Australia celebrated one hundred years as a nation in 2001. This book
- part history, part travelogue, part memoir
- tells the inspiring story of how a one-time British colony of convicts turned itself into a prosperous & confident country. Through the eyes of ordinary people, Phillip Knightley describes Australia`s journey, from federation & the trauma of the First World War, the desperate poverty of the Depression, with its attendant spectres of secret armies & near-civil war, the threat of invasion in the Second World War & the immigration that followed it, & the slow but steady decline in the relationship with Britain, the ` Mother Country`, as Australia forged its own unique identity.