Australian History
Book Details

A History of Australia

The Beginning of an Australian Civilization 1824–1851

Volume 3

Manning Clark

Takes the story of Australia to the momentous discovery of gold and the separation of Victoria from New South Wales.

Awards

The Age Book of the Year 1974

Opinion

‘. . . a novelist, a painter, a theologian and prophet, and from these callings he brings some of the qualities of imagination, the sense of wonder, and the will to create order from chaos, which is as vital to the historian as those other more common and essential skills.’ Geoffrey Blainey

‘. . . He looked for great human issues and presented them as moral dramas.’ Donald Horne

About this Title

The third volume of Manning Clark’s distinguished history takes the story of Australia to the momentous discovery of gold and the separation of Victoria from New South Wales. The story is one of destruction as well as construction, the destruction of the Aborigines and the construction of an essentially English bourgeois society and the taming of an alien and seemingly sterile land along the coastal country.

This is not a general Australian history—it does not attempt to cover all aspects—and it is not a definitive or quantitative analysis. It is a work of art, a living and breathing account of the remaking of a primitive continent, history come alive.

Table of Contents

Preface; Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; 1. The Iron-Age Men of New Holland; 2. Another Province for Britain’s Gentry; 3. A British Province with a Laudable Purpose; 4. High Noon for Moral Improvers in South Australia; 5. Overstraiters, Overlanders and Others Descend on Port Phillip; 6. England’s Echo in the Antipodes; 7. A Grand Centre for an Australian Civilization; 8. But Colonials Do Not Make their Own History; 9. Ebb-tide in Van Diemen’s land; 10. A Place for a Belly-full but not a Full-Blown Civilization; 11. Country Gentlemen and Bush Barbarians; 12. Squatterdom’s Domination; 13. Self-government for Plutocrats; 14. The In-between Years; 15. Tethering the Mighty Bush to the World; 16. Epilogue; Appendix; Sources; Index

About the Author

Manning Clark was senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne, and later, Professor of History in the School of General Studies, Australian National University. In 1972 he became the first Professor of Australian History. In June 1975 Clark was made a Companion of the Order of Australia, in recognition of his writing of the monumental A History of Australia. He was named Australian of the Year for 1980. Professor Clark died in May 1991.

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978-0-522-84054-4