When asked how she became an amateur historian, Williamstown’s Barb McNiell credits her school teachers with firing her interest in the topic.
“If you’d been to school in the 1950s you’d know why everyone hated Australian history, it was the most boring, tedious thing you could imagine,” she remarked with a backhander that Roger Federer would be proud of.
“It was just facts and figures like how many thousands of tonnes of wool we were exporting in 1850 and all this garbage,” Barb added before turning her ire on having to redraw maps by explorers such as Burke and Wills and Hume and Hovell.
“I thought it was stupid because the Aborigines had already been there. I hated it.”
Fortunately for her history teachers, Barbs’ disdain for their lessons made her 1963 discovery of the book ‘Scandals of Australia’s Strange Past’ by journalist and author George Blaikie a revelation.
“They were just so wonderfully bizarre and entertaining,” she said of Blaiklie’s stories which were originally published as columns in the Brisbane Courier Mail.
“I was totally hooked from then on.”
So hooked, that Barb’s fascination with Australian history has endured for more than 60 years, to the point where she is now emulating her hero George Blaiklie by writing a weekly newspaper column on it.
Barb’s first ‘Quirky History’ column appears in this week’s edition of the Star Weekly and like most of her writing, it focuses on Australia’s colonial era from 1788 to 1901.
“There were a lot of loonies running the show,” she laughed when asked about her fascination with this period.
“I think Britain got rid of all their mad people and sent them over here.”
However, Barb pointed out that in the long run, this had proven to be a good thing.
“We actually benefited from the convict era,” she said.
“It bred an egalitarianism which is still with us.”
As for what a lifetime reading and studying history had taught her?
“One thing history teaches you is that human beings do not change,” Barb said.
“Technology does, but the same human behaviours keep repeating in all their greatness and stupidity.”
