Manning Clark's six-volume history is one of the masterpieces of Australian writing. It is also one of the most passionately debated visions of Australian history, in which the struggle to realise an Australian nation is played out on an epic scale.

A History of Australia: 1824-1888, takes the story of Australia through the momentous discovery of gold and the separation of Victoria from New South Wales, to the centenary of the coming of European civilisation to Australia on 26 January 1888. The story is one of destruction as well as construction-the destruction of the Aborigines and the construction of an essentially English bourgeois society and the taming of an alien and seemingly sterile land.

This is not a general Australian history-it does not attempt to cover all aspects-and it is not a definitive or quantitative analysis. It is a work of art, a living and breathing account of the remaking of a primitive continent, history come alive.