Cirrus@Austlit

'At the launch of Up Came a Squatter, Geoffrey Blainey reflected on how important the wool industry was to Australia for more than a hundred years. He noted that forty or fifty years ago you would not have bothered to mention the fact: it was as understood as the vagaries of Melbourne’s weather. Now wool is not even among Australia’s twenty top exports. Many of those present listening to Blainey and the author speak were from the Western District, descendants of Niel Black and others who established squatting runs in the 1830s and 1840s on the lands of Australia Felix ‘discovered’ by Major Mitchell during his overland expedition of 1836. An inevitable result of the land’s rapid occupation by squatters was the dispossession and near destruction of the local indigenous peoples.'

(Introduction)