Origins

A remarkable new account of Australia's colonial beginnings

This fascinating book sets aside the clichés of Australian history and asks us to look again.

What really happened when exiled criminals made a home in an occupied and defended country? How were they changed by this new world? What can the first years of settlement tell us about Australia today?

The First Fleet left Britain at the height of the enclosure movement, when traditional rights to communal land were being rapidly extinguished. Many convicts brought those older ideas about land with them, and the first years of the colony saw a distinctive new society develop. Later, it was supplanted by a system favouring free settlers, large land grants and a creed of unstoppable progress. But the first thirty-five years of the colony tell a different story.

In Origins, James Boyce brings this formative period to life. The protagonists include convicts, Aboriginal people, soldiers, governors, and the country itself. The picture that emerges will change how you think about Australia's origins.

Startlingly original: a book that allows us to see Australia anew - Mark McKenna, author of The Shortest History of Australia

With this fine history James Boyce captures the earliest years of Australia, rendering the texture of its people, time and place with clear, beautiful prose. Origins recounts how the colony's particular mix of precarity, power, violence, cultural entanglement and Country itself shaped an emerging society in ways that were unique, complex and far from inevitable. - Anna Clark, author of Making Australian History