Forget everything you thought you knew about the founding of Australia. There's a secret money trail, and a hatched plan, that nobody ever knew about.
TRANSCRIPT:
(This transcript is derived from an automated process. The video recording is authoritative.)
It was 1785, the French were preparing for war again. They had sent Count LA Peruse into the Pacific to scout around for a possible future French site. The British East India company directors were worried. They contacted Prime Minister William Pitt to complain about what the French were doing in building up their Navy. Navy, prime Minister Pitt must act. But sending battleships into the Pacific to splinter a few French vessels wouldn't be enough. Putting another flag in the sand somewhere wouldn't be enough. Even establishing a military base wouldn't be enough.
What plan could William Pitt come up with that the parliament would accept? And what plan could he come up with in secret? And there was one. Do you like a good story? Yes. Well, this book's full of them. This actually started out as a children's book. I got asked to do a children's book on Australian history for primary school, and I said, well, it's been a while. Let me get into the research and I'll get back to you. Well, once I started the research, I couldn't stop. And you're lucky, this is the abridged version,
And it's a hard covered book because my wife had me send a copy while I was still typing it to Eric Abetz. And so months later [I lost my glasses] He wrote to me and he said, I can report. I've now had the immense pleasure of reading your work page by page and word for word. I've just finished moments ago and believe I should write immediately to express my gratitude for the immense amount of work that must have gone into compiling this comprehensive account you are to be congratulated. And I thought, that's a strange form letter. I haven't read one like that before. And I read it again and thought, well, maybe he's telling the truth. I'll give him a call. And so Eric and I became friends and he said, you have to publish it as a hard covered book.
And I thought, well, I'm on the pension, and you are probably on the pension, but you pension's probably a lot bigger than mine. But he wasn't chipping in to help me though. Anyway, we ended up with this book and I started by putting a dozen history books on the floor just to see what people were writing, basically to look at content. And something struck me pretty well straight away. And that was how boring they looked. It was all on the same fading bond paper. And as I looked, and it was all in black and white, if they bothered to put in any pictures, it was sort of in the middle. And you sort of, well, where did that come from? And then as I started to read, I found that they were repeating themselves. I was up to the fifth edition of the same stuff that he'd written in the sixties, or they were repeating stuff that they put in other books.
And so I sort of felt like I was, what was happening is I'd fallen into the Santa Claus syndrome. And that is if you keep telling yourself the same stuff often enough, you'll eventually believe it. But there's nobody at the North Pole to tell you the truth. But it was the Santa Claus thing. And as I continued to look as I read, I found a couple of things. Firstly, if I found a fact, I'd be flipping back to five pages to try and find a date to make sense of what I was reading and put it together. And the other thing is I discovered that these tellers or people that call themselves, historians really do like to write novels, and they would just sort of waffle on. And I'd think, well, where did you get that from? There wasn't for me enough facts. My background is, I suppose, where the height of where my life went was I actually got to work for the US Senate in Congress.
I was senior professional staff for the Senate Judiciary Committee working with Kennedy, and I worked with Mitch McConnell. I wrote Mitch McConnell's first legislation and also along beside Biden. He was a much more energetic and much more comprehensive individual than I knew him years ago. But I wouldn't have the only Australian risen to that position and been in the monthly briefings at the White House if my work wasn't second to none, to be the only Australian ever to rise to that position and receive a commendation from President Reagan. I earned it. So when I came to this topic of Australian history, I wasn't impressed with the W. It waffled on. And the thing that got me was a paragraph in Manning Clark. And he said, as he lifted the Shiraz to his lips, he pushed back in his seat and stretched his legs across to the bannister of the veranda, and he watched the sun setting over the gum trees and pondered the price of wall on the London stock market.
And I went, oh, yuck. What rubbish was that? His house faced Eastern, he couldn't see the sunset. He wasn't making Shiraz, but a pretty rough old Clara out there on the Cumberland plane. He was excommunicated, that's not the right word, out of Australia so often. He was probably only home on the weekend, and it probably rained that day. But I mean, it was just nonsense. And then I was reading Keneally and I'd read enough to know that while I was reading was just down right wrong, and I slammed the book, I swore at him, I turned around and I threw the book in the garbage bin. I'd had enough.
Well, that didn't work out well for me. It turned out to be my wife's book and I had to get it out again. But anyway, as I looked at what I was reading, I decided I really needed to get back in and do the research, not just repeat the same stuff, but go looking for original documents. I wanted the original legislation. I wanted the newspaper reports. I wanted diaries, I wanted documents. I was interested in books that were written a hundred, 200 years ago. I wanted to get back as close as I possibly could to the events that were happening. And I got diaries that were talking about what happened today in 1787 or 1788. And there I was on the set as these men were describing what was going on around them. And as I decided to have a look at all of this and looking at this history, I decided if I'm going to do the research, I'd set myself three tenets.
The first one was the one of integrity. That is history is history. It's not there for opinions or interpretation. If I didn't like something, I'd take it on the chin, but it was there to be read and understood. The second one was to chase the money trail. Nothing happens in politics that doesn't involve money. So whenever I read something, it was a matter of then saying, where was the money? The third one comes from my theological training, and there's a German concept called Sits in Labin. And it means situation in life. It doesn't just mean what is the context, but it means who were the people in that context? What were the influences on those people to make decisions? So with anything I came at, I was coming at it with those three tenants when I was looking at what I was reading. So I set out to be the Sherlock Homes of the international libraries of the world, chasing information all over the place to try and get the real picture.
And so it became a treasure hunt for me. And I have fun. I kept finding things that I'd never read or knew before, and I just couldn't stop. So the research just went on and on right back, as I said to the early days, even beyond coming to Australia. So I understood the context. I got into the lounge room of William Pitt the day, I think it was a Saturday in the summer of 87. And he sat with five men. I got their names, their religions, their positions in the aristocracy, Barrons and Dukes. And they sat around these five men and they discussed the Australian venture going to New South Wales. Oh no. Said one of them. We can't have slavery. I mean, Wesley and Wilberforce will be most upset that we don't ban slavery. Oh, and money, money is of course the root of all evil.
Well, we shouldn't have money. Why don't we just give the convicts land, of course, and set them free as soon as possible. Oh yes. Well, there can't be any incarceration. They haven't been sentenced to prison. They're sentenced to do labour to get them out of the country and give them a fresh start at life. And as I listened to these gentlemen go on, as they were writing the letters pattern for the king, I could just hear one of them say, oh, what a capital idea. We will all go off to New South Wales. And I thought, well, there's the title of the book. What a capital idea. So then I got into the things like the Gold Rush, the greatest gold rush in human history. In eighteen fifty two, one hundred and fifty ships, 150 ships pulled into the London docks from Australia Laden with nothing but gold. And the rush was on.
There was a new ship called a Clipper, and they were going over the South Pole. I dunno, they ran across the ice and got on the other side. But what they were doing, but they were going past the South Pole to get here faster. There were 33, 30 6,000 people on the San Francisco Goldfields. Remember the 49 ERs in 39? Remember that story? Yeah. 11,000 of them were Australians. And didn't they cause trouble? If you wanted a drink, you wanted some fun, you wanted to gamble, you went down to Sydney Town in San Francisco was all happening there. And they called them the Sydney Coves and the Sydney Ducks.
Well, they did cause a lot of trouble. Quite often they would burn down the city, and as everybody was running in one direction, they were looting the shops and the houses behind them. There was a couple of fellas knocked over a bank. Well, they got $40 million or some huge amount of money. So the council in San Francisco decided to introduce the police. And of the first 50 people arrested, 48 of them were Australians. I know, I know Larrikins. So when they discovered gold in 52, 18 52 in Australia, and all the Australians got on the ship to go home, the committee stood at the dock and waved them all goodbye.
There were 24,000 people just on the one Ballarat Goldfield. That's how huge the Australian gold rush was. We were exporting 40% of the world's gold out of this one country, 40% of the world's gold out of this one country. And so Australia became Britain's greatest commercial accident. And we returned three times the wealth to Britain than even Canada. Three times more money went back to England than even in Canada. They discovered gold up behind Port Macquarie up on the land. Now I keep forgetting what it is, and it was run by the Australian agricultural company. A lot of politicians and people in England had put money in shares into the Australian agricultural company. Well, when they discovered gold, one share on the London stock market in the Australian agricultural company wasn't $4 wasn't $40. It wasn't even $400 a share. It was $40,000 for one share.
We have got no memory of the wealth that was in this country. Absolutely amazing. What a capital idea it was to come to Australia to it. Yes, you got the meaning, double meaning of the word. And then I got into this what was going to be this horrible thing called the Constitution. Oh, it had to be done. I thought, I'll get into the Constitution. Where was the money? I'll tell you in an minute where the money was. And I discovered this amazing fellow by the name of Andrew Inglis Clark, and he was from Tasmania. One might say, what good thing can come out of Tasmania? Well, Andrew did, because he was the Attorney General. He showed up in 1891 to a constitutional convention with all the bureaucrats and the premiers and all there. We're going to see what we can do to federate. Well, Earl Grey had been trying to get the states that the colonies that federate since 1855, please will you federate because I'm so sick to death if you're all riding and whinging at me. But it took 'em another, what is it, almost 40, 50 years. So in 1891, they're having a convention, and Andrew showed up and he coded up and he just slapped 96 clauses for Constitution on the desk. And he said, try that.
Of today's 128 clauses in the Constitution, that is the Australian constitution. Those 96 clauses still form 75% of our constitution from that one man. And while I were thinking about that, looking at it going, he's written a thing, he said, oh, have you thought about a name? How about the commonwealth of Australia since there's the Commonwealth of Virginia, the Commonwealth of Delaware. Why don't you have the, and they thought, that's a good idea, the commonwealth of Australia. And he said, while you're thinking about that, he opened his satchel and he pulled out an old rag. And he said, what about this for the Australian flag, the flag, the name. And 75% of our constitution come from this one man from Tasmania. And you've never heard of him.
You've never heard of him. And then I've just taking stories out of the book and I'm now writing them up as novels. So short stories out of the book, because at the end of every chapter, I kept finding interesting people. And I thought, well, they're there. They're all part of the whole story. But they're not big enough to make the front page of a newspaper, but I'm going to put 'em in anyway. At the end of every chapter, I'll do an interesting character. Well, I'm now taking them out and I'm putting in the dialogue and I'm having such fun, such fun. But the details are even more incredible than what I've got in the book because I've got to be there. And everything that they say and do has got to be just accurate. So I'm putting people like Andrew Clark into the book, and I've just done, I've just done the first two years of settlement. Have you ever heard of Henry Dodd?
(Audience member) Yes.
Oh, you have?
(Audience member) Yeah.
What?
(Audience member) I listened to you last time
You spoke to Oh yeah. Well, you can't have heard Henry Dodd. I've only just discovered him myself. That's cheating. Creepy. Henry Dodd actually worked for Philip when Philip had a farm in England. And so when he was coming out, he said to his friend Henry, who ran the farm, come and work for me. So Henry came out with Philip, and he is the one that actually organised the convicts. So it actually worked. He'd also been in the Portuguese army, English. It wasn't a war. You had to do something, you'd go and fight for anybody. So they did. So we did Philip. So he took his friend with him. And it was actually Henry dod that got the gardens going and the convicts organised. And here, you probably dunno, none of the convicts, as I said, were locked up. They couldn't be put in prison. So they were all given permission to build their own homes.
And DOD makes a comment, well, they did need a bit of tutoring. Some of them were sort of falling over. I mean, here were people from London never built anything. And I found this wonderful painting of this first two years with all the huts of the convicts all scattered over the shore. And I've never seen it before. Why haven't I heard this? And as I was coming out of the trees at BU five and a half years of writing this, five days a week for five years, I found I was on the edge of a referendum. A referendum. What's this about? Oh, they want to put a self designated racial group who are really a political group over the top of the other three arms of government. And although, wait a minute, we have these three divisions of government that go all the way back to the Magna Carta 800 years.
And now we are going to have a referendum. And we, people who probably have never read the Magna Cart or understand why it was written. And if you walk into the United States Congress in the House of Representatives, and you come into that big dome that you see on television when you walk in and you go, oh, well look at this. If you turn directly to the right, there's a copy of the Magna Carta in gold in a glass cabinet. It still influences the American system of government just as it does ours. And we have this principle of the separation of powers. But we were going to put a fourth group over the top. And I was bewildered as I was bewildered and walking around trying to understand it. I came across a quote by a fellow by the name of Stuart McIntyre, who he, I dunno, he still is, was a professor at Melbourne University. And in the preface of his book, he said, if we deny our British heritage, we will become a people without a soul. I felt that that's what I was witnessing. People walking around looking for an identity, even clinging onto a society that they imagined that was a stone age society. They remained romanticised it as, acclaimed it as if it was something important that would have an influence on us. And I was bewildered, but there were people saying things such as treaty, why didn't the Aborigines get a treaty? Where was the comeback? They were talking about invasion, but where was the comeback? Or the aborigines were mistreated, but where was the comeback?
Ladies and gentlemen, we have become vulnerable to the onslaughts, the criticism, the derailing, even the slander of our nation because we don't know our history. We are vulnerable because we don't know our history. Perhaps you have heard it said that he who doesn't know history is doomed to repeat it. But our situation is far more serious than that because it is our very social DNA that is under attack. It is our identity as a nation that is under attack. They tell me that there were 700,000 people that came into this country in the last year, and there was probably another 700,000 before them. And I think, well, how are they going to become Australian? Are we thinking it's just going to happen by osmosis? Perhaps they can run out and buy a football Guernsey and wear it around for a year and maybe that'll, it'll sort of soak in or something. We are vulnerable because we don't know our history. And the problem is that we are going to lose our identity as a nation through apathy and ignorance.
And then I wrote this book because it needed to be written. Now it is a book that needs to be read. God saved the King.
