History is a strange and slippery thing, full of truths, half-truths, and strange inexplicable seeming events.

And so it is when you watch other people’s tv.

Sometimes it turns out what you think you know isn’t quite true.

For example, we’ve recently been watching a Czech TV drama on Prime – The Prague mysteries.

We started watching it simply because we have this strange addiction to foreign language cop shows, but this one is something more.

A costume drama, set in the early years of an independent Czechoslovakia after the dissolution of the Austro Hungarian empire it’s simply a series of detective mysteries linked by some running threads – sort of a Czech version of Vera but set in the early 1920’s.

People still have photographs of Franz-Joseph and Karl in their houses even if these days they keep them out of sight at the back of a cabinet.

And there are references to the first world war – not Britain’s war or even Germany’s but to Austria Hungary’s war – the bitter war of attrition fought in the Alps against Italy, the horrors of the eastern front, returning PoWs from Russia who have somehow survived the chaos of the revolution and subsequent civil war to return home convinced Bolsheviks.

There’s an episode where a character based loosely on Nikola Tesla, but infinitely less successful, shoots his boss with a Montenegrin Gasser – no, I didn’t know either, but it’s a revolver based on a nineteenth century design for the Austro Hungarian cavalry, that found favour in Montenegro, which at that time was a wild place, riven by vendettas, that had emerged out of the wreck of the Ottoman and Venetian empires.

But of course, what this reminds us is that there are multiple understandings of history.

In Australia, one of our founding myths is based around the ANZACs and Gallipoli, even though many more Australians died on the Western Front – and some, like J’s grandfather, had the misfortune to be wounded at Gallipoli and then be redeployed to France after they recovered.

Which is why J had an Australian grandfather, but an English grandmother, and indirectly why her mother, even though she had lived in Australia as a little girl, went to school in England – and of course before 1949 it didn’t really matter – there were no Australian citizens, only British subjects living in Australia.

But, if you’re Czech, it’s the disaster of the war in the east and the winter war, and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the emergence of the new successor states, all trying to forge a separate identity.

And actually, these stories are not really separate – in Beechworth, outside of the RSL we have a Krupp 75mm gun that was manufactured in Essen in 1904 for the Romanian army, but which was captured by the Light Horse in what was then Palestine …