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  • Published: 7 September 2001
  • ISBN: 9780099772910
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $35.00
Categories:

Australia




'A grand encapsulation of all Australia, past and present sharp, racy and irreverent' Independent

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 and confident country. Through the eyes of ordinary people, Phillip Knightley describes Australia's journey, from federation and the trauma of the First World War, the desperate poverty of the Depression, with its attendant spectres of secret armies and near-civil war, the threat of invasion in the Second World War and the immigration that followed it, and the slow but steady decline in the relationship with Britain, the 'Mother Country', as Australia forged its own unique identity.

  • Published: 7 September 2001
  • ISBN: 9780099772910
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $35.00
Categories:

About the authors

R M Crawford

Phillip Knightley is the author of many books and divides his time between Britain, Australia and India.

Phillip Knightley

Phillip Knightley is the author of ten non-fiction books. He is best known for The Second Oldest Profession and The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth Maker. He has met nearly every spy chief on both sides in the spy Cold War and spent one week with the British traitor Kim Philby in Moscow in 1988 debriefing him just before he died. Knightley has also dined with several heads of the KGB, several chiefs of the British Secret Intelligence Service, the Inspector General of the CIA, and the director of its anti-Soviet operations. For twenty years he was a special correspondent of The Sunday Times and a member of the Insight Team. He is now representative in Europe for the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and spends most of him time writing books and articles for publications around the world.

Praise for Australia

Catches the feel of Australia brilliantly. His 350 pages tell you more of Australia's public history and secret life than any academic study ever could. Wonderful

The Times

Knightley deals skilfully and generously with all the great issues his country has faced

Independent

Gripping and comprehensive

Irish Times

A fine book...fascinating

Economist