Among all those legendary bushrangers, heroic explorers, genius inventors and upstanding politicians in Australian history, aren’t there some duds in the pack? Of course there are! Paul Stafford has rounded up all the dingbats, dropkicks and disasters in our glorious past. All together now, let us say to them . . . ‘YOU’RE HISTORY, MATE!’ Which explorer claimed to have found an enormous reef of gold then lost it again (and lost himself in the process)? Heard about the men who sold their shares in BHP just days before the mineral discovery that made it the richest mine in history? Surely it can’t be true that one of our politicians drank a glass of herbicide to prove it wasn’t poisonous? And how did the police catch the ugliest, least successful and unluckiest colonial bushranger you could ever hope to find? Learn about some of the lesser-known episodes buried in our history and what life was really like in colonial Australia, right through to the 1920s and beyond.