Issue link: https://viewer.e-digitaleditions.com/i/103334
historyfocus David Hill uncovers the truth about some of the bad boys of Australian history in his latest book, The Great Race, which explores the battle between the British and the French to complete the map of Australia, writes Simone Henderson-Smart. A pirate who was a rapist and a terrible rogue, and whose story inspired famous novelists, is the unlikely hero of a new book about the historical quest to map the continent of Australia. The Great Race is the latest work by David Hill, a man whose education, by his own admission, was "rather a write-off", but whose list of accomplishments is quite extraordinary. He has been chairman and managing director of the ABC, chairman of the Australian Football Association, chief executive and director of the State Rail Authority NSW, chairman of Sydney Water Corporation and chairman of CREATE, a national organisation that represents the interests of young people and children in institutional care. These days he is an author and has just published his fourth book on Australian history. It's a subject he finds fascinating. "It's a great story, a great narrative. When I talk about the books I've written, I don't say they're history – they're part of the Australian story," David explains. The stories he uncovers are remarkable, though most are missing from our history books. While researching the First Fleet's voyage to Australia for his book, 1788, David came across the extraordinary tale of the race to create the first map of Australia. "What I found amazing while I was researching and writing the book was that when they sent Arthur Phillip and 1,500 people to establish the first convict colony, they didn't know if the east coast of Australia, called New South Wales, and the west coast, called New Holland, were part of the same landmass or not," David says. "I'd never seen or heard that referred to anywhere before, so that's what attracted me: that at the time of British settlement of Australia they didn't know if it was one landmass or two. I thought, 'So, when did they find out?' " David spent a year researching full-time to uncover the forgotten story that forms the basis of his latest book, The Great Race. He explains that 14 years after the British settled Australia, the French and the English both sent expeditions on a quest to chart the "unknown coast", which was "mostly a large slab of South Australia from current-day Ceduna to roughly the Victorian border". The British sent Matthew Flinders nine months after the French had farewelled Nicolas Baudin. David's research was made difficult by the lack of information about the French explorers. "The French research material isn't as readily available as the English," David explains. "Flinders, Cook and Bligh, who are all players in the story, wrote very detailed accounts. But in the case of the French, apart from Bougainville, all of the others died before getting back to France. The accounts of their voyages were then left to others, so you have to allow for terrible distortions and prejudices. For example, with the Baudin expedition, "At the time of British settlement of Australia they didn't know if it was one landmass or two. I thought, 'So, when did they find out?' " 80