Mark McKenna

The history of Australia has been written before – but not like this.

In The Shortest History of Australia, Mark McKenna offers a compelling new version of our national story. This is a modern Australia permeated by First Nations history; a multicultural society with an island mindset; a continent of epic beauty and extreme natural events; a country obsessed by war abroad but blind to its founding war at home; and a thriving nation-state still to realise its political independence.

McKenna's wise and humane history reveals the surprising in the familiar, and reframes the past so we can see the present more clearly.

The Shortest History of Australia

Karolina

Australia has its islands within; feelings of isolation and insignificance accentuated by the vastness of the continent and the distances they separate its towns and major cities.

Anzac Cove, not Sydney Cove, was where the nation is believed to have been born because this is where the right kind of blood was spilt: blood lost in a distant imperial war that gave rise to a story of pride and sacrifice, rather than blood lost in a much longer, largely unacknowledged war for Australian territories that aroused disquiet and shame.

The inability to be fully human unless you are in and with your own Country is one of the most distinctive aspects of Australia's Indigenous cultures and their millennia-long history. Not even centuries of invasion and colonisation have managed to eradicate it, perhaps because it is not a literal or material relationship, but spiritual. For many non-Indigenous Australians who are on the outside looking in, it also possesses an undeniable mystery: a reminder that, as recently arrived migrants in a country that Indigenous Australians have occupied for more than 65,000 years, they do not have the same keys to Country.

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