Australian Short Histories: From the First Fleet to Today

Australia is a rather unusual country

Our convicts became respectable citizens. Our soldiers overthrew their own governor. Our explorers vanished into the bush, and our gold miners took up arms against the government. We built railways across deserts, a bridge across one of the world’s great harbours, and an Opera House known around the world.

Chapter One: Australian Beginnings: 1788
Chapter Two: The Rum Rebellion, A Very Australian Coup
Chapter Three: The Governor Who Named Everything After Himself
Chapter Four: Riding on the Sheep’s Back, the birth of Australia’s wool industry
Chapter Five: The Colony Spreads

We also once declared war on emus. The emus, by most accounts, won. But behind these stories is something more interesting. The history of modern Australia is really a history of people arriving from somewhere else. Some came in chains. Some came as soldiers, farmers and labourers. Some came chasing gold. Others came to escape war or poverty, or simply looking for a better life.

My family arrived in 1828, which makes me a sixth-generation Australian. My wife is a first-generation Australian of Greek background. Our children will add their own stories, just like every Australian, old and new. That’s what this project is about. I’m collecting 100 stories about the people, places and events that shaped Australia, written especially for people who have come here from somewhere else.

I’m a historian by training, and I’ve always loved the smaller stories behind the big events: the characters, rivalries, tragedies and occasional absurdities that rarely make it into the history books. Why did soldiers march on Government House in 1808? How did explorers finally cross the Blue Mountains? What brought thousands of Chinese miners to the goldfields? And why did it take Australian artists so long to learn how to paint a gum tree?

You’ll meet the First Fleet, the Rum Rebellion the Eureka Stockade, Banjo Paterson, the Anzacs, the Snowy Mountains Scheme and the postwar migrants who helped build a nation. You’ll also meet bushrangers, eccentrics, sporting legends and the occasional spectacularly bad idea.

Where I can, I’ll link each story to a place you can still visit: a street, an old pub, a country town or a stretch of coast with a remarkable past. I’ll add stories here as I go, and eventually I hoe to turn them into a book and a podcast.

This isn’t a complete history of Australia. It’s a collection of the stories, that I believe can help explain how we became the rather unusual place we are today, with all our ingenuity, humour, mateship and occasional bloody-mindedness. Basically, history doesn’t have to be dull. So here’s the lowdown.