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Girt: The Unauthorised History of Australia Audiobook - Free from Audible

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Girt: The Unauthorised History of Australia Audiobook - Free from Audible
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Molloch on 28/11/2016 - 14:39 audible.com.au (2877 clicks)

Audible is giving away the audiobook of "Girt: The Unauthorised History of Australia" by David Hunt to celebrate the 2nd Birthday of Audible Australia (4.3/5 rating on Audible).

I was about to borrow this from my local library but it had a waiting list of 14 people, so I looked it up on Audible and noticed it is currently a freebie! Enjoy.

From the publisher's summary:

Girt. No word could better capture the essence of Australia….
In this hilarious history, David Hunt reveals the truth of Australia's past, from megafauna to Macquarie - the cock-ups and curiosities, the forgotten eccentrics and Eureka moments that have made us who we are.
Girt introduces forgotten heroes like Mary McLoghlin, transported for the crime of "felony of sock", and Trim the cat, who beat a French monkey to become the first animal to circumnavigate Australia.
It recounts the misfortunes of the escaped Irish convicts who set out to walk from Sydney to China, guided only by a hand-drawn paper compass, and explains the role of the coconut in Australia's only military coup.
Our nation's beginnings are steeped in the strange, the ridiculous, and the frankly bizarre. Girt proudly reclaims these stories for all of us.
Not to listen to it would be un-Australian.

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closed Comments

  • wfdTamar on 28/11/2016 - 15:01

    Good, thanks. I have a trial of Audible and got the Man Booker prize winner (The Sellout) thinking that has to be good - terrible. Hopefully this will be better.

    • Charleston on 28/11/2016 - 15:43
      +3

      Remember the Audible guarantee! If you go to your purchase history, you can return the book if you didn't like it and you'll get a token to buy another one, no questions asked.

      • wfdTamar on 28/11/2016 - 17:11
        +2

        Yup, found that. I wonder how many times you could do that before they chucked your off?

  • Eyespy on 28/11/2016 - 15:26
    +2

    I'm listening to it now. Funny and informative (and free).

  • Findo on 28/11/2016 - 15:30

    This book is the best. I have a signed copy from the author and briefly met him when I was placed in his daughter's classroom for four weeks.

  • Overtime2000 on 28/11/2016 - 15:31
    +1

    That's OP.

    I needed some girth.

    • BargainKen on 28/11/2016 - 18:16
      +4

      That's what she said

    • Scab on 29/11/2016 - 14:18

      Are you girt by semen?

  • Meconium on 28/11/2016 - 15:58
    -8

    Quite a good book, although I found the author's comments on Aborigines bordered on racism.

    • Duram on 28/11/2016 - 16:21
      -1

      Sigh, only the Aboriginal part or the part where he paid out all the other immigrants coming here as well?

      • UFO on 28/11/2016 - 17:24
        +1

        There we go….

        It took less than 2 hours from OP making the thread for someone to call the race card :(.

        Can't you just enjoy the book with a cup of concrete and harden the….

        *sigh

        • Untameable on 28/11/2016 - 20:18
          +2

          Let's read/hear/discuss what the book actually said before making judgements.

    • Untameable on 28/11/2016 - 20:18
      +1

      Is it possible you could post a specific paragraph or two?

      • Meconium on 29/11/2016 - 09:49
        +1

        The book is at home somewhere so I can't sorry, but the first couple of chapters are about the pre-European settlement of Australia. Hunt, like most Australians, isn't very familiar with Aboriginal practices and the history of events in the 60-odd thousand years before Captain Cook, so he glosses over this long period in a dismissive way. He implies that a whole lot of nothing happened in that time, and dehumanises Aborigines in the same way as has happened since European settlement. After all our collective efforts toward reconciliation, it's disappointing to see a reasonably intelligent writer perpetuate the same racist stereotypes we've heard all our lives, rather than probe a little bit more and enlighten us all in a positive way.

        I get that it's a light-hearted view of Australia's history, and yes he does joke about immigrants (who in almost all cases chose to come to Australia). I just couldn't help thinking while reading the bit about Aborigines that it was an obligatory inclusion that he didn't really want to research or address, so his attempt to glibly summarise the history of an entire continent's indigenous population came across as lazy and mean. Not a huge gripe, and I'm not personally offended by it, but I thought it was worth pointing out, downvotes or not.

        • Untameable on 01/12/2016 - 20:18
          +1

          Fair enough, thanks for the explanation.

          I don't tolerate anti-immigrantion stuff. How quickly people forget most of us are from our grandparents fleeing a war-torn Europe region during WW2 after fighting and losing everything.

    • Diji1 on 29/11/2016 - 01:58
      -3

      Well that'd make sense since Australia is a racist country.

  • robotdad on 28/11/2016 - 15:58
    +1

    Fantastic and hilarious book. Thoroughly recommended.

  • decryption on 28/11/2016 - 16:01
    +3

    I've read the dead tree version of this and loved it.

    The ABC also made a podcast based on the book too: https://soundcloud.com/rum-rebels-ratbags

  • Duram on 28/11/2016 - 16:22

    Great book, hilarious and informative.

  • Cap N on 28/11/2016 - 17:11
    +1

    What's the difference between Grit and True Grit?

    • UFO on 28/11/2016 - 17:24
      +3

      That it's Girt, not Grit ;).

    • stonkered on 29/11/2016 - 11:20
      -2

      One's an overrated coen brothers movie?

  • BeefBiryani on 28/11/2016 - 17:59
    +3

    Will buying this book change my amazon account from US to Australia?

  • EightImmortals on 28/11/2016 - 18:03
    +3

    uggh, I mean thanks for the deal but for those who, like me haven't used audible you have to download an app to play the file. Doesn't look like you can just download and play it on your normal regular music player. Unless I'm missing something? Which means I can't listen to in the car either.

    • Charleston on 28/11/2016 - 18:13

      You're right, needs to be through the Audible app.

      Out of interest, how come that means you can't listen to it in your car?

    • Untameable on 28/11/2016 - 20:24
      +1

      Audible can be played through iTunes (including iOS versions) like any other audiobook. You can also (if you really wanted to) burn from iTunes to CD, and then re-import it as an MP3.

      There's also Audible Manager which apparently deploys the DRM plugin to an apparently wide variety of USB MP3 players (though probably not your car).

      I used to download the file, import into iTunes, copy to my phone, and then play that way over bluetooth in the car. Now I just use their app and bluetooth in the car.

      • EightImmortals on 28/11/2016 - 20:36
        +2

        Thanks for that. I refuse to use iTunes too. :)

    • SteveM on 29/11/2016 - 18:07

      You can log into your audible account from a computer and download your audio books as mp3 files from there, then play them however you like

  • Ryk on 28/11/2016 - 18:10
    +2

    "Hello ! To complete your purchase, we just need to confirm your address." hello, it's an audio download, is it not? why do they need an address?
    Ok, dodgy up an address, same as the email address they have. jeez.

    • malouphix on 28/11/2016 - 20:45
      +1

      I entered my address as:

      Why do you need my address for an Audio Book?

    • a22andrew on 28/11/2016 - 23:06
      +2

      2 Balls Crt, Tieeminaknot.

  • Silicon Wizardry on 28/11/2016 - 18:44
    +2

    This is a great book - I went to uni with Dave, he's a great bloke too

  • dm01 on 29/11/2016 - 00:19

    Cheers, OP!

  • ring of fire on 29/11/2016 - 01:22

    Girt….hehe. Always reminds me of Adam Hills rendition of the national anthem (for the uninitiated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiEycVMKoJo)

  • [Deactivated] on 29/11/2016 - 10:23
    -5

    If it omits talking about the war and genocide committed by European invaders, then it's not worth free

    • INFIDEL on 29/11/2016 - 12:30
      +3

      I think your comment that these serious issues be included in a humorous work is ill-conceived. But I understand your intention.

      The publisher's summary describes this as a hilarious history - "The Unauthorised History of Australia" as in the title. So it's not an attempt at a complete or serious history. (I downloaded it for a laugh, so am yet to read it.)

      As most would realise, when writing for humour - many things are given different emphasis or left out. That's little different to most history books though. I don't think many would or should find the early atrocities funny.

      It's important to acknowledge the past wrongs and help bring about healing and change. But, its also good to be able to have a laugh about the strange & often funny history of this land😯

      • [Deactivated] on 30/11/2016 - 09:43
        -3

        Thank you for your civilised answer. I think any book that talks about the history of Australia, hilarious or not needs to talk about what white colonizers have done and still do to indigenous Australians, otherwise it's not a history book, it's a story book

    • andy911 on 29/11/2016 - 13:27
      -2

      So you can't be bothered understanding what the book is about, but you want to lecture us all…
      Why, don't you just stick to your daytime job of making up fake news sites for Trump.

  • ashaman on 29/11/2016 - 12:38
    +1

    Nice find - is there any way to see all current free books on Audible, or do you just have to happen upon them?

  • FUZHA on 29/11/2016 - 14:17
    +1

    "Indonesian fishermen have been coming to Australia in search of …" etc
    Now we burn their boats, this is called progress" ;-) Epic!

    Very good find OP, thank you. Author of the book himself presents the audio version and he is bloody good at it.

    • INFIDEL on 29/11/2016 - 18:09
      +2

      Yes - don't tell our Border Force™ that Indonesians have been coming to the land we now call Australia from around 1000 years ago, up until relatively recently. They planted trees here to harvest on their returns, & intermarried. (I wonder if the current "Stop the Boats" laws can be made retrospective??)

      And the first "Aussie" reportedly to travel to Singapore & South East Asia was an aborigine, with these Makassan boat people. Probably visited Bali too, hundreds of years before it became popular😀

      All long before "Capt" (he became a Captain afterwards) Cookie popped by and "Discovered" the East Coast. In 2006, (400th anniversary of European mapping of Australia) I saw maps & globes from the 1600's in the Netherlands - with all but that East Coast drawn in.

      And the "noble aborigines" in my school books (who I understood to only be in the past), were the same people we shooed off the oval to play cricket in Brisbane. How could I have been so blind, rather believing what I was taught to be true? (But then, my relatives were the publishers of those books!!)

      Must read what the author says about these slight differences in history.

      Much history I was taught in school turned out to be… wrong😯

  • Bronnie on 29/11/2016 - 16:37
    +1

    Didn't work for me. It apparently downloaded the book to my mobile,
    but required me to update (ie pay for) my Audible membership in order to access the "free" book. If I pay for the Audible membership, it includes 1 free book a month anyway. Disappointed

    • andy911 on 29/11/2016 - 17:08

      The latest audible app should be a free download from appstore/equiv.
      Otherwise, I figure you should be able to sign-up get what you want and cancel membership before they start billing you monthly.

    • INFIDEL on 29/11/2016 - 17:24

      I last used the Audible membership, free on .au site - in 2010. (Book added to my old audible .au account)

      But have latest Android app on phone, after recent expired 3 month free Prime deal on UK site.

      Opened app, signed into old audible.au account - this free book is ready to be downloaded. No current membership needed.

  • gbak17 on 30/11/2016 - 22:38

    I only see free with 30 day trial membership, otherwise $24.08.

    • daydream on 03/12/2016 - 22:18

      Me too. Has it expired OP?

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