If you wanna read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. That book’ll fuckin’ knock you on your arse.

– Will Hunting

Remember this scene from Good Will Hunting? Matt Damon dazzles as the smart-arse genius kid from the shitty part of town wreaking havoc on the status quo by fucking with the sensibilities of the rich and educated elite.

Damon has a point when he goes on about these people, uppity tertiary-educated types, reading the wrong books. There’s a sense that this rough, edgy, teen-prodigy reveals a great truth of the world. There exists a secret history: one that those who benefit most from the way things are do not want you, the average battler, to know.

But even as Damon reveals this truth, there is an uneasiness about how it is delivered. Sat here, typing this up, staring out over the vast expanse of the Marlborough plain stretching west as far as the eye can see before hitting the mountains, I can’t help but think that surely there is something here and now that can be used as a reference point for unanswered and uneasy questions. I mean, I’ve read Zinn’s book, and yeah, it’s awesome. But is there not a People’s History of Australia? How do I get my hands on the right books for me, for here, for now?

I’ve been looking for the right books for over a decade and when it comes to making sense of the world from the vantage point of our place in it, here and now, there ain’t much to choose from. It is a bloody great shame that we have to rely on critical insights about other places and times to inform our own questioning of our reality. So fuck it, I say, let’s get cracking on making our own.

One of the ongoing projects that we hope to launch with this site is to create a People’s History of Australia beginning with right here in God’s country, central Queensland. How do we set about understanding the world and our place in it? Where and how do we start?