Error Australis: The Reality Recap of Australian History

Satirist Ben Pobjie has taken the essential stories that make up the history of Australia from its ancient bacterial origins to the arrival of the First Fleet and on to the Rum Rebellion through to the Eureka Stockade, the Burke & Wills debacle, the age of whiskery bush-rangers culminating in Ned Kelly, then on to Federation and Gallipolli, Kokoda, Vietnam and The Dismissal right up to last year's bun fight between Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull.

It’s one big Pythonesque  mash-up in which the first half is eye-wateringly, side-splittingly, hilarious. But then there’s a switch and while it seems OK to chortle at the antics of Captain William Bligh hiding under the bed or explorers Hume and Hovell cutting their tent in half and fighting over who gets the handle of a frying pan, massacres are tricky to make funny and when it comes to the war-blasted 20th Century it starts to feel more forced. The rambling script between those even more whiskery founding fathers of Federation is just a tad too long-winded.
 
It regains pace when describing the Great Emu War of the 1930s, but slips away again in the last third which is too much about recent Prime Ministers whose finest biographies are those by cartoonists. The book could have kept the wit factor high by concentrating on some other only-in-Australia eccentricities such the Hutt River Colony, the heroics of potato farmer Cliff Young, or even Lady Flo Bjelke Petersen and her pumpkin scones. Speaking of which, women don't get much of a look-in in this history, which is evidence that the Aussie male still secretly harbours the belief that sheilas belong only in the kitchen or the bedroom.
 
If the book had ended with Ned's last stand at Glenrowan, I’d have given it a big tick as an Australian equivalent of 1066 and All That, but after that the circus train fell off the tracks somewhere beyond the road to Gundagai. Three and a half stars.

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