Australia A Very Short Introduction - Kenneth Morgan 2012

Time was when an introduction to the making of Australia was unproblematic: the modern story of Australia began with James Cook claiming New South Wales for Britain in 1770 and the British convict settlement at Sydney Cove in 1788. Aborigines were omitted from the story. Thus, Walter Murdoch’s school text Making of Australia: An Introductory History (1917) argued that ‘when people talk about “the history of Australia” they mean the history of the white people who have lived in Australia’, for the Aborigines ‘have nothing that can be called history’. W. K. Hancock’s Australia (1930) began with the Younger Pitt’s government selecting New South Wales as a convict settlement and the emergence of the pastoral industry down under. When the book was reprinted in 1961, Hancock admitted that inattention to Aborigines showed that it had fallen behind the times.