The Beginning, the first of three volumes in the awardwinningseries The Europeans in Australia, available together for the first time, gives an account of earlysettlement by Britain that began during the 1780s, a decade of extraordinary creativity and the climax of the European Enlightenment.

In this period, the penal colony at Port Jackson wasestablished. As it grew, this community of convicts andex-convicts posed profound questions about the commonrights of the subject, the responsibility of power, andthe possibility of imaginative attachment to a land ofexile. Europeans were not just conquerors motivated bybrutal colonising imperatives. Their culture was ancientand infinitely complex, thickly woven with ideas aboutspirituality, authority, self, and land, all of which hadimplications for the way Australians live now. Conflictand possession of Aboriginal land were at issue, as werethe ancient habits of Europeans themselves.