'The most significant colonial history since The Fatal. In re-imagining Australia's past, it invents a new future.' - Richard Flanagan

'The first ecologically based social history of colonial Australia, showing how wallabies led to liberty, and the bush became a true home for desperate men. A brilliant book and a must-read for anyone interested in how land shapes people.'-Tim Flannery

Almost half of the convicts who came to Australia came to Van Diemen's Land. There they found a land of bounty and a penal society, a kangaroo economy and a new way of life. In Van Diemen's Land, James Boyce shows how the convicts were changed by the natural world they encountered. Escaping authority, they soon settled away from the towns, dressing in kangaroo-skin and living off the land. Behind the official attempt to create a Little England was another story of adaptation, in which the poor, the exiled and the criminal made a new home in a strange land. This is their story, the story of Van Diemen's Land.