Yes, we know that for Morrison Captain Cook is a hero, in the same simple, pre-pubescent way in which boys have hero-worshipped Biggles or Superman, in which Young Liberal boys have looked up to Sir Robert Menzies.

But we knew that he, the PM, was just being a shameful ignoramus.

How different it would be/will be when and if Donald Trump makes an equivalently inflated claim about an achievement of a famous American he admires. When/if this happens (he might for example claim that Davy Crockett circumnavigated America in a canoe, that Ronald Reagan was the first man to climb Everest) we will assume, reasonably, that Trump does know better but is simply lying.

Believe me when I tell you that Donald Trump hardly knows how to tell the truth. By late-January (the most recent figures released) The Washington Post Fact Checker database said he had made 7,645 “false or misleading claims” since taking office. There have been some individual days where he’s uttered more than 100 fibs.

The fact checkers’ draining Trump-work is well-reported in The Guardian’s recent piece The 'exhausting' work of factcheckers who track Trump's barrage of lies.

It emerges that lots of them are repeat fibs so that for example he has trumpeted at last 125 times that his government has passed “the biggest tax cuts in the history of our country” when this simply isn’t true.

Last October alone in an orgy of fibbing (how come his presidential pants didn’t catch fire?) the Post Fact Checker found him saying 1,200 things that were false or misleading.

“Reporters have noticed another Trump trait,” The Guardian points out, “his tendency to make something up, then embellish his own lie each time he repeats it.”

So for example he will lie-announce that a steel corporation is opening six new plants due to his policies then lie-announce later, that it’s seven, then eight plants.

What strange, reality-distorting times these must be for those millions of Americans who are straight arrows, living every day according to the truth as they understand it. How wobbly the concrete and the clay beneath our feet becomes when truth and facts count for nothing.

But back to honest Australia where the unforced error of the PM’s display of ignorance was depressing but where some of the ridicule it attracted made one proud of the quality of Australian ridicule.

Some commentators have scoffed that we shouldn’t expect historical accuracy from someone, Morrison, who as a credulous Christian creationist believes that the World was created in a week and that we are all descended from those Young Liberal prototypes Adam and Eve.

Other wits launched a crowdfunding campaign to build and to crew an authentic replica of a pirate ship of the same era as Cook’s replicated Endeavour. The pirate ship, treating the Endeavour as the invader’s vessel some believe it was, would chase it along the coast and sink it.

Others have chortled that Morrison, somehow managing our continent’s borders in 1770, and in our own times so recently a minister for immigration with a ruthless enthusiasm for turning away boatloads of strangers, would never have let Cook and his Endeavour within cooee of our sovereign shores.

Perhaps, though, there is an attractive, fictional quality about historical distortions like our PM’s Cook-circumnavigation story. Once one relaxes the shackles of fact and truths (as a journalist I always found truth-telling a tyranny that bullied my sensitive, poetic nature) all sorts of colourful improvements become possible.

So for example we find a sporting Mary MacKillop making history as a pioneer for her athletic gender. Selected entirely on merit (a batter and leg-spin bowler) she is an indispensable member of Don Bradman’s team that tours England in 1948. A six she hits at the Oval bounces off the helmet of Oliver Cromwell (stunning him) only to be caught (one-handed) by William Shakespeare.

By 1948 Bradman is world-famous and so while he is nearby in England he is sought out by the great portrait painter Rembrandt, anxious to portray him. Bradman’s hitherto mysterious absence from the tour match against Somerset is now known to have been because he, Bradman, beetled over to Amsterdam to sit for Rembrandt. The resulting portrait, once thought to be of a burgher, Maerten Soolman, but obviously The Don once you know who and what you are looking for (the cricket bat is a giveaway!) hangs today in Amsterdam’s great Rijksmuseum and is an object of pilgrimage for all Australians visiting Holland.

Elsewhere in Australian history, Dame Joan Sutherland, abducted by the audacious Kelly Gang during their hold-up of the box office at the Sydney Opera House, turns out to have a civilising impact on these brigands. Fond of them, at their camp fires at night she brings these sensitive bandits to tears with her warbles of sentimental ballads.

They release La Stupenda to resume her stellar career. Softened and sensitised by knowing her the Kelly Gang gives up its brigandage. Dedicated now to Doing Good, the gang goes in search of the lost Burke and Wills and, using drones, finds them and brings them safely home to Canberra.

Australia! We’ve so much to faithfully re-enact!