David Hunt tramples the tall poppies of the past in charting Australia’s transformation from aspiration to nation – an epic tale of charlatans and costermongers, of bush bards and bushier beards, of workers and women who were not going to take it anymore.
Girt Nation introduces Alfred Deakin, the Liberal necromancer whose dead advisors made Australia a greater place to are living, and Banjo Paterson, the jihadist who referred to as on God and the Prophet to drive the Australian infidels from the Sudan ‘like sand before the gale’. And meet Catherine Helen Spence, the feminist polymath who envisaged a utopian long run of free contraceptives, simple divorce and immigration restrictions to forestall the ‘Chinese coming to destroy all we’ve got struggled for!’Thrill as Jandamarra leads the Bunuba against Western Australia, and Valentine Keating leads the Crutchy Push, an all-amputee street gang, against the conventionally limbed. Gasp as Essendon Football Club trainer Carl von Ledebur injects his charges with crushed dog and goat testicles. Weep as Scott Morrison’s communist great-great-aunt Mary Gilmore holds a hose in New Australia. And marvel at how Labor, a political celebration that spent a quarter of a century infighting over methods to spell its own name, ever rose to power.
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