MY PAGE

Since I went to all the effort of putting this DVD Rom together, I decided it was only fair to include a page of info about why I decided to do all this work without making a cent out of it.

Why did I write this guide?

The guide gradually grew over time from something aimed at tourism, to a fairly in depth historical look at W.A. As I researched information for the guide I came across interesting snippets of information that I felt were worth following up. This all led to a guide that is more or less about everything West Australian including weather, fish, mythical creatures, ghosts, flowers, important people, towns and localities and anything else that looked remotely interesting.

To this point in time (April 2010) I have had no financial support from either companies or government - despite trying to get help from various sources. Sadly it looks as though no-one is all that interested in our history, as almost all my letters have been met with a wall of stony silence.

I continue to work on the guide both because I am now pretty much obsessed with working on it and because I don't really have anything else useful to do and I am not the sort of person who can just sit around 'watching the grass grow'.

Academic historians will no doubt dismiss the guide as it is not technically written. References are not individually noted and this was a deliberate decision right from the start. The purpose of this guide is to get more people interested in finding out about West Australian history and to that end I did not want a series of individual references cluttering up the pages. There is a substantial reading list and it was from the sources listed there, that almost all this information was gathered.

A concerted effort has been made to get the facts right, but history is often distorted by the agenda of those who write it. Although historians should write un-emotionally about the subjects they choose, it is very hard to learn about things like the suicide of C.Y. O'Connor and not be made both sad and angry at how he was treated.

Why do I think history is important? Well to be honest I never really thought that history as a subject was all that important. At school I regarded it as a nuisance subject that I just had to get through. I was sure it would mean nothing to me in the real world and guess what? I was right! Unless you intend to be an academic historian you can live your whole life without ever knowing who was the first Governor of the state, or who first found gold, but history is something more than mere facts. Everyone living today has ancestors and those ancestors had lives just like us. Knowing something about their story adds something to ours. As I researched this material I found something else, history can be really interesting too. Yes I know lots and LOTS of it can be very boring, but there are hidden jewels that are worth seeking out and there is great satisfaction in finding the rare and interesting bits. History is like a jigsaw with pieces hidden all over the place and putting together a more complete picture was far more interesting than I ever thought possible.

I hope this guide will inspire at least a few people to want to find out more about our collective story.

Unfortunately my health has been on a downward spiral for a few years and I am no longer able to travel and research this guide as I once did. Even so I have been lucky enough to travel around Australia for a number of years and for anyone who is interested, the journals of these travels are included in the pages listed below.