In this Very Short Introduction, Kenneth Morgan provides a wide-ranging and thematic introduction to modern Australia; examining the main features of its history, geography, and culture and drawing attention to the distinctive features of Australian life and its indigenous population and culture.

The publication of this book in 1981 profoundly changed the way in which we understand the history of relations between indigenous Australians and European settlers. Describes in meticulous and compelling detail the ways in which Aborigines responded to the arrival of Europeans.

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.

This 2005 book tells the story of the first British settlers of Australia and the people they found living there.

The Arrernte people of Central Australia first encountered Europeans in the 1860s as groups of explorers, pastoralists, missionaries, and laborers invaded their land. During that time the Arrernte were the subject of intense curiosity, and the earliest accounts of their lives, beliefs, and traditions were a seminal influence on European notions of the primitive. The first study to address the Arrernte’s contemporary situation, Arrernte Present, Arrernte Past also documents the immense sociocultural changes they have experienced over the past hundred years. Employing ethnographic and archival research, Diane Austin-Broos traces the history of the Arrernte as they have transitioned from a society of hunter-gatherers to members of the Hermannsburg Mission community to their present, marginalized position in the modern Australian economy. While she concludes that these wrenching structural shifts led to the violence that now marks Arrernte communities, she also brings to light the powerful acts of imagination that have sustained a continuing sense of Arrernte identity.

Living with the Locals comprises the stories of 13 white people who were taken in by Indigenous communities of the Torres Strait islands and eastern Australia between the 1790s and the 1870s, for periods from a few months to over 30 years. The shipwreck survivors, convicts and ex-convicts survived only through the Indigenous people's generosity. They assimilated to varying degrees into an Indigenous way of life and, for the most part, both parties mourned the white people's return to European life. The authors bring fresh insight to the stories and re-evaluate the encounters between Indigenous people and the white people who became part of their families.

The title Many Maps, Charting Two Cultures, looks at the way two contrasting societies often misunderstood each other in the western third of Australia. Maps can be drawn and interpreted in different ways. It is possible to map a path through life, find a way through a forest, traverse a desert or chart a sense of self and guide one's relationship to the natural world. Australia's First Nations mapped their world in terms of a spiritual and environmental relationship to country and an animate sense of being. The maps in European heads often explored ways to obtain wealth from the Australian earth. Many Maps traces both misunderstandings, and sometimes sensitive understandings of land and culture in a continent that we both inhabit. Bill Bunbury graduated with an honours degree from Durham University in 1963 and emigrated to WA that same year. He has won several awards for his Social History Radio features, including the UN Australia Peace Prize, the New York Radio Festival Gold medal and the NSW Premier's Media Prize. Since 2007, Bill has worked with Community Arts WA, producing radio features where Noongar communities tell their own histories. He now works part-time at Murdoch University. In 2016, he was awarded an Order of Australia for his services to Broadcasting and Aboriginal communities. Jenny Bunbury attended Durham University and graduated with BA (Hons) in Modern History. Jenny followed Bill to Australia and in 1975 Jenny joined the WA Public Service where she worked as a policy officer and manager for 30 years in various agencies including Health, Consumer Affairs and Transport. She also managed regional services for a number of agencies working on Aboriginal-Wadjela relations in rural and regional WA.

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.

Australia's economic history is the story of the transformation of an indigenous economy and a small convict settlement into a nation of nearly 23 million people with advanced economic, social and political structures. It is a history of vast lands with rich, exploitable resources, of adversity in war, and of prosperity and nation building. It is also a history of human behaviour and the institutions created to harness and govern human endeavour. This account provides a systematic and comprehensive treatment of the nation's economic foundations, growth, resilience and future, in an engaging, contemporary narrative. It examines key themes such as the centrality of land and its usage, the role of migrant human capital, the tension between development and the environment, and Australia's interaction with the international economy. Written by a team of eminent economic historians, The Cambridge Economic History of Australia is the definitive study of Australia's economic past and present.

North Queensland has long been a frontier province of Aboriginal Australia. Well before Europeans penetrated to the south-west Pacific, the Torres Strait Islanders had regular and extensive contact with Aboriginal groups in Cape York Peninsula and the Dutch had visited the coast at intervals since 1606. Not till the coming of the white settler in the mid nineteenth century, however, did ‘invasion’ begin. When it did, the Aborigines were dispossessed of their land and, since in British eyes they had no title to it, resistance was considered a criminal activity. This book studies Aboriginal-European relations on four different frontiers of contact. Though the pastoral industry led to the colonisation of most of North Queensland other parts were also the scene of confrontation: the gold mines, the timber-getting areas of the rainforest which later were settled by farmers and the pearlshell and bêche-de-mer areas on the far north coast. In all areas, despite sometimes armed resistance by the Aborigines, the Europeans imposed their authority. This book has something challenging to say to all white Australians interested in the basic values on which their society is based and is an essential reference for Aborigines wanting to know how and why they were dispossessed.