'Geoffrey Blainey is Australia’s happy historian. ‘Blame’ is not in his vocabulary and his hindsight points no fingers at the past. Thus our nation’s story is told congenially, in large typeface, without footnotes to trouble the ‘general reader’ to whom it is directed – the author’s trademark generalisations come with the authority of his age and his achievements. They are nicely, sometimes lyrically, expressed, as he tells two stories – triumphal (how the progeny of British convicts built a prosperous nation) and tragic (the despoliation and degradation of our indigenous people) without bothering too much about how they may have been causally related.' (Introduction)