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Whatsapp Peter Macinnis believes real education is about opening the mind.

Winning a televised quiz show was easy, writes Peter Macinnis. Writing a scientific history of Australia that schoolkids would find interesting? That was far trickier.

I have a secret. In 1970 and '71, I was on TV screens across Australia for 26 of the last 28 weeks of Bob Dyer's Pick-a-Box.

Because I appeared in Australia's lounge rooms each week back then, I was a very temporary celebrity of sorts, seen as public property and therefore approachable.

The invariable entry point was: 'You're Peter from Pick-a-Box—you must be very intelligent.'

Moondyne Joe, pardoned by the governor for being good at escaping, rarely rates a mention outside Western Australia.

What I really wanted to do was scream: 'I like to think I'm fairly bright, but what you see me doing on TV offers no proof of that. It just shows I've got a trivial mind, the mind of a pack rat.'

Being a pack rat was just how one learned, in those days. We could all recite the lists that schools flattened their students with when I was young.

One such list went: 'Dawson, Mackenzie, Isaacs, Suttor, Burdekin, Lynd, Mitchell, Gilbert, Norman, Flinders, Leichhardt, Roper, Alligator.'

I'll stop that uselessness there. I won't explain it, but learning it, and other such lists, was a task demanded of those in my age cohort.

I learned the list 60 years ago, and I can still recite it today, but only because I trot it out on occasion to demonstrate how stupid the list-learning sort of history teaching can be.

Once I became a science teacher, my memories of list-based teaching changed how I taught: my lessons had no lists in them.

Over time, I started shifting my interests more to history. As I got older, I poked around original sources, I enquired, I organised my pack rat collections in spreadsheets and I distilled books from them.

I found myself being called a historian, though in truth, I'm no historian.

I provide the raw material that lets my readers see what the history was. I give them the wherewithal to be historians.

How to write a history of Australia

When the National Library of Australia commissioned me to write a seriously large history of Australia for younger readers, the commission came with an excellent list of 120 required topics, to be packed into just 90,000 words.

I looked over the list and found two deficiencies that only a scientific mind would see, so I squeezed in our 1900s bubonic plague epidemic and colonial steam engines.

My histories treated science as just another human activity, but there were no rote learning tasks—no lists of names, dates, rivers or anything else.

I named names where it was appropriate, I gave dates where it helped to establish a perspective, explaining the reasons for things where I could, and underlining my puzzlement where I couldn't.

I offered the case of Daniel Matthew, a steam engineer who came to Australia to erect somebody else's steam engine.

When he was done, he established a sawmill near Sydney's Pymble, which was never driven by steam.

For at least 20 years, the steam engineer's mill was powered by animals, using a system designed to harness eight horses or eight pairs of bullocks.

I also offered the delightful saga of The Experiment, a paddle wheeler boat, driven by horses working a treadmill.

Used first as a shallow draft cargo boat in the Hunter River, the vessel later made it all the way to Sydney.

Not your usual bushrangers

At every point, I was forced to choose from a wealth of insights into how Australia grew and changed. I selected on the basis that the chosen item provoked further questions and made readers want to run and find out. That's what real education is about: it aims to open the mind.

Take Chinese bushranger Sam Poo. Or the first real bushranger, a man of unknown African parentage nicknamed Black Caesar.

Or the very first bushrangers, who ran away in early 1788 to Botany Bay, and asked French explorer Laperouse for a lift home in the first couple of weeks of settlement at Sydney Cove.

I told, too, of some of the hard luck cases, like Frederick Turner—a youth who came to Australia free but had his certificate of freedom rejected and was banged up in Goulburn Gaol, where his hair was cropped.

After a delay, Turner was marched to Sydney, and while the authorities could find no evidence that he was a runaway, they kept him locked up just in case.

When Turner at last found somebody to vouch for him, he was tossed out on the street, penniless, with few clothes—and no certificate of freedom!

When you hear tales like that, you begin to understand why the system made bushrangers.

Turner isn't in the usual history books, nor is Diver Fitzgerald, Governor King's official thief. Moondyne Joe, pardoned by the governor for being good at escaping, rarely rates a mention outside WA.

Those are not your usual bushrangers. Nor was Tom Hughes, the last of the bushrangers, who died after I was born.

The importance of making education interesting

Why do I bother, at an age when I should be sitting by the fire, reading a book?

It's because I prefer lighting fires to sitting by them. I want to slip new combustibles into the equation.

I want to beat back the simplistic herd of buffoons who would change the curriculum into a training course in market-ready skills. I want to expand the conversation.

Professional teachers know that wisdom, knowledge, understanding and erudition are all what they should be promoting, along with curiosity, culture, enthusiasm and a few other things.

Training matters, but only as a concomitant of doing interesting things.

To the simple critics, teaching is what they did once when they taught a young relative to ride a bicycle, or to swim, or to drive. There was no nuance, no finesse, no planning—you just step up to the mark and launch into your spiel.

People like that should not set agendas. Allowing ministers to dictate content policy is the equivalent of making somebody transport chief on the basis that he or she once saw Mulga Bill's bicycle on the next ridge on a stormy evening.

All you'll get is failed ferries, truculent trams, intransigent trains—and boring buses. Not to mention gridlock. The last thing we need as a nation is mental gridlock.

This is an edited extract of Peter Macinnis's Ockham's Razor talk.