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Girt. No word could better capture the essence of Australia...

In this hilarious history, David Hunt reveals the truth of Australia’s past, from megafauna to Macquarie – the cock-ups and curiosities, the forgotten eccentrics and Eureka moments that have made us who we are.

Girt introduces forgotten heroes like Mary McLoghlin, transported for the crime of “felony of sock”, and Trim the cat, who beat a French monkey to become the first animal to circumnavigate Australia. It recounts the misfortunes of the escaped Irish convicts who set out to walk from Sydney to China, guided only by a hand-drawn paper compass, and explains the role of the coconut in Australia’s only military coup.

Our nation’s beginnings are steeped in the strange, the ridiculous and the frankly bizarre. Girt proudly reclaims these stories for all of us.

Not to read it would be un-Australian.

274 pages, Paperback

First published July 24, 2013

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About the author

David Hunt

5 books224 followers
David Hunt's first book "Girt: The Unauthorised History of Australia" won the Australian 2014 Indie Award for Non-Fiction Book of the Year. The award is bestowed by Australian independent booksellers, who clearly have excellent taste.

Girt was also shortlisted for the 2014 Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA), the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, the Australian Book Design Awards and was the only non-fiction book shortlisted for the ABA Nielsen BookData 2014 Booksellers Choice Award.

Girt is four parts narrative Australian history and one part satire, mixed in the cultural melting pot, stirred with the wooden spoon of schadenfreude, and garnished with the crushed stems of tall poppies.

True Girt, volume 2 of The Unauthorised History of Australia, was published in 2016 and shortlisted for Audiobook of the Year at the 2017 ABIAs and for the Russell Prize for Humour Writing .

David's first children's picture book, The Nose Pixies, was also published in 2016. It is illustrated by the award-winning Lucia Masciullo. The Nose Pixies is a tale of a father's love, a son's nose picking and the bedtime story that cured him of his habit.

David's second picture book with Lucia Masciulo, My Real Friend, is about friendship and the existential angst of being an imaginary friend.

David has a birthmark that looks like Tasmania, only smaller and not as far south.

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5 stars
1,927 (31%)
4 stars
2,490 (40%)
3 stars
1,232 (20%)
2 stars
349 (5%)
1 star
123 (2%)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 633 reviews
Profile Image for David Hunt.
Author 5 books224 followers
October 29, 2015
I give myself five stars for effort. Well done me.
Profile Image for Miss.
69 reviews2 followers
November 23, 2014
I really wanted to like this book. I love the concept, because the history of Australia is quirky and the idea of it written with Bill Bryson-esque humour is appealing, but I couldn't help feeling this attempt needed a laughter track behind it; most of the jokes were awkward and predictable.

The reading experience was akin to sitting down to Christmas lunch with that annoying uncle who thinks he is incredibly funny. Through the nibbles, you laugh politely hoping, against all precedent, that he will say something funny soon, by the time the ham is sliced, you are rolling your eyes, and when the pavlova appears, a sarcastic comment sparks that family argument - the one you knew would occur before you even arrived.

But based on the ratings on here, I am in the minority, so I do applaud the author for writing a history book that engaged the masses. I, on the other hand, will stick to 'boring' history for now.
Profile Image for Trevor.
1,405 reviews23.4k followers
August 29, 2020
This is a seriously amusing book. You know, both serious and amusing. The author says at the end that he wanted to do to Australian history what Bill Bryson does for science – and given I laughed out loud quite a few times during this, I would have to say he has succeeded. Australian history is a deeply strange thing. Like the author of this, I only became interested in it after school – where I thought it was tedious and so lacking in things that had happened that I could only feel sorry for the poor teachers trying to teach it in a way that would be anything but pure agony.

I love that this is called Girt and his next one is called True Girt. No Australian could miss the reference – our National Anthem has the line ‘Our land is girt by sea’, and of such little things we are proud. Ireland similarly has songs about the joys of being surrounded by the sea.

He has left lots of scope for future volumes in the series, and the details of the lives of people like Banks, Flinders, Cook and King are really a delight. How odd it is that so often the things that people become famous for are among the least interesting things about them.

If you want an easy introduction to Australian history, and a few belly laughs too, start here.
Profile Image for Bianca.
1,208 reviews1,064 followers
November 10, 2021
If you ask most Aussies, they'll very likely tell you that Australian history is quite boring.
It is a new country, invaded and colonised by the Brits in the eighteenth century, even though the Dutch and the French had "discovered" it many years earlier.

This unauthorised history covers the "discovery" of Australia, its first colonies and some of the "great men" of the time, such as Macquarie, Macarthur, Flinders and many others who have many statues around Australia, streets, rivers, even banks etc named after them. It turns out that they were all very flawed people, who'd have thought? Not that one learns those kinds of things in the history books. After all, those historical figures, are literally put on a pedestal.

I found this book hilarious and very interesting, Hunt's writing style was similar to Bill Bryson's. If you're not a fan of sarcasm and irreverence this book is not for you. It was right up my alley. I plan on reading the next two instalments.

NB: I was surprised by the choice of a female narrator for this book.
Profile Image for Cass.
488 reviews137 followers
December 14, 2016
I laughed a lot and read a lot of passages to my husband... This is always a sign of a good book. With a great sense of humour (no one is safe from being mocked in this book), David Hunt writes our history in a way that I have never read it.

It is a very brief history of the Australia, with a focus on the colonisation, the governors and in particular the treatment of indigenous australians.

I feel like my eyes have been opened... Bligh was an ass-hole, Macarthur was a venomous man who only cared about himself, and Flinders was in love with Bass.

It has made me interested in the history of Australia, in a way that I have never been before. I have a long list of highlights and notes of people that I want to read more about.

**Read Jan 2015, Dec 2016
Profile Image for Jas.
192 reviews8 followers
August 21, 2014
While funny and informative, I couldn't get past the racism of this book. Yep, yep, it's satire, but referring to historically discriminated people as "lazy" and uninventive and all the rest isn't breaking any new ground and rather just reinforcing actually held views that continue to make real struggles for modern Aboriginal people. Even the milder white-on-white racism against Irish and Scottish people is continuously a punchline until the dead horse disintegrates from over-flogging.

Good for an overview of early Australian colony history, and you'll be very familiar with every stereotype the author knows by the end of it.
316 reviews16 followers
December 1, 2016
DNF - I could only stomach a few chapters of this book before I gave it up. This book was bad on a number of levels.

First, it committed the unpardonable sin for a book on history: it did not try to get into the true mindset and views of the people whom it talked about. Instead what you get is a modern day secular-leftist interpretation on the popular level of some of Australia's salient past (and some of it's not so salient past).

Second, it tried to be funny and failed. I can appreciate that it was trying to make history readable - that is probably its only redeeming feature. Histories that achieve that goal are few and far between. Unfortunately, while it frequently tried to be funny, it only occasionally succeeded in being amusing.

Third, in trying to be funny it resorted to fairly frequent sexual innuendo, which for me at least is a comedic crutch... that will always fail and leave you flat on your face.

The idea of an entertaining, popular-level take on Australian history is laudable. Unfortunately, Hunt has completely failed to deliver.
Profile Image for Tony.
465 reviews8 followers
June 16, 2024
An unusual blend of history and humor, Girt is more entertaining than it is informative. The funny portions--both funny real-life stories and outright jokes--are quite good. As for the actual history, I found that Hunt moves a bit too quickly through the material, making it somewhat hard to follow when one has no prior knowledge of the covered events.   
January 21, 2014
This should be compulsory reading for all high school students!

As a history graduate I was able to fully appreciate just how well researched and well written this book really is. It's so easy to read and so entertaining, it's easy to think it's all just a bit fun. On the contrary, this book should be compulsory reading for all high school students because it actually brings our marvellous chequered past to life like no other history of Australia I've ever read. Humour and insight leap out from every page, and just when you think you couldn't laugh any louder...there's the footnotes!
Profile Image for Darek.
14 reviews14 followers
November 22, 2013
"On 26 January 1788, Phillip named the large harbour north of Botany Bay after Lord Sydney, who was also big and wet". Not only is this the best book on early Australian history or the funniest book on Australia in general - this is one of the most intriguing and hilarious books I have EVER read. It is witty, informative and surprising, filled with marvelous, dark humor, which gives some passages almost surreal, Monty Pythonesque feel. Can't wait for sequels.
Profile Image for Richard.
1,235 reviews35 followers
May 18, 2015
Bad good bad good bad good ahh fuck it I can't be bothered any more

Some of the worst sentences ever written about some of the most fascinating history

I gave up at the 150 page mark
Profile Image for K..
4,299 reviews1,147 followers
August 7, 2016
Okay, so there should probably be a mention SOMEWHERE in the title that this is, in fact, volume 1 and not the complete history of Australia. It covers Australia's history from the megafauna era through European discovery and the arrival of the First Fleet, and then becomes the history of early colonial New South Wales through to the end of the Lachlan Macquarie era (so 1822).

Still, it's a book that incredibly readable, filled with entertaining titbits and anecdotes, and all with a fantastically sarcastic and funny writing style. There were moments throughout that were clearly poking modern Australia with a stick (references, for example, to the Eora considering the First Fleet to be boat people who should integrate into society), as well as a few brilliantly inserted Keating and Latham-isms ("a conga-line of suckholes" will forever be my personal favourite).

It's a book that doesn't require any prior knowledge of Australian history, though there are definitely some in-jokes for those of us who've been here a while. Well and truly worth the read, and should probably be handed out in high schools to keep kids interested in a subject that tends to be presented in a very dry and uninteresting way.
May 30, 2019
Girt is an entertaining read, but heavy (sometimes even heavyhanded) in its humour and light on facts. It gives a great general overview of the early years of Australian history but gives more of a sense of character than a sense of history.

It's a fun book (although some of the humour can be a little on the nose), so if you're looking for an historical book with an easy to read core, this definitely fits the bill. If you actually want to learn something concrete, not so much.

It's more about the vibe of the thing...
Profile Image for Tim Carroll.
15 reviews1 follower
November 7, 2015
Australian history always kind of bored me. Turns out I was just learning about it from boring people. This is one of the funniest things I've ever read and chock-full of interesting stories about our alcoholic, corrupt, criminal, veneral disease-ridden prison colony and its beginnings.

Plus, the Kindle version is only $12.
Profile Image for Paul (Life In The Slow Lane).
778 reviews57 followers
May 19, 2023
Australia owes its existence to tea, tax evasion, criminals and cannabis David Hunt

An hilarious account of the earliest history of Australia and its various "discoverers" (mostly Dutch, French and Portuguese, plus a couple of Englishmen, one of whom was James T. Kirk...no, wait...James T. COOK). Australia was, of course, actually discovered some 40,000 years earlier by the Aborigines. How inconvenient...for the Poms (English...you know...the people with terrible teeth.)

I think I had at least two laugh-out-loud moments every chapter. Even the footnotes are funny, especially the ones relating to chapter 3, where I learned the origin of "Blowing smoke up your arse."

Yes, we were the dumping ground for Britain's waste humans, but we're better now...mostly. If you plan on visiting Australia one day, don't worry. We won't rob you, rape you or curse at you...unless you do something silly. And if you like poking fun at the Poms and their poncy little princes (like David Hunt does in this book) you'll be most welcome.
Profile Image for Imelda Evans.
Author 3 books25 followers
January 12, 2014
I did enjoy this. Anyone with half an imagination (or who has seen Horribly Histories) knows that history couldn't possibly have been the dry series of facts that it is often made out to be in school. But Australia does seem to have gone out of its way to be hilarious. That, and David Hunt tells it very well. Educational and enjoyable, should be on the required reading list.
239 reviews
March 4, 2021
Quite possibly one of the funniest books I've ever read. Hunt is a wry and clever writer and also wonderfully savage, continually mauling racist opinions and biases inherent in academia. Fabulous and would definitely recommend to anyone no matter their nationality.
Profile Image for Bree Pollard.
77 reviews8 followers
January 8, 2022
would have slapped if hunt didn't make one too many questionable chinese accents in the audiobook
Profile Image for Cory.
398 reviews2 followers
April 14, 2016
A very funny and slightly offensive view of Australian history up to Macquarie's stint as governor. Cracking pace, generally quite good jokes, although if you have no ability to spot irony, this book will not sit well. The irony is so thick in places that it would be hard not to spot it, but I've met some people who are pretty adept at not spotting irony when it pleases them.

The best parts are the selected quotations in context, and the utter maligning of the colony's biggest figures -- there's a certain glee in exposing the sordid underbelly of the people we're taught to revere in history lessons. The part that really didn't work was the use of pop-culture references in places to comment on the history. It was limiting; it already felt dated at times, and clearly won't be relevant in five years or so. The author's note comments on editors disallowing any jokes about Michael Jackson's monkey, to which I say THANK YOU EDITORS.

I'll definitely be picking the next one up; well worth the read.
Profile Image for Caitlin.
337 reviews70 followers
August 17, 2014
This book was nothing short of an absolute freaking hoot!

I love history, but like many people, I tend not to read up much on my own country's history. Now that the new government have plans on "improving" the teaching of Australian history, I'm starting to gather an understanding of Australia pre-Bradman, while I can.

Now, I doubt the humour throughout this book would offend anyone, because quite frankly I doubt anyone with an absolutely entrenched reverential opinion of Bligh, Banks, Cook and MacArthur would pick this book up in the first place. I can understand that the constant asides and humour might irk some people, but this wasn't just "Let's have a few jokes to make this less dry" - this really was an exploration of the funny, weird, scandalous and just plain unique elements of Australian history.

I have heard rumour of there being books to follow, which would be good as I felt it ended abruptly with the official naming of Australia - so I'm eager to see what comes next!
Profile Image for Julie Bozza.
Author 32 books302 followers
June 30, 2019
I bought this and had it signed by the author after attending his talk at the recent StoryFest event in Milton-Mollymook-Ulladulla. David Hunt is hilarious in person, recounting in brief many of the tales to be found in this tome and its sequel. Also, he includes our queer history, which is a huge plus - and when I thanked him for that afterwards, he immediately said very sincerely, "It's important."

The book is very amusing (rather than hilarious) to read, though the droll cover image makes up somewhat for the lack of David-in-full-voiced-person. And I have to confess to feeling bogged down a little in the latter parts about governors. But this is all the unsavoury bits of Aussie history that we didn't get taught at school, and it's well worth catching up with that just as soon as you can, and having a bit of a laugh on the way.
Profile Image for Blake Spady.
1 review
February 12, 2019
Thought this was hilarious at first. However, the insistence on making a joke out of every other sentence got old fast and often was done at the expense of the history. There were a lot of interesting fun facts but the overall history being told was smothered by so much silly humour that I felt I missed out on a lot of the story.
Profile Image for Apratim Mukherjee.
243 reviews49 followers
June 3, 2019
'Girt' costs about £15 in India which is quite a fortune(Its just ridiculous).This book tries to be funny by making racist jokes on aborigines,Irishmen etc.I think comedians shouldn't be historians as history is not a joke.If this tasteless horrible book is the history of Australia,then Australia lacks historians.I don't recommend this book to anyone.
Profile Image for John Purcell.
Author 2 books124 followers
April 29, 2014
Great fun, and I learnt a great deal as well. The best of both worlds really - history with a comic twist (Horrible Histories for grown-ups). Update: after close consultation with the author I have revised my four star rating up to five stars. (ok, David I did it, now let my wife go free)
Profile Image for hayls 🐴.
321 reviews12 followers
August 24, 2019
3.5/5. Would've been 4/5, but it was a bit too filled with dad jokes for my liking.
But this dropped so many truth bombs about the racist and misogynistic foundations of the Australian nation it is a must-read, despite the number of eye-roll jokes.
Profile Image for Jessica.
50 reviews
May 23, 2024
Hilarious and 'very' Australian.

I was looking for means to educate myself on Australian history because, unfortunately, as a Chinese Australian, I feel like I have an obligation to have a conversational understanding of how 'things' came to be. This was purely a shower thought and desire, and I'm glad that it led me to David Hunt's telling the history of colonial Australia, and even when beyond/further.
Profile Image for Karla Thomas.
Author 8 books1 follower
February 19, 2015
The bookseller at the shop where I bought this told me it had been flying off the shelf. Deservedly so, I must say. My only problem with it was that it ended at the end of Macquarie's governorship. I was looking forward to him explaining Eureka to me so that, ignorant American that I am, I would finally understand what happened.

I've read other (drier) books of Australian history before, so I was familiar with the names and events, but Hunt managed to put them in a way that will definitely stick with me. I was giggling all the way through the book and desperately wishing I had someone I could read bits to who would appreciate them as I did.

Tell me there's going to be a Volume Two!
Profile Image for Eve Dangerfield.
Author 30 books1,418 followers
November 21, 2016
I wasn't sure what to expect but I really, really loved this book. It was funny, interesting and just so hilarious. I literally laughed out loud. David Hunt is right, Australian history is always perceived (especially by its inhabitants) as a dry, sheep-filled snorefest. This book well and truly proves it isn’t. Hunt doesn’t gloss over the bad stuff either; white invasion and the genocide commited against Indigenous Australians is well documented and the sheer audacity, racism and ignorance of our white ‘founding fathers’ laid bare in a funny, insightful way. I for one wanted to hear even more about those crazy, clap-infested nutcases; which is why I bought and am now listening to True Girt.
Profile Image for D.A. Cairns.
Author 18 books50 followers
November 6, 2013
This hilarious history grabbed me from the opening chapters and kept me laughing, smiling, and fascinated all the way through, to the sad ending. Sad because there was no more. I hope David Hunt writes another volume because this is a terrific book.

It's shocking and repulsive, intriguing and bizarre, and all gloriously factual, albeit coloured with cynicism and sarcasm. Bottom line? Girt by David Hunt is fun, and you should read it, if you like history and humour, or even if you don't. You've heard the saying that truth is often stranger than fiction. Girt will astound you.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 633 reviews

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