UPDATE: For ordering information, including a PayPal option, go here.

Regular readers of this blog may recall that I was writing a book called The Slab. If you’re not a regular reader, I banged on about it here and here.

Well, that book is well and truly finished and available for sale around the place (for more info on where to get your hands on a copy check out the bottom of this post). It’s not just a book about beer in Australia, it’s a book about Australia as well. People who have read early copies have said they learned stuff about our country they never knew before. But just because it’s history doesn’t mean it’s dry. I’ve aimed to make it as interesting as I can.

If you don’t believe me, here’s what a few other people had to say about The Slab.

John Birmingham (author of Leviathan and He Died With a Felafel in His Hand): History as it should be written. With beer. About beer. Crisp. Refreshing. Won’t cause bloat.”

David Hunt (author of Girt and True Girt): “The Slab is a full-bodied book, with a fruity aftertaste and a nose that carries the slightest hint of sawdust and vomit. I suggest you XXXX it.”

James Smith (from the Crafty Pint): “The Slab is less a historical document, more a rollicking ride through a bizarrely untapped part of an openly beer worshipping nation’s past. That’s not to say you won’t learn anything; you will – and about much more than beer. But you’ll also walk away infused with the sheer joy that Glen has clearly poured into every – and I mean every – page.”

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Okay, maybe by now you’re interested enough to throw some money at me to get a book. But wait, here’s an excerpt from the introduction to give you a taste of what the book’s like.

“Us Australians love to think of ourselves as a nation that has forever been one of the big beer drinkers. One that ranks in the top five beer-drinking nations on Earth every single time whoever it is compiles one of those lists.

“We know Bob Hawke more for his record-setting talents with a yard of ale than for anything he did in his eight years leading the country. The man himself acknowledged this in his autobiography – ‘This feat was to endear me to some of my fellow Australians more than anything else I ever achieved’. Just dwell on that for a second – he was the leader of the country for eight years and he had to resign himself to be well-known for success at drinking beer from a glass that these days is only ever used at 21 st birthday parties.

“When Hawkey skulls a beer at the cricket – which he has done at least three times according to YouTube – we figure it can’t get more ‘Aussie’ than that. Except when he does it at the urging of a crowd of people dressed up like Richie Benaud – YouTube again. These days, other Australian politicians know that, if they want to be more popular, they make sure they stage at least one media opp in a pub so they can be seen drinking a beer. And a proper beer, out of a schooner glass – Prime Minister Tony Abbott copped a bit when he was seen drinking a middy. Come on, man, go big or go home.

“And, David Boon, my God do we love David Boon. But we love him more for being an opener of beers than an opener of the batting order. We remember him most for drinking a crapload of beers on the flight from Australia to England (though, to be fair, the man himself has never admitted to it). Later, a miniature talking version of Boony helped Carlton and United sell a truckload of VB slabs (even though it wasn’t actually Boony’s voice drinkers heard). We love him so much he appears in three separate chapters of this book.

“And, while there seem to be conflicting schools of thought on whether his nickname is spelt ‘Boony’ or ‘Boonie’, I’ve gone with the former throughout The Slab. For no reason other than I think it looks much better in print.

“Yep, us Aussies, jeez we love a beer. Beer is tops, right? But here’s the thing. This idea we have that we’re a nation of beer lovers and have always been like that? It’s a con – a fib we’ve let ourselves believe because, for some strange reason, we think it’s great to be seen as a nation of drunks. Aside from a decade or two in the 20th century we’ve never been one for knocking back slabs of beer (sure, there was a decade or two after the First Fleet’s arrival when a lot of people seemed to be tanked a lot of the time, but that was on spirits, not beer). And we haven’t been among the world’s biggest beer-drinking countries for ages.

“While the story goes that Governor Arthur Phillip toasted the health of the colony of Sydney with a dark beer called porter on January 26, 1788 – and as we shall see in Chapter Two, that seems doubtful – beer wasn’t that big a deal in the early decades of the colony. The drink of choice was wine or rum, because it travelled so much better than beer. The fact that, on a volume basis, rum allowed more people to get drunk than beer didn’t hurt either. Spirits, to a large degree, were also used as a surrogate currency in the colony’s early days.”