Your correspondent Pat Lightfoot isn’t the only one bemused by Dr David Roberts and Carol Baxter’s pseudo-historical articles about my 2009 book Thunderbolt: Scourge of the Ranges. Because crucial official records were put off limits to public scrutiny, Scourge was written as an historical novel to dramatise a story based on real events to say what no one else so far has dared to say in public about the travesty at Uralla. Sinclair and I filled in the gaps in the Thunderbolt story to make a coherent and credible account of events, in contrast to the inept official version embraced by Roberts and Baxter. Parliament’s order to reveal the records forced a State Government reaction that showed that the good name of the Crown was to be protected at any cost. MPs were reminded that their Oath of Office forbids jeopardising the good name of the Crown, under threat of dismissal and jail.
Most Australians will see what’s what in this instance. The mantle of academic respectability that has been hung over the recycled official version of events is an embarrassment. Historians of the 1870s were mainly journos treated by officialdom as chooks to be fed. Historians today at UNE maintain, it seems, that chook feeding tradition. I wrote Scourge (i) to get at the truth by embarrassing an autocratic state government and (ii) to get people thinking about what this latter-day autocracy means; an insidious form of neo-serfdom. It’s more than time we out-grew that. A genuine historian doesn’t subvert the quest for truth, or abuse influence. The UNE has done itself irreparable damage backing their dumbed-down, self-serving form of history recording.
Of no apparent interest to Roberts or Baxter is the claim of the Upper House MPs who supported me: that I provoked a Constitutional crisis nobody knows what to do about. I do, and continue my patient efforts, noting that they’ve been of no interest whatsoever to our “truth-crusading historians” at UNE in their attempt to validate the Thunderbolt travesty cover-up.
Greg Hamilton,
Hyland Park
