The Europeans in Australia: Democracy

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Oxford University Press, 1997 - History - 440 pages
V. 1. In the first volume of his history of Australia, Alan Atkinson covers the first impact of European power on Australia. He argues that the Europeans were not simply conquerors, that their own cultures were infinitely complex, thickly-woven with ideas about spirituality, authority, self and land, all of which influenced the development of Australia. -- v. 2. This is the second installment in the acclaimed three-volume history of Australia. Atkinson's aim is to show what the European did with Australia--and why they did it--what drove them, what troubled them--during the first four or five generations of colonization, up to the end of the Great War. This volume takes the story from around 1815 to the early l870s. Atkinson tells of the expansion and enrichment of the colonies and the emergence of democracy. -- v. 3. This is the third and final volume of the landmark, award-winning series The Europeans in Australia that gives an account of settlement by Britain. It tells of the various ways in which that experience shaped imagination and belief among the settler people from the eighteenth century to the end of World War I.Volume Three, Nation, tells the story of Australian Federation and the war with a focus, as ever on ordinary habits of thought and feeling. In this period, for the first time the settler people began to grasp the vastness of the continent, and to think of it as their own. There was a massive funding of education, and the intellectual reach of men and women was suddenly expanded, to an extent that seemed dazzling to many at the time. Women began to shape public imagination as they had not done before. At the same time, the worship of mere ideas had its victims, most obviously the Aboriginal people, and the war itself proved what vast tragedies it could unleash.The culmination of an extraordinary career in the writing and teaching of Australian history, The Europeans in Australia grapples with the Australian historical experience as a whole from the point of view of the settlers from Europe. Ambitious and unique, it is the first such large, single-author account since Manning Clark's A History of Australia.

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Contents

Still They Kept Coming
1
Bound by Birth
3
The Well Read
24
Copyright

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About the author (1997)

Alan Atkinson is an Australian historian who won the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature for the third volume of The Europeans in Australia. This is the most valuable single literary prize in the country. It is the culmination of the annual Victorian Premier's Awards, with each winner of the five $25,000 categories eligible for the big one. This final installmnet of Atkinson's in this series covers the period from the 1870's to the aftermath of World War I. He also won the Ernest Scott Prize 2015 with this title. This title also won a NSW Premier History Award 2015 in the Australian History category which carries a monetary prize of $15,000. It also made the shortlist for the Colin Roderick Award 2015. This title also made the shortlist for the 2015 Australia Book Prize presented by the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. Atkinson has won the 2015 Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS) Australia Book Prize. The prize, worth $3500, is presented annually to an Australian writer whose nonfiction book published in 2014 'contributed most to Australian cultural and intellectual life'.

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