#genuinely idk how she picked “major river” or if that's all accurate

[thatgirlwhokeepsreading]

I absolutely second that! I'm Australian but (for reasons not relevant here) spent upper primary school living in Western Europe attending an USAmerican international school. My mother was haunted by the idea that me and my siblings weren't learning the Australian-specific humanities content we'd have gotten if we'd been back home, and as part of an effort to correct that bought us some books that basically had a Horrible Histories-esque tone.

I mostly read and re-read the first book in the series, and I can't remember date range but it basically started with pre-invasion* European contact and went through to I think federation. My recollection is these books didn't really unpack the First Nations' perspective, like they still were very much positioned primarily as sympathetic to people who had been transported. (Which does mean they were pretty ACAB lol.)

But the fact that they left in parts like massacres, enslavement, genocide of Indigenous Tasmanians, James Cook being Like That, etc., ended up being HUGE for me. Like, I'm a historiography** girl, I know there's no "neutral" approach to reporting history, but the barest facts prima facie are just Not Good. In particular I remember this part that was just like "Terra Nulius was plainly bullshit, because like... There Was Guys There. You kept having to kill them, so they're clearly there???? European understandings of land ownership be damned."

Anyway, I say this was Huge for me bc it turns out when I reintegrated into Australian schooling I was coming in way hotter and more anti-colonial than everyone else. Also I was so so bad at naming people who undertook mapping expeditions. So I ended up being slightly behind anyway because I didn't know anything post-federation and retained Zero names of white boys who died trying to find the inland ocean.

Like I'm not even trying to claim I was a Woke Bae in class (I was 11yo and I wanted the authority approval so bad lol), or that I'm a flawless ally to Indigenous people now, or even that my peers were all completely ignorant. It's just literally my whole perspective was founded on the idea that cruelty to Indigenous people was if not a feature then an inevitable byproduct of colonialism, and this was Probably Bad Actually. And I didn't realise that for most of my peers and even many teachers weren't starting from that same premise.

And this always fascinated me because my mother didn't set out to give me a Woke History Book. (I think I literally ended up with those books bc, as I say, they had a very HH vibe and I LOVED HH.) It also, more importantly... really stands in contrast to the sanitized American history I learned in school.

(*they used the term "settlement" or if they were feeling spicy "colonisation", which is fairly standard for books ostensibly aimed at white kids. In the academic environment in which I operate**, however, we tend to use "invasion" because even if the Brits brought a prisoner labour force to then colonise with doesn't make it not a military action.)

(**Australian theatre historiography, not history history, so I won't unilaterally claim language we use is current best practice)