Awards

• Commended for Non-Fiction 2021 (Australia)
• Long-listed for Best Non-fiction 2021 (United States)
• Long-listed for Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2021 (Australia)
• Short-listed for Best Non-fiction 2021 (United States)
• Short-listed for George Perkins Marsh Prize for Best Book in Environmental History 2021 (United States)
• Short-listed for Indie Book Awards 2021 (Australia)

Overview

Winner of the Prime Minister's Award for Australian History 2021 Winner of the NSW Premier's Australian History Prize 2021 Co-winner of the Ernest Scott Prize for History 2021Winner, Henry A. Wallace Award for Agricultural History 2020 'A masterpiece of historical writing that takes your breath away' - Tom Griffiths 'A majestic book' - John Maynard 'Shimmering prose' - Tiffany Shellam Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury-Nepean River, is where the two early Australias - ancient and modern - first collided. People of the River journeys into the lost worlds of the Aboriginal people and the settlers of Dyarubbin, both complex worlds with ancient roots. The settlers who took land on the river from the mid-1790s were there because of an extraordinary experiment devised half a world away. Modern Australia was not founded as a gaol, as we usually suppose, but as a colony. Britain's felons, transported to the other side of the world, were meant to become settlers in the new colony. They made history on the river: it was the first successful white farming frontier, a community that nurtured the earliest expressions of patriotism, and it became the last bastion of eighteenth-century ways of life. The Aboriginal people had occupied Dyarubbin for at least 50,000 years. Their history, culture and spirituality were inseparable from this river Country. Colonisation kicked off a slow and cumulative process of violence, theft of Aboriginal children and ongoing annexation of the river lands. Yet despite that sorry history, Dyarubbin's Aboriginal people managed to remain on their Country, and they still live on the river today. The Hawkesbury-Nepean was the seedbed for settler expansion and invasion of Aboriginal lands to the north, south and west. It was the crucible of the colony, and the nation that followed.

Full Product Details

9781760292232

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Reviews

'A masterpiece of historical writing that takes your breath away' - Tom Griffiths 'A majestic book' - John Maynard 'Shimmering prose' - Tiffany Shellam

Author Information

Grace Karskens is author of The Colony, winner of the 2010 Prime Minister's Non-fiction Award, and of The Rocks, winner of the 1998 NSW Premier's History Award. She is Professor of History at the University of New South Wales and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

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