An endorsement from the back cover of Tim Flannery's The Birth of Melbourne:

'Fascinating...lifts the curtain on the respectable facade of Marvellous Melbourne to reveal it as more of a boom-and-bust frontier town...a tale of dispossession, slaughter and environmental destruction inflicted so swiftly through greed and mismanagement that it almost beggars belief. It is a story of moral decay and sordid criminality.'

At this point you're nodding gravely: dispossession, slaughter, sordid criminality — sounds about right for early Australian history. But then you notice the byline:

Sydney Morning Herald

And suddenly the whole preceding paragraph looks like two scruffy boys in a trenchcoat, one sitting on the other's shoulders so as to imitate an adult, testifying gravely in the witness box that Bugs O'Leary did indeed steal Old Lady McCourt's prize petunias.