A History of Australia, Volume 6

"All through this volume runs a sense of Australian uncertainty over the period 1916-1935: were Australians a people with their own country, their own responsibilities, their own history to make? Or were they essentially Britons, relocated merely by some chance in a far corner of the globe? Was it their destiny to look forward bravely to an unknown future, or to look backwards on a fading imperial past? Henry Lawson put to them the choice they had - between "the Old Dead Tree" and "the Young Tree Green"."