Robert Macklin

Your new book, Hume. Our Greatest Explorer, is a gripping read for history buffs and non-history buffs alike. Every child educated in Australia learns the name Hume but most of us don’t know much more than the fact that he and Hovell explored the interior of this country. What initially drew you to the subject of Hamilton Hume?

I have been fascinated and frustrated by Australian history ever since school and university days. Fascinated because it’s about who we are; and frustrated because as taught it’s dry as dust and seen only from a British point of view – one where the Aboriginal people are treated as though they have no rights (and deserve none), the convicts are treated as slaves (which is their rightful due) and the British governors and landed gentry are paragons of virtue. In other words, our true history has been hidden from us.

My special interest in Hamilton Hume derived from a remarkable coincidence – my wife’s father, one Bob Webster, was a lovely bloke and we became very close. He was an amateur historian, a bush auctioneer from the Riverina who came to Canberra as the first director of L.J. Hooker. And when he retired in the late 1970’s he developed a fascination for Hamilton Hume and did a lot of basic research. His work could not find a commercial publisher – it was more a monograph than a book – and we published it as a family. But it was more than 20 years after he died that my own writing reached the point where I wanted to explore Hamilton Hume’s story as part of the wider history of our first 80 years as a colony. Bob’s research provided the start point.

Hume. Our Greatest Explorer is more than a history. It takes us on the journey with Hume and his party. As a writer, how do you bridge the chasm between writing academic history and writing a good story?

I came to it with the experience of 30 years as an active journalist at The Courier-Mail, The Age, The Bulletin and as Associate Editor of The Canberra Times. But also I have written four novels; and I have tried to combine techniques gained from both forms. History should not be the mere recitation of facts. In our case, it is a remarkable saga filled with wonderfully memorable characters in an exotic and fascinating setting. It absolutely demands the best of the author. It deserves to be presented accurately, and as an engrossing story at the same time.

This book seems to have an agenda; that of putting the story right. Is that part of what you set out to do?

Yes, I am angry that for all this time we have been misled into seeing ourselves simply as some kind of English offshoot in an alien land. I was born in Brisbane but I spent some of my most formative years in the bush, as a jackaroo and then as a rouseabout in the Western Queensland shearing sheds before returning to university and taking a cadetship on the Courier-Mail. I love the land as my own; and I met Aboriginal people in the bush and was drawn to them; we shared the sense that we belonged to the land rather than the other way around. And I think that until we accept this attitude of uniqueness, we will not be able to make the good decisions necessary to find our proper place in the Asia-Pacific region and the world.

You have an impressive list of award winning publications, nineteen, if I am correct. All of them are inspired history, especially Australian history. How important is it that we have a deeper connection with our history?

It’s vital. We must be able to understand the colonial attitudes of the British who first came here with their embrace of notions of class and race that are (or should be) repugnant to all Australians. They are certainly no part of the Aboriginal way. Indeed, those attitudes prevented us from respecting and embracing the knowledge that the Aboriginal people had accumulated over 50 millennia in living well on this great land.

And I believe that we must do two things to draw a line under those mistakes. First we must declare ourselves a republic and cut those ties to an aristocracy based on class. And then we must hold a Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the history of Aboriginal treatment so that everyone knows what really happened in the Frontier Wars and thereafter. Only then can we honorably declare ourselves a true nation as part of the Asia-Pacific continuum.

You graduated in screen writing and you have also written several screen and television plays. This seems like an interesting pathway. Can you tell us something about your journey as a writer?

When I write I think in pictures and this lends itself to screenwriting. In 1980 I won a fellowship to the Australian Film and Television School, based on the documentaries I had written and produced in 33 countries from Afghanistan to Western Samoa. Since then I have written a number of Feature film screenplays but my writing of books has prevented me from devoting myself to getting them produced. However, next year I plan to concentrate wholly on movies and television.

Finally, can you tell us what you like to do on your days off, if you have any?

I write every day, but when I’m not writing I love going to the movies and I love to play golf and spend time with my wife and family, especially my two sons and their daughters who are five, six and seven. We have a beach house at Tuross Head on the south coast of NSW and its beauty refreshes and sustains me. I walk on the beach.