Australia celebrates one hundred years as a nation in 2001. This book - part history, part travelogue, part memoir - tells the inspiring story of how a one-time British colony with only two sorts of citizens, convicts and gaolers, turned itself into a proud, prosperous and confident country, the greatest sporting nation on earth, where the citizens of its high-leisure cities enjoy a lifestyle that is the envy of the world. The original hostile factions of British Protestants and Irish Catholics were joined by gold rush adventurers, waves of migrants seeking a new life, war-shattered Europeans...