The Beginning, the first of three volumes in the awardwinningseries The Europeans in Australia, available together for the first time, gives an account of earlysettlement by Britain that began during the 1780s, a decade of extraordinary creativity and the climax of the European Enlightenment. In this period, the penal colony at Port Jackson wasestablished. As it grew, this community of convicts andex-convicts posed profound questions about the commonrights of the subject, the responsibility of power, andthe possibility of imaginative attachment to a land ofexile. Europeans were not just conquerors motivated bybrutal colonising imperatives. Their culture was ancientand infinitely complex, thickly woven with ideas aboutspirituality, authority, self, and land, all of which hadimplications for the way Australians live now. Conflictand possession of Aboriginal land were at issue, as werethe ancient habits of Europeans themselves.

Democracy, the second of three volumes in the awardwinningseries The Europeans in Australia, shows whatthe Europeans did with Australia and why during thefirst four or five generations of invasion and settlement,so as to secure great wealth and the beginnings ofdemocracy. During the period from around 1815 to the early 1870sAustralia began to find its place. The pace of colonialexpansion accelerated while a kind of democracyemerged. More than a story of geography and politics,Democracy describes the way people thought and felt -what drove them, what troubled them. By analysing thelives of both powerful and ordinary men and women,Atkinson sets out the ideas that moved and marked them,in a history of 'common imagination'.

This is the second installment in the acclaimed three-volume history of Australia. Atkinson's aim is to show what the European did with Australia--and why they did it--what drove them, what troubled them--during the first four or five generations of colonization, up to the end of the Great War. This volume takes the story from around 1815 to the early l870s. Atkinson tells of the expansion and enrichment of the colonies and the emergence of democracy.

A landmark and revealing joint biography of Elizabeth and John Macarthur, from one of Australia's most respected historians. Arriving in 1790, Elizabeth and John Macarthur, both aged 23, were the first married couple to travel voluntarily from Europe to Australia, within three years of the initial invasion. John Macarthur soon became famous in New South Wales and beyond as a wool pioneer, a politician, and a builder of farms at Parramatta and Camden. For a long time, Elizabeth's life was regarded as contingent on John's and, more recently, John's on Elizabeth's. In Elizabeth and John, Alan Atkinson, the prizewinning author of Europeans in Australia, draws on his work on the Macarthur family over the last 50 years to explore the dynamics of a strong and sinewy marriage, and family life over two generations. With the truth of John and Elizabeth Macarthur's relationship much more complicated and more deeply human than other writers have suggested, Atkinson provides a finely drawn portrait of a powerful partnership.