A different lens: ‘The Shortest History of Australia’ by Mark McKenna

This latest volume of Black Inc’s Shortest History books offers an invigorating challenge to traditional southeast-focused and chronological narratives of Australian history.

In this book the national story is told via themes, such as ‘the founding lie’, ‘the Island dilemma’, ‘taking the land’, ‘fire and water’, or ‘the big picture.’ As the author remarks in chapter one: …history is not inherently linear; only historians make it that way. (p7)

The ‘usual’ big events and national turning points are all here: Captain Cook and the Endeavour; the penal colony, land and gold rushes, wars, legends like Ned Kelly and the ANZACS, migration, Federation, the legal sorcery of ‘terra nullius’ and the Mabo and Wik cases that overturned this doctrine, and so on.

However they are viewed through a series of different lenses: First Nations people and their stories and experiences; non-British migrants; the folk who occupied or visited the continent’s north over untold years; those who suffered under the endemic racism embedded in the British colonisation; asylum seekers in recent decades; droughts, floods and fires.

The story of pearl diving in the north is told alongside the stories of gold, wheat and wool in the southern states.

The centrality of Country to First Nations peoples’ worldview and the growing recognition of this among non-indigenous Australians is discussed, along with examples of the newly created Commonwealth’s wilful blindness to the humanity of Indigenous Australians at Federation (p230) and the heroic and persistent campaigners for Aboriginal rights over many, many years.

Mark McKenna has an informative and engaging narrative style; his book reads like a series of fascinating stories rather than a history text. Highly recommended for those who enjoy non-fiction that asks its readers to question and revisit what we think we know about our own national history.

The Shortest History of Australia was published by Black Inc in 2025.