Girt: The Unauthorised History of Australia by David Hunt

JUDGES' COMMENTS

Girt is ‘Horrible Histories’ for grownups that revivifies Australian colonial history by sending it truthfully up. It makes us laugh at our lowly and parsimonious beginnings, at our ‘stupid deaths’ and rum rebellions, our circumnavigations and circumlocutions, our grand designs and grander larcenies, petty thefts and somewhat inadvertent nobility; it pokes savage fun at the idea of terra nullius. Mature cultures (and individuals) take themselves only just seriously enough. They grow wise by seeing themselves at a distance, and humour helps with both detachment and intimacy.

While parody is hard to sustain for the length of a book, first-timer David Hunt does an astonishingly good job of keeping the joke going. Girt is written, like the best humour, with love. Its irony is relentless but tender. Only a history that matters is worth laughing about at such length, in such detail; farce is wasted on the inconsequential. Girt does the reading and scholarship of Australian history (and prehistory) a favour by proving they are big and strange enough – no less than the histories of Rome or Europe – to spoof.