Error Australis
BEN POBJIE AFFIRM PRESS $29.99
Recent events might suggest that Australia has taken a turn for the worse, but Ben Pobjie lets us know that we have never really been up to much. His stint as TV columnist for this paper has given him the skills to approach the national story as if it were a parade of reality TV contestants, so his take is not so much black armband as red nose and spinning light-up bow tie: more than irreverent, it's mean and derisive. 
It's a history that has its constants, such as silly men: Bligh and Macarthur ("Macarthur borrowed Bligh's pencil and refused to return it. Bligh spread a tale that Macarthur wet his bed"), Burke and Wills ("Say what you like about Burke and Wills, but one thing you can't deny is that they were stupid to ever even try this dumb expedition"), Hawke and Keating ("Paul looked at Bob ... Even now, Paul felt the awesome force of his charisma. The man was born to be Prime Minister. As a baby his first words had been 'capture the middle ground'. Paul's had been 'Armani monetarist"').
As the quotes suggest, accuracy is not Pobjie's strong point and his approach is riddled with anachronism and fantasy: if nothing else, this book should encourage Australian history tyros to go and find out how much he has just made up.
But he does manage to uncover a deeper truth, which is that this is a country founded on tortured bromance. Even our bushrangers are gay and Pobjie is almost nice about that, though not quite ("Claims that Moonlite and Nesbit had planned to buy a King Charles spaniel together are even more dubious.").
Elsewhere there are running gags at the expense of Australia's delusions of military grandeur: "The heavy lifting of the liberation of Western Europe fell to the Australians, who penetrated deep into occupied territory, driving the Wehrmacht out of France" and almost serious remarks at the expense of Australian racism and xenophobia, of which there is always more than you might ever have thought.
One of the high, or low, points is a transcript from the Constitutional Convention that not only wallows in another set of prejudices but sees the event as the moment when they were first laid down: "We agree that each state will be assigned its own humorous stereotype ..."
Although it may seem as if Pobjie's inability to resist cheap shots means he has squandered this chance to make a substantial contribution to historical scholarship, a moment's thought is enough to show that he has convincingly demonstrated the thesis that this country is a bit of a joke.