A Concise History of Australia

Front Cover
Cambridge University Press, 1999 - History - 320 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 describes how they 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. Now, with the realisation that colonisation began with invasion, present-day Australians are - more than ever before - coming to terms with their past and recognising the need to redefine and reposition Australia in a changing world. This is the most up-to-date single-volume Australian history available.
 

Contents

Beginnings
1
Newcomers c 16001792
17
Coercion 17931821
36
Emancipation 18221850
54
In thrall to progress 18511888
86
National reconstruction 18891913
122
Sacrifice 19141945
155
Golden age 19461974
196
Reinventing Australia 19751999
236
What next?
274
Sources of quotations
281
Guide to further reading
293
Index
306
Copyright

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About the author (1999)

Stuart Forbes Macintyre was born on April 21, 1947 in Melbourne, Australia. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Melbourne, his Master of Arts from Monash University and his PhD for the University of Cambridge. He is a historian and a former Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. His awards include Premier of Victoria's Literary Award for Australian Studies (1986), Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (1987), Redmond Barry Award (1997), The Age Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award (1998)for his book The Reds, Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (1999), Premier of New South Wales' Australian History Prize (2004)for the History Wars (co-written with Anna Clark), Officer of the Order of Australia (2011), and the Ernest Scott Prize (2016) for his book Australia's Boldest Experiment: War and Reconstruction in the 1940s, and the Premier New South Wales' Australian History Prize (2016) for Australia's Boldest Experiment.

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