The Good, the Bad and the Silly: Stories of our Past by John Dickson and Bern Emerichs

"The following 'peep holes' introduce young readers to heroes, villains, fools and plain folk on the extraordinary journey Australians have taken to arrive here in the twenty-first century"

History, well reading about history, should be fun. There are heaps of quirky, crazy, strange and slightly unbelievable stories out in the world about all periods of history.  I used to delight in talking to my students about a convict called Mansfield Silverthorpe. He could easily have been included in this book his story is so wild!  Here is his record:

Through a variety of employment in the Silk Trade, Wines and Spirits, India Rubber and Shakespearean actor, he eventually ends up jobless. Taking a notion to go to France, he ends up down to his last franc and in desperation he steals a "valuable diamond" from a museum in Boulogne. Returning to England he discovers it's a fake - when the "fence" he tries to sell it to smashes it to smithereens with a hammer. He is eventually arrested when he tries to steal a Scottish Captain's Chest. Unfortunately, making his getaway on an Omnibus with the chest he finds he is on the same coach as the Captain's butler who has been given time off to see London!  He is found guilty, sentenced to transportation for fifteen years and sent to the Hulk "Ganymede" at Woolwich. His story ends on his arrival, aged 24, at Norfolk Island. 

I wonder that I didn't discover this book in 2019 when it was published. I also wonder that this book did not appear on any CBCA notable lists. Perhaps it wasn't entered?

In The Good, the Bad and the Silly you will read about a variety of people, animals and events from our early Australian history. For example I had not heard about the dwarf emus that lived on Kangaroo and King Islands. Sadly they were all killed by seal hunters. Three were sent to France and two were placed in the gardens of Empress Josephine. When they died they were stuffed and put in a Paris museum. The makes me think of the book A giraffe for France.

Perhaps you already know the story of our platypus. Captain John Hunter "sent its pelt back to Britain. Hunter's gift was greeted with scorn. Anatomist, grave robber and body snatcher Robert Knox said it was most likely to have been cobbled together with bits of duck and beaver ... and should be included in the same category as mermaids."

Back to the emu. In Western Australia in 1932 soldiers were sent out to shoot the emus, 20,000 of them, that were eating crops. The emus were the winners with their strategy of running off in every different direction. 

You can also read about the convict Mary Wade mother of twenty one children. Former PM Kevin Rudd is one of her descendants. Harry the very unhappy camel. The rum hospital in Sydney. Hulks that were used to hold prisoners off the coast of Victoria, our first indigenous cricket team who visited England in 1868 and women winning the vote in 1902. 

I do hope this book is in your school library. It would be a wonderful resource to share with older Primary classes as a jumping off point to further research.

This is one book in a series - here are a few of the others: