Four Corners - 31/07/2006: Junk History
Junk History
Reporter: Quentin McDermott
Broadcast: 31/07/2006
Four Corners often explores extravagant claims and tall tales. Rarely though does it meet a character quite as colourful as author Gavin Menzies.
Menzies, an elderly Englishman with an easy charm, has written a thick best-selling volume called "1421 - The Year China Discovered the World". It’s an alternative history of world discovery centred on Zheng He, a celebrated Chinese mariner. Zheng He was real and remarkable – but perhaps not as remarkable as Menzies claims, for he suggests that the fifteenth century eunuch admiral and his captains set out on an enormous undocumented voyage. Menzies tells us that Zheng He’s giant junks circumnavigated the world , discovering Australia, New Zealand, the Americas, and Antarctica. His fleets supposedly left settlers and artefacts wherever they made landfall. If true this makes Zheng He and his sailors greater explorers than Columbus, Cook and Magellan combined.
Not surprisingly Menzies’ book appeals to Chinese pride. In 2003 Chinese President Hu Jintao, addressing a joint sitting of the Australian Parliament, repeated the claim that the Chinese had discovered and settled Australia three centuries before Captain Cook.
"1421" has sold over a million copies. Last year it was the second largest selling history title in Australia. Gavin Menzies has lectured at Melbourne University and is invited to attend conferences around the world.
Unfortunately, reporter Quentin McDermott points out, his book has a credibility problem. Professional historians label it naïve scholarship or worse, straight-out fabrication. Menzies writes, amongst other things, that New Zealand Maori are not Polynesians but a cross breed of Chinese concubines and Melanesians. The evidence for this, and many similar claims, is tissue thin.
So was "1421" an eccentric and fluky publishing success? Well no. Junk History tells how Menzies, his agent, his PR company and publisher set out to milk a public thirsty for revisionist history. Menzies hired professional spin-doctors to create hype about a half formed idea. Transworld, which also publishes Dan Brown’s "Da Vinci Code", paid Menzies, an untested first time writer, a half million pound advance. The book was finished by a team of editors and a ghost writer. Revisionism is big business.
Unlike "The Da Vinci Code", "1421" claims to be a work of fact. For all that, it appears to have involved little fact checking and next-to-no academic scrutiny. Yet as we see in the program Menzies, his publisher and agent are quite unapologetic. They have cracked the big time.
This is not just a story about ones man’s wild theory. It is a parable of modern popular culture, a tale about intellectual chutzpah and about a publishing industry that knows how to extract profit from a public which wants to thumb its nose at the dry though documented history taught at school.
"Junk History" - on Four Corners, 8.30 pm Monday 31 July, ABC TV.
@ desperate Chinese Dragon.
