A Concise History of Australia

Front Cover
Cambridge University Press, Aug 24, 2004 - History - 342 pages
Australia is the last continent to be settled by Europeans, but it also sustains a people and a culture tens of thousands of years old. For much of the past 200 years the newcomers have sought to replace the old with the new. This book tells how they imposed themselves on the land, and brought technology, institutions and ideas to make it their own. It relates the advance from penal colony to a prosperous free nation and illustrates how, in a nation created by waves of newcomers, the search for binding traditions has long been frustrated by the feeling of rootlessness. This revised edition incorporates the most recent historical research and contemporary historical debates on frontier violence between European settlers and Aborigines and the Stolen Generations. It covers the Sydney Olympics, the refugee crisis and the 'Pacific solution'. More than ever before, Australians draw on the past to understand their future.
 

Contents

Beginnings
Newcomers c 16001792
8
Coercion 17931821
26
Emancipation 18221850
44
In thrall to progress 18511888
77
National reconstruction 18891913
113
Sacrifice 19141945
148
Golden age 19461974
191
Reinventing Australia 19752004
234
What next?
283
Sources of quotations
290
Guide to further reading
306
Index
319
Copyright

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About the author (2004)

Stuart Macintyre has been the Ernest Scott Professor of History at the University of Melbourne since 1990 and is a former president of the Australian Historical Association. His books include The Oxford History of Australia, Volume 4 (1986), A Colonial Liberalism (1991) and A History for a Nation (1994), and more recently, The History Wars (2003). Since 1999 he has been Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne.

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