If, like me, you’ve been fascinated by the incredible true stories of Bennelong, Arthur Phillip, William Bligh and Lachlan Macquarie in the previous books in this series, and you’ve been bewitched by Bern Emmerichs’s unique illustrations, then you won’t be able to resist M is for Mutiny.

This is quite a different book as it isn’t about a particular famous person. It is instead an alphabetical walk through our history. The title of the first page is ‘A is for Acknowledgement to Country’. It pays respects to the traditional owners of the land on which the book was written and illustrated. B is for Banks (that’s Joseph Banks, who thought bananas were ‘slimy’), C is for Cook and D is for Discovery, where we are told very clearly that ‘While Europeans often claim they discovered Australia, they didn’t. The first people arrived here as many as 100 000 years before them.’

There are so many interesting and often macabre snippets of information, such as the K for Kangaroo page, where we find out that Governor Macquarie took a shipload of kangaroos to give away as gifts when he returned to England. And on the X for eXtinct page, the author tells us that the Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, was hunted from the Australian mainland by dingoes, which came from Indonesia about 4000 years ago.

A great book for younger readers who love quirky information.

Reviewed by Merle Morcom
Age guide 8+