Australian History For Dummies. Alex McDermott

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Introduction

      Over the past 20 years, I’ve taught history, studied history, written history, talked and listened about it with all sorts of different people, learning all the time. What’s struck, and stayed with me through this whole time, is just how big the for good history is. And good history, in my own frankly biased opinion, generally involves helping people answer some of the really compelling questions. Questions like, who are we, really? (And, sure, are we even a ‘we’?) And how did we come to be as we are now, today? History can be as small as what’s happened over a few decades on one neighbourhood street, but no matter how small its immediate subject matter, if it’s good history, it can’t help but relate back some sort of answer for the big questions too. The reason there’s a history profession at all is because there’s enough folks who want to know the answers to these questions, and want their kids to know, and their friends, relations and various others to think and ask these questions too.

      Now, obviously there is no one final, finished ultimate set of answers to these questions. That’s the beauty of history for me — with every year and decade that passes, from one generation to the next, our view of the past changes. In this sense I like to think of history as one great big ongoing conversation between the past and the present. And the conversation keeps changing and evolving and shifting as the society it’s in keeps changing with it. At the heart of this changing, ever-shifting conversation though, is the need in us to tell each other the basic story, as clearly and as well as possible. And providing that story is what this book is all about.

About This Book

At first glance, Australian history appears to be nice and neat and compartmentalised, doesn’t it? There it is, most of it fitting into the last 230+ years (aside, of course, from the 50,000 years or more of Indigenous Australian history that preceded it, but we’ll get to that). So it can be positively weird just how often bits of it get sliced, diced and served up as completely different dishes. ‘First contact’ history gets separated out from Gallipoli, say; the conscription controversy of World War I and the Vietnam War might get placed in separate boxes; convicts are set aside from the rise of colonial towns and cities; and it’s all completely separate from the Great Depression. From the Tent Embassy and Gough Whitlam’s ‘It’s Time!’ election win in 1972, to John Howard, Julia Gillard, Asylum seekers, Carbon tax and Same Sex Marriage since the 2000s.

      Okay, this separation isn’t always a bad thing — they’re all good topics worthy of being teased apart in isolation. But it can be useful — not to mention interesting! — to also have them available to a reader in one easily accessible, easily readable volume, and this is where the For Dummies books shine.

      You might want to read the whole of Australian history from go to whoa — from first Indigenous arrivals to practically just last week. With this book, you can do that. Or, this month, you might want to find out what caused separate, self-sufficient colonies to federate into a nation but, next month, be wondering exactly how a supposed convict hellhole managed to create a ‘workingman’s paradise’ within 70 years of first settlement. You can dip, you can skip, you can cross-reference — jump from one item to another as you see fit. The book is designed to work the way you want it to.

Foolish Assumptions

      In writing the book, I’ve been making some assumptions about what you as a reader might be bringing to the book. I’ve been assuming that you want to know more about Australian history, and that some or all of the following might apply to you: