1
00:00:10,939 --> 00:00:39,898
G'day guys! Welcome to this episode
of Aussie English. Hope you're having
a great week. I am very excited to
bring you today's episode because I
have had the amazing chance to
interview one of my favourite
Australian authors, David Hunt. Now,
David Hunt is the author of the books
Girt and True Girt, I think I've
mentioned these a few times on the
podcast here, they're amazing, funny,
hilarious, but informative history
books about Australia. They're the
kinds of history books that are
written so well, you guys probably
won't be able to put them down and
the audio books are even better.

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00:00:43,871 --> 00:01:23,500
Anyway, to give you an idea of
David's sense of humour, I'll read
his bio from
www.blackinkbooks.com.au. So, David
Hunt is an unusually tall and
handsome man who likes writing his
own bios for all the books he has
written. David is the author of Girt:
The Unauthorized History of
Australia, which won the 2014 Indie
Award for non-fiction and was
shortlisted in both the NSW Premier's
Literary Award and Australian Book
Industry Awards. True Girt, the
sequel, was published in 2016 as was
a book for children, The Nose Pixies.
David has a birthmark that looks like
Tasmania, only smaller, and not as
far south.

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Alright, so he's a hilarious guy. I
think you're going to love this
episode, guys, strap yourselves in
and prepare for a significant dose of
humorous Australian history. Let's
get into it.

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00:01:39,390 --> 00:02:00,490
Alright. Well, David, thank you so
much for coming on the podcast. David
is the author of Girt and a True
Girt. Two books that I fell in love
with last year and I hassled him to
come on today to sort of talk to us a
little bit about his life growing up
in Australia, but also about
Australian history, how you got into
it and then heroes and villains.
Where did you grow up in Australia,
David?

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00:02:02,760 --> 00:02:20,052
Pete, thanks for having me on, mate.
I am a Sydney boy born and bred, so
born in the Paddington Women's
Hospital, which has now been knocked
down for apartments, which pretty is
much the story of Sydney over the
last forty seven years, which is as
long as I've been about.

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00:02:20,190 --> 00:02:21,597
In the last five use shoddy
apartments, right?

7
00:02:23,220 --> 00:02:28,484
Pretty shoddy, but yeah I don't if
I'd be moving into anything that's
being built in the last ten or twelve
years or so.

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00:02:29,780 --> 00:02:32,681
Is that situation getting any better
or it's not looking good?

9
00:02:33,090 --> 00:02:44,682
Look, look, I... I'm an expert
historian, a master of the English
language, sadly I know bugger all
about property development, so I
probably can't help you on that.

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00:02:44,760 --> 00:02:45,760
So, no tips.

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00:02:46,260 --> 00:02:48,389
No tips, no tips when it comes to
property.

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00:02:48,660 --> 00:02:54,039
So, what was like..what was it like
living in in Sydney and growing up
there? Did you spend all your life
there too?

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00:02:54,680 --> 00:03:08,639
Oh, look, no I've been... I've
travelled a bit and I've spent a few
months living in in the north of
England, but Sydney has always been
my home base, I suppose.

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00:03:09,510 --> 00:03:15,117
And what was your education like? Did
you always think you were going to
become a historian or was that just
something that sort of happened to
you?

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No, that was the product of a
mid-life crisis when I decided that
being a lawyer was getting me down
and I wanted to do something a bit
more creative.

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00:03:27,720 --> 00:03:29,092
I heard that story a few times, I
think.

17
00:03:29,093 --> 00:04:42,929
Yeah, yeah, I actually got into...
I'd always liked history at school,
but it was sort of sword and sandals
type history. I did ancient history
at school, Greeks, Romans, Persians
that sort of thing and found
Australian history to be incredibly
dull and that was partly the way it
was taught, I think, and also I think
Australians have a bit of a chip on
their shoulder about their own
history. And so we haven't...we've
often been a little bit disengaged
and disinterested. I really got into
Australian history probably about ten
years ago when I was asked to be a
writer on a sketch comedy TV project
around Australian history with some
of the guys from The Chaser, and that
never ended up going to air, but the
research I did for that led me to
believe that Australian history was
unique and fascinating and had just
been communicated in a poor way in
the school curriculum over time, so
I'm a recent Australian history
convert.

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00:04:43,810 --> 00:04:51,519
So, what was it? Was there a single
moment that that you suddenly clicked
and went 'holy crap', you know
'Aussie history is actually really
interesting and a story worth
telling'?

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00:04:52,300 --> 00:05:52,619
Yeah, look it was, as I said, it was
working on a comedy show. So, first
of all we were looking at ways that
we could make Australian history
stories funny and then I came across
so many funny Australian history
stories that were real. I thought
'why are we trying to turn this stuff
into sketch comedy, when the real
stuff is so good?', and so that was a
bit of a brainwave, whilst we were
waiting for the green light to start
filming, I wrote an article on the
Burke and Wills expedition and
submitted it to a magazine, the
magazine people passed on to their
sort of related book publishing
company and Girt was commissioned off
the back of that piece I did on Burke
and Wills, so it probably the Burke
and Wills short sort of story was
what got me into writing Australian
history and that sort of literary
sense.

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00:05:53,300 --> 00:06:03,307
And, so how did you decide to get
started for a full book? Was it that
they contacted during the like 'you
know what? This should be... This
style that you write in needs to be
applied to a broader scale of
history'?

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Yeah, yeah, so the magazine passed it
on to my current publisher Black Ink
based down in Melbourne and they said
'would you like to write a book in
this style?', and I said 'sure, yeah,
that'll be easy'. It wasn't easy, it
was incredibly tricky, but it did
give me, I took some time off work,
wrote the book, went back to work
briefly and then decided pretty much
to toss in the day job and focus on
writing and a little bit of
performance type stuff, yeah.

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00:06:38,440 --> 00:06:54,529
And what was the process like? When
they said to you, you know, we want
you to do this, but obviously, was it
the first hundred years of Australian
history and the first book there and
what was the process like of deciding
how you were going to flesh that out
and which bits to put in, which bits
to leave out how detailed you get?

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Well, they look, my original pitch
was for me to have a book that went
all the way up to Federation and I
think I handed... My book was about a
year overdue, and I'd sort of got up
to 1824, the naming of Australia and
I thought, I said to the published
'look, you know, I've got 80 thousand
odd words now, why don't we, why
don't we leave it at this and I will
do a other volume two'? And, so it
never had the scope that was
originally pitched, But that's
because when I pitched after being
told go and write a book, you know, I
prepared a pitch document, and I had
no real idea at the time and it
wasn't until I really got into the
research that it became clear to me
that I'd be taking longer to tell the
story of Australian history.

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00:08:02,260 --> 00:08:09,040
And how is that done? How do you
research it properly, right? Like I
take it you don't just get on
Wikipedia and just summarise a few
articles.

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Why not? That's propably... No, I
spent a lot of time at the Mitchell
Library, there are lots of historical
documents, journals, letters and the
like, available online through a
number of resources, Trove is a great
one, various libraries like the New
South Wales State library have got
quite large history collections
online. Project Gutenberg is another
one, which had journals of people
like William Dampier and Joseph
Banks. So, look, I basically locked
myself away for over a year and read
originals, the primary documents, and
lots of secondary material as well.

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00:09:07,430 --> 00:09:29,230
And, so what was the David like going
into that? And the David like after
that? In terms of his understanding
and appreciation of Australian
history. Because I know for most
people today, especially my age, it's
kind of like that... I would say the
average person probably has a basic
idea of what happened, but either
doesn't want to talk about it or it
doesn't really know very much really
have an opinion on it, what was it
like for you?

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Well, look I went in knowing a bit
having always had a passing interest
and done some work on the TV project,
but certainly...look I came out of
it..I went in thinking that I was a
humorous writer writing about history
and I came out of it saying really...
Going forward, I'm going to be a
historian who writes comically. So,
the second book True Girt is a bit
more historically packed and denser
and darker than the first one and
that probably reflects that I took
the history side of things a lot more
seriously than when I started out on
Girt.

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Were there things that you came
across that sort of where the
complete opposite of what you were
thinking or shocks and surprises that
you weren't taught in school?

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Well, most of it isn't taught in
school. I mean, the suggestion that
Bass and Flinders, the great
exploring double act, Flinders is the
most, you know, one of the most
important characters in Australian
history. He was the first person to
circumnavigate the continent, he
actually proposed the name Australia,
he discovered Bass Strait, and prove
that Tasmania was an island, which
we're all grateful to this day, and
there are more statues of him in
Australia than any other man, more
things named after him, he's an
incredibly important figure.

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00:11:07,995 --> 00:11:08,995
The book about his cat.

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00:11:09,710 --> 00:12:50,950
The book about his cat Trim. There
are more statues of Trim cat than of
any other cat in Australian as well,
so a very important man and cat
double act, but there's this love
letter that he writes to George Bass
in nineteen hundred that that's
really quite racy. And the fact that
Bass and Flinders were more than just
sailing buddies, is something which
certainly isn't regularly taught in
our schools. That was a story that
surprised me, but I changed my views
on lots of things. I mean, I have a
much more nuanced view of Ned Kelly
than after researching him than
before I researched him. I think he
was a, you know, he's essentially a
poor horse thieving, cop killing
terrorist with a penchant for
cast-iron fetish ware. But he also
has incredible charisma and depth and
a degree of political vision. So, it
was quite a complex character, which
I hadn't appreciated before I really
got stuck into him. Yeah, look I
think what I came to appreciate is
that when Australian history is
traditionally been taught, lots of
our great historical figures are
reduced to archetypes. There's sort
of one dimensional and what I
realized was that a lot of these
great characters are more like
characters in games Game of Thrones.

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There's a bit of bad stuff, there's a
bit of good stuff, and that and the
people are complex and that's what I
try and get across in some of my
writing that, you know, Lachlan
Macquarie wasn't just the guy who
built things and named everything
Macquarie, he was also, you know, an
alcoholic, a bit of a pants man, had
had a history of fraud. Those things
made him a more colourful character
and those things about his background
are often overlooked in mainstream
histories.

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It's really difficult too, I found,
because it depends on who you read,
like I read the explorers by Tim
Flannery recently and then Dark Emu
as well, and it seems like both of
those, well, although Tim Flannery
kind of just dives in a little bit
into Mitchell and Major Mitchell and
what he was like, it seems like he
paints him in a much nicer light than
he was painted in Dark Emu where it
was his racist side was played up a
lot more. It's hard to know what to
believe, right? When you just read...

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00:13:55,999 --> 00:14:42,571
Well, both are probably true and we
would...I mean, Mitchell was
reasonably enlightened, he was the
guy who actually says we need to be
using Aboriginal Place Names, as he
was Surveyor General. So, basically,
so lost explorers could ask the
locals for directions. But he had a
greater appreciation of Aboriginal
culture than most, and yes and Bruce
Pascoe's book, Dark Emu he look at
Mitchell's journals and diaries
pretty, pretty closely, and there are
bloody conflicts with Aboriginal
people on the banks of rivers and
that was...

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Was that Hume that was on the Murray
River? I forgot the name of him, the
guy that was going down there and
suddenly comes around a corner in
this 500 Aboriginals ready to kill
him on a boat.

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Mitchell certainly had that
experience when he was out sort of
pottering around the sort of Lachlan
Macquarie Rivers. So, that was not an
uncommon for explorers to have to
have, you know, conflict with
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
people. I mean, Edmund Kennedy was
and nearly most of his party were
bumped off, Ludwig Leichardt, you
know, went missing presumed killed by
Aboriginal people. Understandably so,
I mean, there was the Aboriginal
people who would have been meeting
these explorers would have if not had
first-hand experience of Europeans
moving them off their land, would
certainly have heard about it and
certainly would have formed a
strongly negative impression of them,
you know, of any passing stray
Europeans.

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What was that like? So, you know, the
first fleet gets here because Cook
really didn't have that much to do
with the local Indigenous people,
right? He kind of bumped into them in
the north and that was about it.

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00:16:17,116 --> 00:17:05,999
He bumped into them in, well... His
first encounter was with the Gweagal
of Botany Bay, or Stingray Harbour,
as he called it at the time in
Sydney, and when the two Gweagal
warriors sort of threw spears and
rocks at the approaching longboat, he
ordered them to be fired on, and so
that was the first contact that Cook
had. Also he'd get up at the
Endeavour River near Cooktown as it
is now in Queensland, again, there
was there was conflict with local
Aboriginal people, but also an
attempt at reconciliation.
Reconciliation rocks up there when
Cook came to appreciate that he was
causing some some problems.

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So, did they have a good
understanding at the time of what was
to come? Do you think in terms of if
I claim this land for the Kingdom,
you know, when they come, and shit,
these people gone, you know, I'll
give you guys 10 years and it's over?

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No, not at the time of Cook, I mean,
Cook actually didn't bother claiming
the east coast of Australia until he
got up into the Torres Strait on what
we now know was Possession island,
where he took possession of the,
effectively, the eastern half of
Australia and explorers had a habit
of sort of claiming any bit of old
land they came across. Cook at the
time wasn't that impressed with the
land, neither was Banks, there was no
real, Joseph Banks, his partner
sidekick, there was no plan to
colonize at the time. That really
happens in the 1880s when America is
no longer accepting Britain's
convicts after the American War of
Independence and Britain is
desperately casting around for
somewhere unpleasant and distant and
surrounded by water to send them to.

41
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Joke's on them now.

42
00:18:17,260 --> 00:18:20,839
Well, after watching The Ashes the
other night that the joke might be
back on us.

43
00:18:22,650 --> 00:18:22,905
True.

44
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Yeah, so no, that was, that was not
really a fact going Cook's mind at
the time.

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So, what was the...'cause I guess, I
recently read Australian Aboriginals,
I think by Broome as well, Richard
Broome, and it was eye opening just
the complexity of the relationships
and that there were sort of...they
weren't just a very tumultuous, you
know, set of relationships, it was
always war, always fighting, it
wasn't that kind of situation, right?
It was it was definitely not black or
white.

46
00:18:58,540 --> 00:19:56,043
No, well, I mean, look there was
certainly war and there was fighting,
but there, I mean, some of the stuff
that Broome writes about, the
relationships up in northern
Australia on cattle stations and the
like... where the Aboriginal people,
many of them stayed on their own
land, were incorporated into the
local economy and took pleasure and
pride in work on cattle stations in
the north. Of course they weren't
paid properly for the work they did
and not everything was hunky dory,
but it's wrong to suggest that
Australian European and Aboriginal
relationships were all about conflict
and dispossession. There was often
accommodation, that was often
attempts at cross-cultural
understanding and there were good and
bad people on both sides I think it'd
be fair to say.

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So, what aspects of Australian
history, when you were writing these
books, did you find that you think
get whitewashed or ignored or not,
maybe not even told enough? Are there
certain stories that just got
forgotten that are better than the
ones we do know?

48
00:20:10,260 --> 00:20:29,909
Well, certainly... look, Aboriginal
history had been not only neglected,
but it was whitewashed out of the way
that history was taught until really,
I think, after the Bicentenary in
1988. Certainly, when I went to
school in the 70s and 80s there was
no real acknowledgement of Aboriginal
people at all other than a sort of
passive people who got rolled over
when the continent was settled by
Britain.

49
00:20:48,938 --> 00:20:51,049
Why do you think that was?

50
00:20:51,242 --> 00:21:20,676
Well, I think part of the great...
During the late 19th and early 20th
century there was a vast sort of
nationalist approach to Australian
history where we venerated the sort
of outback men who expanded the
frontier and they were heroes, you
know? Your boundary riders, your
drivers, your shearers, your
horseman, your explorers...

51
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Many of whom were Aboriginal.

52
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Many of whom were Aboriginal and the
idea that the people who, you know,
conferred vast riches upon the
Australian people and opened up the
continent for wheat and beef and gold
and all of those things that made
Australia at the turn of the 20th
century, the richest country in the
world on a per capita basis, the idea
that the frontiersman had
considerable blood on their hands was
not a popular one and, so many, many
of the stories were buried. Many of
them weren't told in the first place
because, certainly with the native
police in Queensland where some of
the worst frontier violence occurred,
there was a deliberate policy of
silence of not keeping records and
those few records that were kept
mysteriously disappeared.

53
00:22:21,680 --> 00:22:23,821
Do you want to explain too what the
native police were?

54
00:22:23,834 --> 00:23:45,130
Yeah, the native police were actually
groups of Aboriginal frontiersmen who
were shipped up from the south with
each group of policemen led by a
white officer and their job was
effectively to, in inverted commas,
"disperse" Aboriginal people from
areas that were being settled, and
that dispersal often involved
basically shooting the locals. And
so, we have this notion of Aboriginal
people today as being sort of one
common group of people, of course
that's not the case. You've got a
couple of hundred different
languages, you've got hundreds of
tribes. And so, the Aboriginal people
from down in southern New South Wales
and Northern Victoria had no real
feelings of kinship for the people
they were displacing. And so you've
probably got over 30.000 Aboriginal
people killed in Queensland. Northern
Territory frontiers, often at the
hands of Aboriginal dispersal squads
run, controlled directed by white
officers.

55
00:23:45,310 --> 00:24:12,162
Because that sounds like, when I was
reading that in Aboriginal
Australians, that seemed like a
massive uncomfortable truth that
doesn't seem to be spoken about.
Obviously, at the hands of us as
well, but it's weird and I kind of
get annoyed when people say ah well
like because teaching English people
are quite often like 'talk about the
Aboriginal accent' and it's like...
that's like saying the European
accent, right, in English. It's kind
of like there are so many different
groups and they weren't necessarily
on good terms with one another.

56
00:24:12,741 --> 00:24:13,741
No, not at all.

57
00:24:14,185 --> 00:24:20,430
Was it like that throughout the
continent when we got here too, that
there was a lot of conflict and that
was used to kind of help solve the
chaos?

58
00:24:20,431 --> 00:24:24,040
Well, that of before.

59
00:24:24,100 --> 00:25:41,390
Before we arrived, the convict was...
the conflict* was very local. You had
Aboriginal groups who would have a
set pattern of migration where they
would take in different resources at
different times of the year. They
were mostly highly nomadic people.
And so, you would have clashes
between different groups of
Aboriginal people over resources,
over women, over various other
things, but it was local and there
were ways of resolving those
disputes, which allowed everybody to
get on to the extent that they
weren't wiping each other out. It
wasn't until Europeans started, and
these were, back in those days, the
Aboriginal people who were fighting
if you were an Aboriginal person were
people who you had to live with, you
know, on a long-term basis. Their
groups would would still be in your
area going forwards. What happened
when Europeans arrived to stay, they
they moved Aboriginal people out of
their tribal areas to quite distant
areas.

60
00:25:43,030 --> 00:25:57,300
And this was sort of done what is
both directly and indirectly, right?
Like they kind of did force them off
the land and they settled there, but
then also with their cattle and sheep
that they just kind of let go into
the wild, that just decimated a lot
of their resources that the
indigenous tribes are using and so
they had to move.

61
00:25:58,640 --> 00:26:42,259
Yeah, yeah. Well, they, yes, so you
have Aboriginal people being moved on
because the waterways that they
relied on were where sheep station,
cattle station owners, wanted to put
their flocks and herds. So, you've
you've got people being moved on
basically because their water
resources are being taken, but they
were actively picked up by and used
as trackers, so some of the early
Tasmanian Aboriginal conflict was
between trackers who'd been moved
down from New South Wales into
Tasmania to track Aboriginal people
in Tasmania.

62
00:26:44,030 --> 00:27:19,339
So, yeah it's... But certainly
Europeans gave some Aboriginal people
guns, horses, moved them on to people
who they had no previous contact
with, didn't have to maintain
amicable relationships with, and yeah
that's...You'd have to say there was
always conflict between some
Aboriginal groups, but throwing
Europeans into the mix that spiralled
out of control.

63
00:27:20,150 --> 00:27:46,920
So, did it change your view of, I
guess, you know, compassion or
towards certain groups or certain
historical figures to when you learn
more about them? Because when I was
reading a bit about convicts and at
first I think, you know, "Oh, these
are like white slaves that have come
over from England". And then you do
sort of read about some of the stuff
that they got up to and how they
treated the locals and you're like,
"Actually... They're, you know,
they're kind of pieces of shit
sometimes." So, they are not
necessarily these, you know, victims
that are innocently over here.

64
00:27:48,230 --> 00:27:59,549
Well, look a lot of the conflict
with, in the early days, with
Aboriginal people was at the hands of
convict shepherds, convict stockmen,
convict woodcutters, who were out and
about in Aboriginal territory with
limited supervision.

65
00:28:05,501 --> 00:28:15,710
And was it also that they'd been
given this place, this is where you
live, this is where you have to
survive, and if you don't sort your,
you know, defend yourself in your
life, you're probably going to die.

66
00:28:17,480 --> 00:28:47,419
Look, certainly there was a great
fear of Aboriginal people, you know,
particularly Pemulwuy, in the early
days of the colony in New South
Wales, you know, Europeans, including
officers, believed that he was
essentially magic and was immune to
bullets and firearms. I mean, he was
regarded as a supernatural force of
nature. And the way that he attacked
wild homesteads and farms, you know,
a fairly effective guerilla
insurgency and, you know, what is now
the middle of Western Sydney, but
now, look, the convicts, you know,
are often portrayed, you know, as in
chains and wearing little black
arrows on white.

67
00:29:05,412 --> 00:29:53,259
So, they weren't like that at all for
the most part, they had pretty much
free reign. They weren't put in
prisons, many of them had far more
opportunities as convicts in New
South Wales and, later, other states,
than they ever would if they'd stayed
back home in Britain. So, some of
Australia's most successful early
entrepreneurs were themselves
convicts made good who here where
there was less class pressure keeping
them down, where, you know, you got
by on the strength of your own
talents, and really made a go of it
over here, whilst back in Britain
they would never had the opportunity
to break into business the way they
did.

68
00:29:53,333 --> 00:30:05,760
Where most of them too hard
criminals? Because I know that story
of a lot of the time they stole a
loaf of bread. Is that representative
of the majority of them or just a
minority?

69
00:30:06,570 --> 00:30:47,877
No, well, I think on the first fleet
of seven hundred and forty odd...
forty nine countries, I think, 28
committed handkerchief theft, another
78 had stolen goods, including
handkerchiefs and another 225 had
stolen other cloth goods or
handerkerchief precursors. So, we're
talking about largely petty thieves,
whether that be food, whether that be
cloth, which at the time, before mass
production, cloth was very valuable.
You know, quite a few stealing lead
from church rooves and some who
engage in various forms of assault
and robbery, but on the whole the
people who, you know, think Elizabeth
Beckett was in her 70s and had stolen
a bit of cheese. So.... Bedford* I
think. So, you know, these aren't
master criminals, these are... The
British law in many ways punished
crimes against property far more
severely than crimes against people.

70
00:30:47,878 --> 00:30:47,983
Yeah.

71
00:31:10,640 --> 00:31:27,990
And a lot of the people who came out
here for seven years, 14 years, life,
had been convicted of, you know,
effectively shoplifting type
offences. They were domestic servants
who, you know, had stolen silver
spoons from their masters.

72
00:31:28,080 --> 00:31:36,839
Is that also because the British knew
that maybe we shouldn't be sending,
you know, our worst criminals there?
We should send the ones that are
likely to make a go of it and
probably not do too bad.

73
00:31:37,420 --> 00:32:07,280
Well, Britain didn't have real, at
the time, didn't really have prisons
to punish people at the time, so the
worst punishment short of death was
was transportation. And, you know,
they were over, in the 1780s when New
South Wales was settled, there were
over 200 crimes for which you could
be hanged, including, you know,
interfering with a fish pond,
stealing a rabbit from its warren.

74
00:32:08,040 --> 00:32:10,586
Is that like skipping a rock over a
fish pond? What is what is
interfering with the fish pond
include?

75
00:32:12,280 --> 00:32:14,877
I think it was sort of an
agricultural type of crime.

76
00:32:16,103 --> 00:32:16,195
Yep.

77
00:32:16,196 --> 00:33:04,160
You know, attacking somebody's salmon
stock and being in the company of
gypsies for one month was a capital
offence. Three weeks. Fine. One
month. You are having... you were
having problems. So, these... but
often the death sentence was commuted
and transportation was procured.
People were still hanged, if people
who stole goods valued at more than
ten shillings were more likely to be
hanged, but lots of people who
committed hangable offences were sent
here. But given you can be hanged for
just about anything that's probably
not that surprising.

78
00:33:04,330 --> 00:33:13,384
And, so what would have life been
like for them on the ships and then
once they got through Australia too?
Do we get much of that right when we
hear about it or read about it in
just common books or?

79
00:33:14,090 --> 00:33:38,539
Well, the First Fleet was an
incredibly humane government-run,
government-controlled, mixture of
private and naval ships, but it only
had a 2 percent mortality rate, which
was much better than the mortality
rate on previous convicts ships that
ship Britain's convicts to America.

80
00:33:39,700 --> 00:33:41,630
And was that mainly related to
disease?

81
00:33:42,740 --> 00:34:38,029
That was related to Governor Philip
being humane and decreeing the
convicts would have the same rations
as the soldiers and himself, and
making sure that they had sufficient
clothing. He refused to leave port in
Britain until basically the convicts
were well supplied and provisioned.
And proved himself to be a, you know,
compassionate and able administrator.
The Second Fleet that came out sort
of three or so years later had an
over 30 percent mortality rate on
some ships because it was... the
government that outsource
responsibility to private enterprise
and they'd paid people for how many
convicts were loaded in Britain and
not for how many were unloaded in New
South Wales, and a dead convict
was... meant that the profit margins
of the slavers who were shipping them
out were greater.

82
00:34:39,139 --> 00:35:20,633
And so they were underfed and
neglected, they had their goods
stolen, had food stolen from them,
which the ship captains then, you
know, sold to people when they
arrived in Sydney. So, we got... the
Brits caught the first bit of convict
transportation right and the second
bit terribly wrong. And then after
that, after the Second Fleet
everybody was sort of so shocked that
there were improvements, but it was
still a pretty big deal being shipped
over here and, you know, a leaky ship
in close quarters with people who,
you know, collected an impressive
assortment of unpleasant diseases...

83
00:35:24,139 --> 00:35:25,139
Smallpox.

84
00:35:25,194 --> 00:35:38,574
Yeah, Smallpox, Typhus, Cholera, you
know, Influenza. Yeah, it was always
fraught, travelling that sort of
distance at sea.

85
00:35:39,290 --> 00:35:51,887
So, what's it like? Today, the
average Brit would probably cut off
their right leg to get a chance to
live in Australia. How long was it
throughout history that it took for
that news to kind of get back home
and be like, you know, 'Oh crap!
Actually...'?

86
00:35:52,760 --> 00:36:18,567
No, very long at all, indeed, in sort
of 1819, I think, Sydney Smythe who
was a clergyman in England and and
one of the great satirists and
writers of the early 19th century,
you know, commented that there were
effectively, he believed, and the
authorities believed that people were
committing petty crimes in the hope
of being shipped out.

87
00:36:18,890 --> 00:36:19,349
Really?

88
00:36:19,350 --> 00:36:20,350
As a convict, yeah.

89
00:36:21,290 --> 00:36:22,346
But getting hanged instead.

90
00:36:23,600 --> 00:36:48,492
The government basically sent out a
guy, Commissioner Big, to investigate
how convicts were being treated in
the colony, in the colony amongst
other things, and you know, he
produces a report that says we have
to treat these people a lot worse to
sort of kill off the incentive for
people to commit crimes, and like in
the hope of them free passage out to
the colonies, because convicts in...
by that stage, by the early 19th
century, were getting a much better
diet than middle-class people back in
Britain.

91
00:37:04,877 --> 00:37:08,559
And they were having the
opportunities, right, to get land, to
start businesses, to... you know?

92
00:37:11,926 --> 00:37:58,429
Yeah. After they'd served their time,
they were they were commonly, until
1830 when sort of land grants were
abolished, they were... they'd
commonly get granted land by the
governor, so to farm. Some of them,
yeah, set up profitable trading
businesses. So yeah, no, it was from
probably 18... probably the the end
of this the Napoleonic wars sort of
1815 or so, coming to Australia began
to look pretty attractive for lots of
poor people back in Britain and
Ireland.

93
00:37:59,630 --> 00:38:07,010
And what did you learn much whilst
you were writing these books about
the history of Australian English and
how that kind of developed from these
first colonies?

94
00:38:07,810 --> 00:38:20,060
Yeah, yeah, I certainly... One of the
things I'm interested in is the
origin of Australian phrases and
there are several of those in the
books and, indeed, in the book that
I'm writing at the moment, Girt
Nation, which is volume 3 of The Girt
sequel.

95
00:38:23,759 --> 00:38:26,985
That's it, get your hands on them,
guys, get your hands on them, they're
a good read.

96
00:38:27,030 --> 00:38:34,282
Yeah, I probably do a lot more...I'll
be doing a lot more of that. There's
an excellent book by Kel Richards
called The Story of Australian
English.

97
00:38:41,087 --> 00:38:42,940
I just finished reading that. It's
brilliant.

98
00:38:42,941 --> 00:39:06,860
Yes, and so....And of course there's
this, you know, Macquarie Dictionary
it's got a lot of Australian words
and phrases, it is a project that
based out of ANU (Australian National
University) which has collected
Australian words that are developed
in Australia that we would now regard
as particularly Australian.

99
00:39:06,950 --> 00:39:09,130
Is that the Australian National
Dictionary or something it's called?

100
00:39:09,410 --> 00:39:36,249
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I'm fascinated
by the way that language evolves and
it's really interesting to think
that, you know, the Australian accent
was probably in place by about 1830.
It takes about 50 years when you get
people from all sorts of different
regions, put them together for those
accents to flatten out, to form
something new.

101
00:39:36,380 --> 00:39:49,846
And the crazy thing about that,
right, would be that that would be in
the grandchildren, whilst their
parents and their grandparents were
still alive, so you would have had
that strata of all kinds of different
accents, but it's finally kind of
getting stable at the bottom level,
right?

102
00:39:49,847 --> 00:40:55,651
Yeah, yeah, that's right, and
certainly Australian English...but
the Flash Language, which was the
thieves' cant commonly spoken by
thieves actually really got a
foothold in Australia, which is
unsurprising given its convict number
of thieves who were sent out. All
sorts of words that we have in
Australia today came from Flash
Language, thieves' language, back in
in Britain. So, things like 'swag',
words like 'bash', you know, 'loot',
all of these sorts of things. There's
probably 30 or 40 different words in
Australia that are commonly used
today that trace their origins back
to those sort of British thieves
underground words that they would
often use amongst themselves that
didn't have a lot of currency in
Britain more broadly, but really took
off out here.

103
00:40:56,250 --> 00:41:23,552
It's really funny how..., Like, I've
got a history in genetics and
biology, and it's really funny how
much it's kind of like words like
genes where if you have a bottleneck
in a population and they have a
certain trait that is unique to the
broader species or something, that
suddenly goes off like crazy if that
population gets isolated. And it
seems to have been the same thing
with Australian English, where once
we are isolated, all these other
words kind of came to fixation in
general parlance and that wasn't back
home in Britain.

104
00:41:24,250 --> 00:41:43,795
No, and indeed, people were looking
for new words for things, and if...
we were more likely to pick up bits
of obscure British dialect here in
Australia than those words were to
actually take off in Britain.

105
00:41:43,950 --> 00:41:45,679
Because there were so few people,
right?

106
00:41:45,900 --> 00:42:04,462
There were so few people. So, if
you've got one guy from some, you
know, strange, small village in
Warwickshire where they call... Use a
certain word for something, which
isn't in common usage in Britain, but
they come out and they apply that
we're down here and other people say
oh that's a useful word, we'll pick
that up.

107
00:42:04,561 --> 00:42:07,739
Just 20 people have to be convinced
to use it and you've nailed it.

108
00:42:08,394 --> 00:43:09,312
That's exactly right. So, we've got a
lot of dialect words, I mean,
'larrikin' the word, which is now
regarded as a great Australian word,
when it was originally meant 'a
troublesome and often violent youth',
rather than 'a knockabout likeable
bloke' today, but that's probably a
bit of Northern English dialect for
'larking about', or to 'larrick' as I
think up in Warwickshire or somewhere
like that, but that was not a common
word in England, and here it morphed
into something else. But we also
picked up words from other places.
The word 'bloke', which is something
that we'd say is quintessentially
Australian, is probably actually a
gypsy word, a Romani word deriving
from a gypsy word for friend "bloke"
without the...

109
00:43:13,590 --> 00:43:18,119
'Sheila' or something is from Irish,
right, or from Gaelic for a name or a
woman?

110
00:43:19,739 --> 00:44:09,938
Yeah, so Irish men in the... from the
1820s on in Australia were commonly
called 'Paddie', and Irish women were
commonly called 'Sheila', as to refer
to an Irish woman. And that term
'Sheila' then became to be applied
more broadly to women, you know, in a
broader sense. So, the origin of
'Sheila' changed from being confined
to Irish women, to going more
broadly. Similarly, 'Matilda' in
'Waltzing Matilda'. 'Matilda' was
a... people would commonly referred
to, or Germans would, a term for a
German girlfriend or a woman was
their 'Matilda'.

111
00:44:12,927 --> 00:44:16,838
Was he also, in that, was he
referring to his swag and like
carrying it along the road when he
was saying 'Waltzing is Matilda'?

112
00:44:17,680 --> 00:44:33,562
Yes, so 'Waltz', as you know, is a
German dance, and 'Matilda' was a
German girlfriend and we had German
populations in South Australia, which
was Queensland where the first free
settlers would German.

113
00:44:34,880 --> 00:44:35,787
Got some history there in my blood.

114
00:44:35,788 --> 00:45:11,420
Yeah, so we've got all of this German
heritage and to Waltz came in terms
of an itinerant worker was to sort of
dance from place to place, and the
'Matilda' was their swag, you know.
Instead of going to bed with your
German girlfriend, you'd go to bed
with your blankets. And so, Waltzing
Matilda was to sort of, you know,
carry a swag around the country
looking for work, but it has those
sorts of Germanic origins.

115
00:45:11,960 --> 00:45:26,809
Yeah, it is fascinating, I absolutely
loved that book 'The story in
Australian English' because it showed
just those multiple different waves
of kind of effect on the Australian
language, right, like the goldfields
and then the First and Second World
Wars.

116
00:45:27,740 --> 00:46:13,610
Well, there are terms today that are
used around the world that come
from... so, 'nugget', 'a nugget of
gold', appears to be an Australian
word. It appears to... and that
probably comes from 'a nug' a lump of
clay or something, which again, is an
obscure Northern English dialect.
And, of course, now all around the
world people refer to 'gold nuggets',
but that is probably an Australian
Gold Rush term, as is 'fossicking'.
'To fossick', again, a British
dialect word. And 'a fossicker' in
whichever obscure region of Britain
it came from was a nuisance, a pest.

117
00:46:13,860 --> 00:46:14,157
Yeah.

118
00:46:14,158 --> 00:46:34,289
And so, somebody who was sort of
scrabbling around in the dirt, often
on your patch of dirt, trying to look
for your gold, you regarded as a
pest, and the term for a sort of, you
know, small time gold digger became
to be 'a fossicker'. So, yeah, it's
interesting the way that words get
picked up and then their meaning
changes over time.

119
00:46:34,730 --> 00:46:44,659
I said to my wife the other day,
who's from Brazil, I said to her
"Just have a fossick in the backyard,
you'll find it somewhere", she was
just like "what the hell are you
talking about? What does that mean?".
I'm like, "Look, look for, look for
it in the backyard".

120
00:46:45,640 --> 00:47:10,242
I don't think 'fossick' has taken off
beyond Australia and New Zealand, but
some of... certainly some of our
words have. And it's not just the
words, but the way that we speak the
language. So, for example, it's in
parts of Australia people instead of
saying, you know, 'you' to refer to a
group of people plural, would say
'yous', 'yous guys'.

121
00:47:10,275 --> 00:47:11,275
Yeah.

122
00:47:12,440 --> 00:47:43,618
And that probably came from a small
group of Irish people, who had that
back in Ireland and you see patches
of that sort of speech pattern in
Ireland and part of it in America as
well, but that probably has an Irish,
has an Irish origin, and the way that
we shorten our words, you know, by
putting an O or an A or on the end,
so you know, 'Davo', avocado's an
'avo', and afternoon is 'arvo'.

123
00:47:44,750 --> 00:47:59,239
Do you think a big part of that was
the fact that we were trying to
differentiate ourselves and that's
sort of underpinned, aside from the
fact that we were sort of melting pot
of different dialects and accents,
were we also trying to push ourselves
away and be unique in developing
Australian English in our culture?

124
00:47:59,930 --> 00:48:44,657
Well, there's a theory that that
until probably the 1880s, 1870s,
1880s there was a pretty common
Australian accent all across
Australia. Unlike Britain and America
where you have populations that have
been living together in the same area
for, you know, generations that
develop their own accents, here
you're bringing people in from all
sorts of different parts of the
world, and so, you're developing
something that flattens out those
differences. And so, Australians have
got a very flat accent. And as they
moved out of Sydney, they took that
accent with them. And you get, you
know, minor differences perhaps with
an Adelaide accent and a Sydney
accent, but it's all pretty much the
same.

125
00:48:45,000 --> 00:48:45,207
Yeah.

126
00:48:45,208 --> 00:49:04,500
What you did get, though, was
differences in the way that that
accent was expressed, and that's
probably a rebellion against the
British elocution movement where in
the 1870s, 1880s, people wanted to
speak proper English, which was a
South, Southern English.

127
00:49:04,770 --> 00:49:07,633
So, the upper class wanted people to
speak up proper English.

128
00:49:07,860 --> 00:49:47,286
And, so the upper class put on this
plummy voice, attempt to sort of, in
some ways, copy almost a Southern
English accent and a group of people
at the other end of the class
spectrum said 'we're not having
that', and deliberately broaden their
accent, and that also the sort of
group who started dropping,
contracting words, rather than
speaking the full word, they'd go for
the abbreviation. So, possibly part
of that contraction of speech
accompanies the rebellion against the
sort of plummy elocution style
English that came in towards the back
end of the 19th century.

129
00:49:47,470 --> 00:49:48,309
Far out.

130
00:49:48,310 --> 00:50:06,070
Well, I could probably keep you here
all day, but the final sort of
question, how would you describe how
Australians view their history
versus, say, someone from Britain,
where they have a much longer
history? Is there a significant
difference in how we look at
ourselves as Australians and Brits
would look at themselves as Brits?

131
00:50:06,240 --> 00:50:29,396
Very much so, and I think, you know,
I say in various talks and things
that I've done that Australians
traditionally believed that they
didn't have a proper history, that
their history was short and they
believed, because this is what they
were taught at school for
generations, that to have a proper
history, you had to have, you know,
great battles, you know, castles...

132
00:50:32,720 --> 00:50:34,966
Classical music, art.

133
00:50:35,117 --> 00:51:19,960
All of that, that's what history was,
and it was a very European view of
history, and, so we had a real chip
on our shoulder about our own
history. We also wanted to ignore
parts of our own history, both the
frontier violence and the
mistreatment of Aboriginal people,
which, you know, was probably a bit
embarrassing, but also, you know, the
convicts stain with something that
people would do anything to hide,
having a convict in your family tree.
So, people were ignoring their own
personal family histories and wanting
to sort of gloss over this era of
convictism and... because it was
embarrassing to be descended from a
bunch of crooks. I mean, Tasmania
changed... Yeah.

134
00:51:20,040 --> 00:51:35,439
Quickly there, why did that suddenly
flip? Because my dad was telling me
that in his generation when he was
growing up everyone was like, hush
hush, you've got convicts in your
blood, hush hush. But nowadays, it's
almost like 'yeah, we've got convict
blood! Yeah!'. What was the watershed
moment?

135
00:51:35,550 --> 00:52:37,200
It's really the 1980s where you start
to get that change coming through.
And the Bicentenary actually had a
big impact on it. The idea of all
these ships coming in and people
thought "Hello! This is actually sort
of something to be interested in and
a little bit proud about.".
Government... Family historians had a
lot to do with it. The Government
started opening up records that had
been sealed to family historians in
the 1970s, so people were actually
able to research their convict past
in a much easier way than they had in
the past. And so, I think there
was... there was more interesting in
families looking at their own family
histories that made having a convict
a little bit more responsible, and
Australians are probably, you know,
keener genealogists than just about
anyone else.

136
00:52:37,320 --> 00:52:54,750
My family is nuts for it at the
moment. They're going crazy with
putting it together, but it's always
funny, what blows my mind is always
the... if you were to find out your
grandfather murdered someone, you'd
freak and you'd keep it hush hush.
But if you find out that you're one
of your ancestors, a few steps back
in the family tree, you're like,
'Wow, he killed someone! How cool is
that?'.

137
00:52:55,440 --> 00:53:31,455
Well, I've got, you know, some very,
very dodgy ancestors. I've got lots
of the stealing silver spoon types,
dating as far back as the Second
Fleet, but I've got one very, very
dodgy character who came out from
Scotland, changed his name, assumed
the name of this woman's husband who
he was travelling out here with this
woman, pretended it was her husband,
he wasn't, he eloped with her. He
comes to Australia and commits a
string of unpleasant sex offences
against young women, leaves his wife,
his second wife is murdered on the
Victorian goldfields in a bar, he was
a suspect. Not a nice bloke. You
know, changed his name again.
Difficult to trace the family tree,
people who keep on changing their
names and recreating themselves.

138
00:53:50,844 --> 00:54:24,630
But now, you know, his daughter, who
is my mother's grandmother, my mother
remembers her grandmother, she
changed her name to avoid having the
same name as members of this family
where she was ashamed of her past.
Nowadays, I look back on that story
and think unpleasant guy, but what an
interesting story. But I think when
you were closer to it, people were
far more ashamed.

139
00:54:25,050 --> 00:54:46,898
So, do you think one of the
differences too between say Britain
and Australia, even with immigration,
is that we're much... even the people
from the First Fleet that got here,
are much, have a shorter history just
like immigrants who arrived after the
Second World War or even today, and
so we're sort of a bit more accepting
on that side than somewhere like
Britain where they can trace their
history back thousands of years?

140
00:54:47,270 --> 00:55:12,211
Well, Australians still saw
themselves as British effectively and
Australians would remain British
citizens until 1948. Australian
citizenship wasn't a concept until
1948. South Australia still flew the
Union Jack flag until 1956, I think.
So, people who were living in
Australia who regarded themselves as
Australian also regarded themselves
as British, and saw themselves as
part of that long British history and
saw the history that they'd had out
here and, somehow, debased or dirty
or not as interesting.

141
00:55:12,212 --> 00:55:12,317
Yeah.

142
00:55:25,403 --> 00:55:50,389
You know, you'll still meet the
occasional elderly person today who
when they are going on a holiday to
Britain talks about going home. There
are still some Australians who call
Britain home, which, you know,
that's... But, you know, I think
that's almost disappeared today, but
that's a fairly recent thing to have
gone.

143
00:55:50,870 --> 00:56:04,485
Far out. Well, David, thank you so
much for coming on this episode. It's
been a long one. Shortly, what should
people expect if they get their
hands... when they get their hands on
these books, Girt and True Girt, what
should they expect once they start
opening these pages?

144
00:56:05,960 --> 00:56:42,920
They should expect to learn about the
beauty and the terror that is
Australian history. They should also
expect to have a bit of a laugh. I
mean, what I try to do is communicate
Australian history in, you know, an
entertaining way, because I was so
used to being not entertained by
Australian history at school. So,
it's looking at providing real
historical information in a way that
is broadly accessible. That's my aim,
and my aim is to keep on doing that,
so I'd have to go back to work as a
lawyer.

145
00:56:43,730 --> 00:56:55,141
I think you succeeded. I'm looking
forward to the third one and I think
if you're going to get it, get the
audio books too, because I think
you're reading them and with the
notations in there with the "bah" and
the "wh-chsss" sounds separating it,
it was beautiful.

146
00:56:57,260 --> 00:57:10,567
I try and work out how to do humorous
footnotes in an audio book. Yes, I
have audio cues from my footnotes
that I think something like two
hundred and twenty different
character voices, although all of my
Scotsmen sound a bit the same.

147
00:57:11,420 --> 00:57:13,722
Did you practice those beforehand or
did you just wing it?

148
00:57:15,400 --> 00:57:49,320
For the first book I winged it. And
then, a lot of that I had the...the
first book was pulled together very
quickly and I had a Greek sound
engineer who was not... his English
actually wasn't that good, and they
just wanted stuff in the can. I did
this terrible Chinese accent, and I
said 'Oh, mate, look, I think that
probably sounded really, really
racist. Can I do that again?', and he
said 'No, mate! No mate! All good.
Keep going! Keep going!'. And there's
my very racist Greek accent.

149
00:57:50,080 --> 00:58:18,099
And so, no, I took the time for the
second book to pre-record character
voices and on my phone, so just
before I do them in the studio I play
them and get them right in my head.
But yeah, no, it's an interesting
thing, not being a voice actor than
trying to do that many character
voices.

150
00:58:18,190 --> 00:58:21,575
I think you nailed it, anyway. David
Hunt, thank you so much for coming
on. I really appreciate it, mate.

151
00:58:23,590 --> 00:58:24,590
Cheers, Pete. Thanks, mate.

152
00:58:29,710 --> 00:58:57,230
Alright, guys. So, I hope you enjoyed
that episode. I hope you got a lot
out of it. David is clearly a wealth
of knowledge, a fountain of
Australian historical knowledge, it
was a pleasure having him on the
podcast and I recommend, I thoroughly
recommend that you guys grab his book
Girt and his book True Girt, and
rumour has it, there's a third one on
the way in the next few years as
well. So, you'll find these at any
good bookstores near you. Anyway,
that's all for today, guys. I
appreciate you joining me and I'll
see you next time. Peace!