Melbourne University Publishing

From The Edge: Australia's Lost Histories

$34.99

March 1797. Ninety Mile Beach, Victoria. Five British sailors and twelve Bengali seamen swim ashore after their longboat is ripped apart in a storm.

The British penal colony at Port Jackson is 700 kilometres to the north, their fellow-survivors from the wreck of the Sydney Cove stranded far to the south on a tiny island in Bass Strait. To rescue them and save their own lives, they have no alternative. They set out to walk to Sydney. What follows is one of Australia's greatest survival stories and cross-cultural encounters

In From the Edge, award-winning historian Mark McKenna uncovers the places and histories that Australians so often fail to see. Like the largely forgotten story of the sailors' walk in 1797, these remarkable histories—the founding of a 'new Singapore' in West Arnhem Land in the 1840s, the site of Australia's largest industrial development project in the Pilbara and its extraordinary…

"A rediscovery of history which offers possibilities of national understanding and rebirth." - Noel Pearson

About the author

Mark McKenna is one of Australia's leading historians. Professor of History at the University of Sydney, he is the author of several prize-winning books, including Looking for Blackfellas' Point: an Australian History of Place, which won the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction and Book of the Year in the 2003 NSW Premier's Literary Awards.

Seven years in the making, his biography of Manning Clark won the 2012 Prime Minister's Award for Non-Fiction and four national literary awards; while his recent book From The Edge: Australia's Lost Histories , won the 2017 NSW Premier's Australian History Prize. His essays and articles have been widely published in Australia and overseas.

Mark McKenna
Published October 2016
Paperback
251 Pages
234mm x 169mm
ISBN 9780522862591