In January 1788 the First Fleet arrived in New South Wales and a thousand British men and women encountered the people who would be their new neighbours - the beach nomads of Australia. These people mixed with ours, wrote a British observer soon after landfall, and all hands danced together. What followed would determine relations between the two peoples for the next two centuries. Drawing skillfully from first-hand accounts written at the time Inga Clendinnen reconstructs the complex dance of curiosity, attraction and mistrust performed by the protagonists on both sides. She brings this sad and poignant chapter in British colonial history brilliantly alive for the reader and then we discover why the dancing stopped ...Dancing with Strangers is the most important and compulsively readable book about early Australian history and identity to have appeared for many years, throwing light on this misunderstood but enormously formative period. It will change the way we see the past.

INGA CLENDINNEN was born in 1934. She is a distinguished historian of the Spanish encounters with Aztec and Maya Indians of sixteenth-century America, and author of Reading the Holocaust, named a New York Times Best Book of the Year and awarded the New South Wales Premier's General History Award in 1999. Her subsequent work, Tiger's Eye was awarded the 2002 Adelaide Festival Award for Innovation and the Nita B.Kibble Award for Women Writers 2001 and was shortlisted for the Age Book of the Year Award 2000. Her essays and short stories have been widely published.