Cirrus@Austlit

'A hundred years after what historian W.K. Hancock in 1930 termed 'The Invasion' of Australia by European settlers in 1788, two-thirds of the nearly three million non-Aboriginal inhabitants were Australian born. Virtually all the third million were born in Britain; at the time of federation in 1901 barely 2 per cent of white Australians were not of British stock. But the painters and artists of the late nineteenth century were far less likely to have been born in Australia or even Britain.' (Introduction)