Rum, Rebels and Ratbags: Recent Episodes
ABC Radio
Humourist and historian David Hunt and ABC 702’s Dom Knight take on Australian history and uncover the characters, events and a cat that you won’t find in the regular history books. This is not history for the faint-hearted.
Women in the convict colony initially had a hard life, but for many, New South Wales presented undreamed of opportunities. They had a greater say in relationships, property, business and government policy than back in Britain, so it is no surprise Australia was a world leader in women’s suffrage.
Lachlan Macquarie was a hard drinking, penny pinching Scottish army officer with syphilis and an impressive history of financial fraud. Yet he became the colony’s most successful governor, erecting new towns and buildings, integrating ex-convicts into society, and naming just about everything Macquarie.
William Bligh - incredible navigator, breadfruit fancier, coconut hoarder, reforming governor, utter bastard.
John Macarthur, a.k.a. Bodice Jack, had two favourite things: alcohol and money, both of which came in brown paper bags. Macarthur and the New South Wales Rum Corps ran dodgy land deals, intimidated government officials, stole from the public purse and introduced “corruption on a scale probably unexceeded until the days of Eddie Obeid”.
There are more statues of Matthew Flinders in Australia than of any other man. And there are more statues of his cat, Trim, than of any other cat. Flinders circumnavigated and named Australia, discovered that Tasmania was an island, and spent a lot of time in a very small boat with his “good sailing buddy”, George Bass.
Australia’s Indigenous people dealt with the white ghosts from across the sea in different ways. Bennelong pursued a path of accommodation and was the first Indigenous man to visit England, whilst the warrior Pemulwuy, dressed in his Amazing Technicolor Dreamingcoat, fought a bloody 12-year guerilla war.
New South Wales’ first governor, Arthur Phillip, dreamed of an antipodean utopia. Instead he founded Sydney, a town full of drunk, starving, naked criminals.
Did you know the colony of Australia only came about because of tea, taxation, criminals and... cannabis? And find out how a Cockney hypochondriac whaler ended up as the first Governor of NSW.
More than 140 years before Captain Cook sighted the Australian coast, Dutch merchant Jeronimus Cornelisz murdered over 120 shipwreck survivors off the coast of WA in a killing spree that makes Lord of the Flies look like Mary Poppins.
Australians might know Banks as ‘that plant guy’ but he was actually a wealthy playboy who inspired Star Trek and discovered surfing. Captain Cook just steered the ship for Banks and his groupies.