The Chaser Report - ‘Girt Nation’: Why Australia’s States have always hated each other | David Hunt

Episode Date: October 29, 2021

Dom and Charles are joined by David Hunt, bestselling author of Girt, True Girt and now Girt Nation. Hunt talks about the long history of Australian states fighting, the fascinating character of Alfred Deakin and why Canberra was always destined to suck. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report, news you can't trust. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report for Saturday the 30th of October 2021. I'm Dom Knight and in a moment, Charles Firth and I will dive into a long chat with one of the funniest writers in Australia. David Hunt is the author of the Gert series of books and the new one drops next week. It's called Gert Nation and it's about how Australia came together to become one country. That's in a moment here on the Chaser Report. A few years ago, a book came out called Gertr. which was the unauthorised history of Australia.

It spawned a sequel called True Gert. And now Dave Hunt is back. With the third in the series, it's called Gert Nation. And it's about the time when a bunch of pissy little colonies grouped together to become one pissy nation. Hello, Dave. Gally, Dom. It's got echoes of today, really, doesn't it?

Those pissy little colonies all at war with each other? The three of us sitting in a room, lots of tensions in the air, and yet coming together to produce Canberra. But at least No, well, Canberra's a bit later though, wasn't it? When they had federation, they didn't actually... No.

In fact, Canberra was a compromise because Victoria and New South Wales had at each other's guts. It's so good. So, Melbourne and Sydney said Melbourne was originally going to be the capital and New South Wales said not on your Nelly.

And so it said, we're not going to sign up to this constitution unless you put the capital in New South Wales. And then Melbourne says, no, we'll let you put it in New South Wales, but it will be a separate territory. And it's got to be a couple hundred miles from Sydney, and it's got to be this size. And the idea that the Melbourneians had was this capital would overshadow Sydney,

which they thought was a great thing. Oh, really? It was an act of bastardry on both parts. Because I thought it was the other way around. And I thought the aim was that, you know, you can have it, but we're going to break it by design so that it's not a good thing to have. Oh, no, that was left to Walter Burley Griffin when he just pulled out his sort of occultist compass

and drew lots of circles and confused everyone. But, yeah, like the turn of phrase you had on this, where at first New South Wales wanted to be identified as the preeminent place, but then Melbourne got more people. Yeah. And so they didn't want Melbourne to be identified as the preeminent city in the new country. Yeah, it was New South Wales who first set in the... the 1850s, how about we federates and being the largest and most important colony,

you'll do what we say. And then come the gold rush, Victoria becomes the largest and most pre-evident colony and New South Wales went dead on the idea. But to try and actually claim that it was the premier colony in 1887, Sir Henry Parks actually passed legislation to rename New South Wales Australia, to steal the name from the rest of the continent. And he passed it. Oh, he introduced it, but everybody thought,

really we're just doing this to piss off the Victorians. And the Victorian says, no, why don't you rename yourself Convictoria? Because that's what you all are. Is that true? Yeah. That's the thing about your books, right? So they're just full of true things that are really funny. True, useless things.

Yeah, yeah. Because the other little factoid, I'm sure it's in this book, about Canberra, is that the name Canberra is an indigenous word. Yeah, it comes from the nunnable name, Nagambra. And it was believed at the time that it meant meeting place. And there was a competition to name our national capital. Oh, there were names like Arian City.

Oh, really? Climax. And if you've ever been to Canberra, Anti-Clobax. Yeah, no. Climax, Canberra, none. Although, to be fair, there's a few desks. Fishwick. And also Fishwick.

Fishwick. And Barnaby Joyce, I'm sure, would have something to have. He would. I think he's cloaxed all over, our national capital. Anyway, so, no, the name from the Nunnable language, they believe, meant meeting place. It doesn't. It actually means breasts. Right.

Which, I mean, to be fair, the Skywale really brought that sentiment back. So it's great because one of the things, it really is a story of different colonies bickering, isn't it? And it's kind of fun to read now at a time we've just had several years, probably unprecedented in our lives, of the colonies absolutely going at each other. Yeah, look.

New South Wales and Victoria were distrustful of each other. They had separate football cards, which made the antagonism worse. Western Australia hated everybody as a matter of principle. Still checks out. Yep. And the only reason that it actually joined Australia is all of its wealth was in its gold fields

and it became the richest part of the world in the 1890s and all of the miners in its gold fields had come from, oh, the majority of them had come from Eastern Australia. They were New South Welshman and Victorian. And they wanted to join the Federation of Australia. Western Australia didn't want a bar of it. And then the gold miners pulled the old Western Australian trick of saying we're going to secede.

We're going to secede from Western Australia and call ourselves Australia. Oh, Australia. Sorry, it's from the Latin for gold. Oralis. Oralus. Yeah. And we're going to secede from Western Australia.

And so the Premier John Forrest says, all right, we're going to join because we can't afford to lose everything that's not boring sand. That's amazing. So long before the West Australia voted, which I think was in the 30s or something. 1933, yeah. They really hate the rest of us, don't they? They do. And they still do. And what about Queensland?

What about Queensland? Well, I'm just thinking, you know, all the most awful people come from Queensland nowadays. Does that parallel hold true from back then? I think so. I mean, George Christensen is the last of many secessionists who wants to split Queensland up into different states. Oh, really?

Yeah, I think he wants his bit of Queensland to federate with the Philippines. Yeah, he lives in Manilad. Yeah. Yeah, so, no, there was a proposal in the 1890s to split Queensland into three, a southern central and a northern Queensland. So that movement was quite strong for a while as well. Well, they're supposed to be separate states? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because why shouldn't they have three times as many? Well, you know, nobody trusted those Shifty Faked down in Brisbane because they were too close to the border with New South Wales. Which is true of today. And if you were wanting to enslave some Pacific Islanders on your sugar plantation up to town, boundsful, those liberals, those liberals close to the New South Wales border, looked at you a bit funny and said, you're basically slavers. Well, this is something that was really shocking in the book, is that I didn't know all

that much about the blackbirding that went on. I mean, you knew that people had been brought over to plant sugar and things like that, but the brutality of it. Yeah, look, blackbirding was basically using, in inverted commas, labor hire firms to get in ships, go to the Pacific Islanders, Vanuatu, the Solomons. Try and lure the islanders on board. If that didn't work, you'd dong a few over the head with your cudgel and throw them into the hold. Bring them back to a sugar plantation. They'd work for three-year labour contracts. Sometimes they wouldn't get paid. If they tried to move off their plantation, the police would

hunt them down, overcrowded unsanitary conditions. It was pretty grim. Scott Morrison said last year Australia had never had slavery and in the technical sense of I own this person this person is my personal property, that's correct but in terms of the definition of modern slavery that everybody uses today

there is no doubt that the black birding practice was modern slavery and that we still have that by the way we do have innovative Pacific Islander labour schemes where we go to these same islands and we we bring them out here to work for below the award wage on our farms.

The Pacific Islanders' Labor's Program is, you know, arguably a form of modern lake birting, if I were to be controversial, which I just was. I was thinking more about the sex trafficking, but yes, one of the great things about the first go, which I still remember, was the sensation that all of the people

whose statues we looked at growing up, everything's named after, Michael Macquarie and of others, they were actually all either very weird or crooks or both. And the great thing about Curtnation and indeed true goate is that the theme continues. It does. And I'm astounded at the level of corruption, incompetence, venality, naked lust, greed and ambition. Of Henry Parks.

Yeah, that's just just, Henry. And when it comes to weakness, Deacon. Father, Artie, John, still on the job at almost 80. So the... But also, and Henry Lawson was also... Wasn't he a bit of a creep or something? Well, no, I think Henry Lawson was just sad. He was sad.

He was sad. He was sad. He tried to have it away with artists' models. Yes, that's right. He pined for young Hannah Thorburn just after he got married. But he was basically a sad alcoholic. But the great thing about Australia is it always called to misfits and outcasts from Britain well towards the end of the 19th century.

So you've got somebody like Henry Parks who was a labourer, a bone turner back in Britain, wrote some pretty mediocre poetry, comes out here, continues to write mediocre poetry, but manages to become a five-time Premier of New South Wales and, you know, a 17 or 18-time father with many women. Yeah, I love to turning over premiers

all the time was a thing that we did back then in the early days too. Yeah, no, we did. We did. Well, look, back in those days, people had more honour in terms of, you know, agreeing to dissolve their governments. I think Alfred Deakin at one stage, who's the central character of my book, knew that he didn't have the numbers anymore, so he moved to motion about what time of the day it was. I move, you know, that it is 3pm and the opponents on the other side of the house said, no, we don't support that.

He said, all right, I'm dissolving the parliament and handing it in the primary. ministership. Now, you don't see that now. You don't see anybody sort of just the gentlemanly way of passing over power. Mind you, I think agreeing on what time it is would be too hard to the Federal Parliament anyway. Look, particularly if you invite the Queenslanders into the debate because, gee, they'd rather crawl over broken glass than accept daylight saving. But on Deakin, I mean, I'm thinking of the weirdo side of the widow-slash-crued divide, I had no idea that he's, given that he's the hero of the book, the amount of dirt you bring on Deakin is pretty special.

What are some of the delights of his biography? Well, look, most of the dirt relates. You know, he was Australia's leading liberal necromancer. He spoke to the dead on a regular basis. He was a spiritualist. He was not only a spiritualist. He was the spiritualist as the president of the Victorian Association of Progressive Spiritualists.

He believed that he could communicate with the dead. he believed that John Bunyan, the 17th century English writer, possessed his hand on 49 occasions and penned a sequel to the Pilgrim's Progress, unoriginally titled A New Pilgrim's Progress, which did not sell well. He took, his first political advisor was Victorian Premier Richard Heels, who'd been dead 17 years when he started advising Deacon on how to run a government. And it wasn't just that, it was like he also took to Homer and Plato and people Like, everybody, Deacon had a line to everyone.

He was keen on talking to Shakespeare, Prince Albert, John Stuart Mills. And didn't he sort of convince other people that, you know, like, he was in contact with these people? Well, they did. He did. He would hold seances, and lots of doctors and lawyers from Melbourne would sit around, and they'd shut up the dead. We may scoff, but Scott Morrison was appointed by God himself. Can we just remember? What's interesting is that the spiritualist movement really got legs because people were beginning to question the sort of biblical literalism that underpins Christianity. They were saying, man descended from Adam and Eve story, not so right. So they were challenging biblical literalism. And the idea that you could talk to the dead and the dead would give you useful tips and entertain you was very attractive.

because the dead were present, the mediums who channeled them. Many of them believed what they were doing. Others, you know, just did knocking on tables and strange, you know, ectoplasmic trumpets in the background were clearly fraudulent. There was a carved liver at one point that I enjoyed. There was. There was people who believed they were touching ectoplasm

when one of the spiritualists sort of gives them some animal liver in the dark. and, you know, Mary Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's wife, was the woman who really made a spiritualism popular. She invited spiritualist to the White House so she could talk to her dead kids. And if it was good enough for the First Lady of the United States, it was good enough for many other people. So it was actually a reasonable movement in Australia, particularly in Melbourne, at the back end of the 19th century. But how much was it actually known that he was a spiritualist outside the sort of ruling class circle? Well, when he first ran for office in 1780, it was, you know, the newspaper ran articles on him that he was a spiritualist and a comptist, and the comptists were people who believed in this bizarre French calendar and an advocate of free love.

So he was charged with all of those things. But then didn't he write the articles responding to that about how, he wasn't, because he was a journalist as well. The great thing about Deakin and the great thing about the press in those days is you could write about conflict of interest, schmonflict of interest. He would write articles later on in his career when he was Prime Minister about himself for British papers. He'd be an anonymous correspondent from Australia getting paid big money from the British

papers to write about his own government and occasionally he'd be critical of himself. And indeed, indeed Alfred Deakin, the president, the president, Prime Minister was a protectionist. The Deakin, the correspondent, was a free trader. So he had this alter ego, and he would critique his own government, had a bit of fun doing it, I think. Which is exactly the sort of ratbaggery and fun that we like from your books. Why do you like Deakin, then, given all of his shenanigans?

And, I mean, all the stuff, his personal life was pretty bizarre as well, wasn't it? Look, he had a conventional family life. his schooling was very unusual at the age because he was sent to an all-girls school. He was the only young man attending Cynton Ladies' College. It's such a premise for a sitcom, isn't I? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So off he goes to this girl's school,

and he's the only one who's seen and heard, basically. And he's educated as a young lady, which stood him in good stead. He got in touch with his feminine side, women made better spirit medium so he had some practical experience of being a woman but didn't he fall in love

with a teenager though well he married her okay fair enough that wasn't that wasn't at his spiritualist he led the he was in his 30s though wasn't he? He was an older man

he was not two he was in his 20s and he was the leader of the progressive spiritualist Lyceum which was a Sunday school for spiritualists to encourage children to talk to the dead And this is one of the best things about your book, Dave, is that it's not just, I know we've only talked about dead white men,

but actually we meet for the first time a lot of these characters through women, don't me? Yeah, look, one of the things that I wanted to do in this book is look at the rise of women's rights. Because there weren't too many chicks in my first two books, Gert and True Gert. Mainly because there weren't many of them in Australia. It was a very blokey, male-dominated place. The era I'm writing about you've got some gender parity roughly in terms of numbers, but you've also got women in Australia really leading the world in areas of reform,

women's suffrage, divorce law reform, the ability for married women to own property. These were all things that happened here in Australia before they had. happened just about anywhere else. And so the fight for women's rights, there were two chapters of an 11, of a 12 chapter book that are dedicated to meeting some of these suffragists when they were young and looking at the difficulties that they laboured under and then having a look at them in the 1870s, 1880s, 1880s when they were campaigning for women to allow, get out of the kitchen, the bedroom and the linen closet and into the public sphere. So that's a big part of this book. Yeah. And so we actually, I think we first meet Alfred Deakin through his wife.

You sort of talk about his wife first. Well, I talk about his sister a bit early on in the piece. He was an incredibly impressive woman. She was the first, the first girl to graduate as a 25-year-old because there was no high schooling for girls when she was of the age. She went back to PLC down in Melbourne, graduated with honours, was admitted past the entry exam to uni with honours, but of course couldn't go to university because women went allowed. Which was the British getting interfering, right away from it correctly. Yeah, so when Adelaide wanted to admit Adelaide University

wanted to be the first university in the British Empire to, admit women because it's charter enabled it to sort of be open to persons and they said gee women women are persons let's let's have a few of them and britain just said absolutely not they had the power to override colonial laws they found repugnant and the idea of women attending university in the mid-1870s which is when that occurred was didn't happen it did happen a few years later in the 1880s. And there's a bit of a contrast to that you draw between Victoria, who was running the entire

show for much of this period. And then her views on the role of women, which was very much, as per the traditional royal family, not the least bit progressive. Yeah, look, this is the most powerful person in the world. This is the ruler of the British Empire. Enormous power

and moral authority. And there's this famous letter that she writes in the late 1860s, early 1870s. against this mad, wicked folly of women's rights. She writes in the third person, the Queen, you know, is most upset by this mad, wicked folly of women's rights and effectively saying that men and women are different and women should know their place and require male protection

and who would want to protect a woman who, you know, says that she's as good as a man. And so she suggested that Lady Ambly, who was a proponent of women's rights, get a good whipping for advancing the suffragist cause. And did she? Probably by her son Bertrand Russell's tutor because Lady Ambly was so progressive

the mother of all-round British brainbox philosopher mathematician Bertrand Russell that she had an agreement with her husband that she would embark on a sexual relationship with Bertrand's tutor because he was pale and weedy and wasn't getting any and she thought he'd teach Bertrand a bit better. if he was getting some. Yeah, which is not a common system of education.

It was sort of negotiated over the dinner table. And she also believed in contraceptives for women, equal wages for women. She was very progressive, really humbly. And it's a bit surprising, given the Australia that we have today and how much we're dragging the world in various things, that we were at the forefront of all of this sort of evolution. And also, I guess, the egalitarian nature of Australia in some ways, the lack of a class system back then?

It really helped. I mean, we had the most progressive politics in the world. Universal manhood suffrage was applied, you know, very broadly, early on in the piece. You have the introduction of postal voting to allow people in remote areas to vote another world first. You have allowing the deaf and blind to vote with assistance, which was part of the 1902 electoral...

Act, again a world first, the first place in the world to set up a truly independent of government electoral office to run elections. So it looks like they were great at the moment. No, they do at the moment. And the modern secret ballast that's used around the world today, you know, came out of Melbourne and then Adelaide in the 1850s. So world leaders in terms of democratic reforms. And, I mean, one of the delightful.

things is as you read the book you sort of see parallels between now and then you've got the whole thing between David Syme who owned the age and you sort of describe him as a as a Murdoch type character but he's with a soul I think a Murdoch with a soul yeah yeah like he was sort of progressive Murdoch well he believed in something other than other than himself and his own riches but then the other fascinating was one was um was it was Like, Andrew Twiggy Forrest, his great-grandfather, is it? His great, look. Or was it his grandfather?

No, no, it was his great-grand. His great-uncle, John Forrest, the Premier of Western Australia. He mentioned before, yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, so Twiggy's ancestor, David, was the most boring member of the family who rose to no particular prominence. But his brothers, John and Alexander, Alexander was the mayor of Perth. John was the premier of Western Australia

and they sort of divided the wealth that they were deeply corrupt. No, look, certainly not by the standards of the day, Charles. I think that's harsh. Well, they literally just was self-dealing, though, didn't they? They got into power and... They did do a bit of self-dealing. They were different times, Charles.

They were different times. Different times. It was called entrepreneurship, Charles. It was W.A. No one noticed. Yeah, yeah. But also, immigration, speaking of W.A., immigration is a big part of the story. And we mentioned the blackbirding, but also the racial tensions.

And I had no idea that W.A. had actually encouraged migration from the Chinese population, given all the problems elsewhere. Well, and was very embarrassed when the rest of Australia found out, because the rest of Australia was trying to lock out the Chinese and make it difficult for them to come. And Western Australia said, look, fellas, we're actually paying them to come here because nobody else wants to live here, and we want somebody to do all the shit jobs.

So Western Australia and the Northern Territory, which had a much larger Chinese population than European population in the 19th century, were holdouts in terms of white Australia. They were bought over the line in the end, but they supported Chinese migration and Chinese labour for quite a while. But I guess the kind of metanarrative of the book is Nationals. is, that's where the title comes from. Absolutely. It's about the coming together of the colonies in a nation,

but more importantly, the development of a common Australian identity. And so when do you think that's going to happen? Yeah, well, we're still working on it. It's a work in progress. But what was really interesting is the way that we attempted to develop a sense of Australian identity was working out who wasn't an Australian. And the way that we came together as a people was by sort of saying who we weren't. we're not we're not black we're not brown we're not yellow we are white we are white

Australia and it takes a particular sort of perversity to introduce an immigration policy where Britain says look we don't want you to look too racist because we have lots of these people in our empire we want you to exclude all the coloured folk you want to exclude in a sneaky way how do we do it we introduce a dictation test so any coloured immigrant coming to Australia after 1901 has to pass a dictation test in a language of the immigration official's own choosing. So they get off the boat and you happen to come from Shanghai and you will be asked to dictate a passage of more than 50 words in Finnish or Icelandic. And when you can't do that, they say, go back to where you came from. I mean, this is such a long theme, isn't it, of us being

absolute fuckwits and yet people still wanting to come and live here? The idea is, at the time, you had, you had, it was so embedded in the Australian psyche. You got children interested in white Australia by playing the white Australia board game. Really? Yeah, where you had to, the aim of the game is to move the coloured folk out. You start with four coloured people in Australia and you start with four white people outside Australia and the aim is to get all the white people in and all the coloured people out. And this was the game that the whole family could play.

It was so honest. It was. Well, it was honest because everybody thought it was perfectly natural. There were very, very few dissenters who disagreed with the idea that Australia should be a white Australia. Charles, can we send someone to challenge Pauline Hansen to a game of this? But we don't want to teach her tactics. That's a terrible idea. Yeah, well, look, there's a lot of so terrible, it's hilarious stuff in the book.

And I guess the final point is the footnotes. What a delight. No other author that I know would spend an entire. entire page on deconstructing Thomas the Tank Engine. The Book of Australian History. I've got almost 500 words looking at, looking at racism, sexism, badism, transphobia, and all of the otherisms in Thomas the Tank Engine.

And I just enjoyed watching Thomas for two weeks and finding all of the really bad bits. So what you're saying is it's a deeply researched book. It is a deeply researched book. But look, when I use my footnotes as the book, bits that really give me a chuckle. It's a piss take on the academic history book where they're the most boring bits. But when you come across a character like Carl von Ledabur, who is an 1890s Essendon football club trainer and also is a dodgy doctor who injects his patients with crushed

goat and guinea pig testicles to improve their performance, I just thought, wow, this is what Australian history is all about. I mean, the idea that it repeats itself. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty clear. Yeah. It's Gert Nation. It's out on the 2nd of November.

Second on November, available on the all good bookstores and some of the crap ones too. And go and read Gert and True Gert before that, if you haven't already. And David, I did a podcast a few years ago, rum rebels and wrap bags. We did. More of us chatting, unfortunately, without Charles, but nevertheless, it's still good. I think that was one of its finest features, Dom. Thanks, Dave. See you, mate.

Thanks for sticking it out this far. always good to know. Some people make it to the end. And thank you so much for joining us for a chat that both Charles and I enjoyed enormously. We'll have a regular episode of the Chast Report for you first thing Monday morning. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend. Our gears from road microphones and we're part of the Acast Creator Network. See ya.