

It's not a subject that I was sure I wanted to write about, but the more I researched, the more it became a story that has to be told. In Indigenous Australia between about 50 - 90% of most nations were wiped out by smallpox in the late 18th and early 19th Cs, a situation that mirrored the experiences in the Americas and Sth Africa. In Nth America it was deliberately introduced to native populations to reduce opposition and ease the way for settlers, and they even left unequivocal written evidence of their crimes. The question here is 'did the same happen in Australia?' It's horrible that it happened, and even horribler to think that it could have been deliberate.

I've tried to maintain a semblance of neutrality and present as much evidence as I could find and as many alternatives as possible and let the reader judge. Not sure I succeeded, but apparently it's a good read. Which is good, because very few Australians know about this episode in their history, but if smallpox hadn't intervened Sydney very likely would've failed and modern Australia would not exist in its present form.

Watch this space