Australia: A Biography of a Nation
Condition: SECONDHAND
NB: This is a secondhand book in very good condition. See our FAQs for more information. Please note that the jacket image is indicative only. A description of our secondhand books is not always available. Please contact us if you have a question about this title.
Author: Philip Knightley
Format: Hardback
Number of Pages: 383
What kind of country is Australia, really? Not the sun-drenched paradise of tourist mythology, nor the self-deprecating larrikin culture Australians like to project — but the deeper, stranger, more complicated nation underneath. Phillip Knightley, one of the finest investigative journalists of his generation, turns his unflinching eye on the land of his birth to ask questions that Australians rarely ask themselves.
From the brutal dispossession of the Aboriginal people to the convict stain that shaped a national psychology, from the slavish dependence on Britain that gave way to an equally slavish dependence on America, to the extraordinary prosperity built on a continent that should by rights be uninhabitable — Knightley traces the forces that made Australia what it is. A country defined by its contradictions: egalitarian yet deeply racist, proudly independent yet eternally in search of a protector, blessed with natural abundance yet haunted by a sense of cultural inadequacy.
Written with the authority of an outsider who was once an insider, Australia: A Biography of a Nation is provocative, affectionate, and ruthlessly honest — a portrait of a country still in the process of becoming itself.
NB: This is a secondhand book in very good condition. See our FAQs for more information. Please note that the jacket image is indicative only. A description of our secondhand books is not always available. Please contact us if you have a question about this title.
Author: Philip Knightley
Format: Hardback
Number of Pages: 383
What kind of country is Australia, really? Not the sun-drenched paradise of tourist mythology, nor the self-deprecating larrikin culture Australians like to project — but the deeper, stranger, more complicated nation underneath. Phillip Knightley, one of the finest investigative journalists of his generation, turns his unflinching eye on the land of his birth to ask questions that Australians rarely ask themselves.
From the brutal dispossession of the Aboriginal people to the convict stain that shaped a national psychology, from the slavish dependence on Britain that gave way to an equally slavish dependence on America, to the extraordinary prosperity built on a continent that should by rights be uninhabitable — Knightley traces the forces that made Australia what it is. A country defined by its contradictions: egalitarian yet deeply racist, proudly independent yet eternally in search of a protector, blessed with natural abundance yet haunted by a sense of cultural inadequacy.
Written with the authority of an outsider who was once an insider, Australia: A Biography of a Nation is provocative, affectionate, and ruthlessly honest — a portrait of a country still in the process of becoming itself.