Manning Clark’s six-volume series, A History of Australia, 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- From Earliest Times to 1838, deals with the pre-white settlement era and the earliest years of European colonisation through to the establishment of an increasingly settled society and the expeditions of the great inland explorers.

;;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.