It had been a frustrating year pursuing a dead man. He had lived an extraordinary life but in death William Buckley was an elusive, maddening ghost. Unable to read or write, he had left few traces of his existence. At night he haunted my dreams. By day he taunted me with his silence.

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Then, one cold Hobart morning, the ghost came to life. It only took one touch to be smitten. Not just with Buckley, but with history.

I was writing a book about Buckley, an escaped English convict who lived among the Wadawurrung people of southern Australia for more than three decades. His story was riveting, the telling of it initially seemed straightforward.

Buckley was a bricklayer and British soldier who'd fought against Napoleon. Originally sentenced to death for stealing a small piece of cloth, he'd been transported to a bleak prison colony in Australia before staging a daring escape. A towering 6'6" - a giant in the early 1800s - he eventually laid Melbourne's first foundational stone.

But the illiterate rarely get a say about the past. Months of wading through turgid 19th century journals, penned in the "Era of Windbags" by authors who hurled commas at pages like darts, had shone little light on Buckley's character, much less his thoughts.

And then I stumbled across a marriage certificate from 1853 in a Tasmanian archive. A reverend had asked Buckley to leave his mark. You could tell he was unfamiliar with a quill, pressing it too hard into the parchment. The ink bled. The only written record he would leave - a simple cross - survived as a dried blot.

I stared at the paper. Buckley had touched this. The ghost suddenly vanished, a living man took his place, and I began to understand why the dead can have such a powerful hold over the living.

History, a school subject that bored and tormented so many of us, is now cool.

Thousands of history buffs recently paid good money to sit in a London theatre and hear two middle-aged British historians talk about the past. A year earlier those same men - Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook - sold out the Royal Albert Hall. Their podcast, "The Rest Is History", is downloaded more than 20 million times a month. Adoring crowds treat them like rock stars.

Genealogy is now a global obsession, with users of family history websites generating hundreds of millions of family trees. Historical fiction remains a publishing phenomenon. One in three Australians visited a museum last year, according to the ABS. Streaming services endlessly exhume dead kings and forgotten civilisations.

Why now? Surely this booming interest is less about the past and more about our growing unease with the present and the future.

In the past decade we've endured a global........

© Canberra Times