When I read Error Australis I thought… This is a history book but not as we know it. This is a book that could be used in schools, but it’s not like the textbooks we had in the 1980s. This is a book that shows irony is not lost on us as Australians. And I wondered, what was your intention in writing the book? Was it to help readers learn more about history, or was it to make people laugh at how ludicrous our past, present and future actually is?

The main intention was always to make people laugh. The germ of the idea came to me years ago, in history lectures at uni. During them, I would write down jokes about what the lecturer was saying, instead of taking notes. With this book I really set out to be as funny as I could be about Australian history. Where the history itself was funny I’d use that, but of course, history isn’t always funny in itself. That’s where constructing these sort of comedic riffs around ‘serious’ history came in. But there was an interesting evolution, in my own mindset, along the way. I began to realise that I was actually writing something a little bit educational, and I kind of embraced that as a bonus. If people read Error Australis and do learn more about Australian history, that’s great.

I also definitely have the feeling that laughing at our history is, in itself, beneficial to the way we learn about history, because if there’s one thing that we’ve got too much of in Australia, it’s reverence for history. We are so po-faced in the way we look at our forebears we’ve ended up sterilising and de-humanising them. So, making fun of them makes our history sillier, and consequently, more approachable.

That’s very analytical, of course. The book’s raison d'être is comedy, and if it does nothing but give you a laugh, that’s enough for me.

I definitely laughed while reading. Error Australis is very funny and accessible. It reads like a late dinner party conversation where someone says, ‘Hey did you hear about how the First Fleet actually spent time in Rio before realising they were in the wrong spot’, and everyone is keen to hear more. Were you hoping your book would feel this personable?

That’s very nice of you to say! The book is written in the style of my reality TV recaps – that was the premise I started with – and the way I write those is by assuming the persona of someone who’s sort of buttonholed you and said, “Hey, listen, I’ve got a story to tell ya”. So that voice is pretty important to the book. Even though I’m playing the part of historian, I’m doing it from a very individual, idiosyncratic perspective, where I’ve got a snarky comment for every fact, and I’m letting you know how I feel about it all – whether I find this bit of history boring, this bit stupid; this guy awesome, this one a bastard. I’m like a professor who’s just found out he’s going to be fired, so he’s walked into his last lecture and dropped all the academic objectivity: “OK, let me tell you what I REALLY think about all this history malarkey”.

The voice varies a bit – there are a couple of chapters where I change up the format completely, just to keep things interesting and I liked the different ways of telling those particular stories – but that dinner conversation voice is the backbone of the project.

What’s your favourite period in Australia’s past, and why? Did you enjoy writing this part of the book the most?

I like the Gold Rush era, because it was really Australia’s own Wild West. All these people, from around the colonies and also overseas, come flooding into the country, and you’ve got these huge mining fields crammed with people from different cultures and backgrounds rubbing up against each other and becoming very tense, because they’re all in competition to get rich. Of course, most of them aren’t getting rich, and the government is fleecing them at the same time, and then you see your neighbour dig up a big nugget, and things really kick off. And anyone who did make a bit of money was likely to take it straight into town, get drunk, and likely to start shooting the place up. You’ve got gunfights and riots and impromptu horse races through city streets.

And then, of course, the Gold Rush leads to the Eureka Stockade, which is this watershed moment when downtrodden working men jump up and say, we’re not going to just be fuel for the upper-class’s money machine anymore. Yes, they were totally disorganised and never had a hope of carrying out a real revolution, but the fact they stood up and declared their own rights just echoed down the ages. Plus, the gold rush ushered in the age of bushranging, which is utterly cinematic with guys like Dan Morgan, who was your classic crazy-eyed psychopath, and Ben Hall, who isn’t remembered all that well, but was really a tragic hero straight out of a novel. And Big Ned himself, who really did dress like a supervillain.

I also quite like the age of exploration, because the famous explorers wrote themselves into history as titanic figures, who when you look a little closer were just as vain and greedy and stupid and incompetent as anyone else.

I very much enjoyed the essay questions at the end of each section – one of my favourites was when you asked readers to consider the relationship between bushrangers and Carl Williams. Do these questions simply reveal your yearning for your adolescent school days, or do they illustrate your desire for deeper intellectual analysis in this country?

This is really me wearing my influences on my sleeve. I’ve read and loved humorous history books, and they were a big part of why I wanted to write this book in the first place. One thing they had in common was little study guides and/or questions at the end of chapters. I’m thinking of books like Dave Barry Slept Here, or 1066 And All That – which is like the Godfather of the genre. I always liked that added element of parodying a school textbook. It’s a little bit of extra silliness that I hope enhances the experience a tad. If there’s any desire for deeper intellectual analysis there, it was totally unconscious.

Congratulations on your book Ben. You have successfully broken Australian history down into moments of stupidity, arrogance, and mindless pride. You have also shown where as a nation we have achieved some progress. What’s next for you as a writer and recorder of our psyche?

Thank you very much! Who knows where to next? There’s lots more in Australia to study. Maybe I’ll break down the political system to help the voters understand better, or write a tourist guide for overseas visitors. Or perhaps I’ll broaden my horizons and write the definitive and final history of the whole world. There are 206 countries on the planet, and every one of them has a history just as weird and ridiculous as ours, I’m sure. There’s no shortage of material.

Then again, there’s also my teen vampire novel…