Australia, Beyond the Dreamtime

LARGE SIZE HARDCOVER WITH DUST JACKET. SLIGHT FOXING TO EDGE OF PAGES ON TOP ONLY. NO TEARS ,MARKS OR INSCRIPTIONS. W. Heinemann Australia, 1987. Used. To celebrate the bicentennial of Australia's first settlement three of her leading modern writers present their country from a personal viewpoint. Each depicts a period of the continent's rich and varied history, its events and personalities, as experienced by their forebears. Thomas Keneally looks at the wild and mysterious land discovered by Captain Cook in 1770. He shows how its early history, centered on the penal settlements, has influenced modern Australian society. Patsy Adam-Smith, daughter of a railroad worker, is one of Australia's best-known popular historians. She describes the rise of the sheep barons, who perpetuated the old-world social division which the newcomers hoped to have left behind, and the bitter struggle of the unions. She draws on her personal experience of childhood during the Depression and explores Australia's rise to maturity as a nation of immigrants tempered in the fire of two world wars. Robyn Davidson writes of the generation who lived through the Vietnam War then shunned urban life and looked inward to the desert.