This, the third and final volume of a landmark, award-winning series, gives an account of Australia's settlement by Britain. It tells of the various ways in which that experience shaped imagination and belief among the settler people from the 18th century to the end of World War I. It also 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...

The first of three volumes of the landmark, award-winning series The Europeans in Australia gives an account of early settlement by Britain. It tells of the political and intellectual origins of this extraordinary undertaking that began during the 1780s, a decade of extraordinary creativity and the climax of the European Enlightenment. Atkinson examines, as few historians have done before, the political and intellectual origins of this extraordinary undertaking.