Alan Atkinson – författare

Nation, the third and final volume in the landmark history of Australia told from the point of view of settlers from Europe, covers Federation, World War I and its aftermath.The culmination of Alan Atkinson’s extraordinary career in the writing and teaching of Australian history, The Europeans in Australia is the first such large, single author account since Manning Clark’s A History of Australia.

The Beginning, the first of three volumes in the awardwinningseries The Europeans in Australia, available together for the first time, gives an account of earlysettlement by Britain that began during the 1780s, a decade of extraordinary creativity and the climax of the European Enlightenment.In this period, the penal colony at Port Jackson wasestablished. As it grew, this community of convicts andex-convicts posed profound questions about the commonrights of the subject, the responsibility of power, andthe possibility of imaginative attachment to a land ofexile. Europeans were not just conquerors motivated bybrutal colonising imperatives. Their culture was ancientand infinitely complex, thickly woven with ideas aboutspirituality, authority, self, and land, all of which hadimplications for the way Australians live now. Conflictand possession of Aboriginal land were at issue, as werethe ancient habits of Europeans themselves.

Democracy, the second of three volumes in the awardwinningseries The Europeans in Australia, shows whatthe Europeans did with Australia and why during thefirst four or five generations of invasion and settlement,so as to secure great wealth and the beginnings ofdemocracy.During the period from around 1815 to the early 1870sAustralia began to find its place. The pace of colonialexpansion accelerated while a kind of democracyemerged. More than a story of geography and politics,Democracy describes the way people thought and felt –what drove them, what troubled them. By analysing thelives of both powerful and ordinary men and women,Atkinson sets out the ideas that moved and marked them,in a history of ‘common imagination’.

Elizabeth and John Macarthur were the first married couple to travel voluntarily from Europe to Australia, arriving in 1790, both aged 23, within three years of the initial invasion. John Macarthur soon became famous in New South Wales and beyond as a wool pioneer, a politician, and a builder of farms at Parramatta and Camden. For a long time, Elizabeth's life was regarded as contingent on John's and, more recently, John's on Elizabeth's.In the multi-award-winning Elizabeth and John, acclaimed historian Alan Atkinson draws on his work on the Macarthur family over 50 years to explore the dynamics of their strong and sinewy marriage, and family life across two generations. With the truth of Elizabeth and John Macarthur's relationship much more complex and deeply human than other writers have suggested, Atkinson provides a finely drawn portrait of a powerful partnership.

In The House of Blue Glass, Alan Atkinson – author of the award-winning Elizabeth and John: The Macarthurs of Elizabeth Farm – explores the life of Penelope Lucas. While she is known as the Macarthur family governess, Atkinson reveals Penelope was primarily an accountant whose bookkeeping work made an important difference to the Macarthurs’ success. Penelope Lucas came to Australia in 1804–1805, in her thirties, unmarried and looking forward to living on inherited income. While Elizabeth Macarthur was unsurprisingly upset when John arrived back from three years in England with a woman she had never heard of, Penelope went on to live with the Macarthurs for over thirty years and became close friends with Elizabeth. In this revelatory work, Atkinson brings together fifty years of scholarship as he explores the gender dynamics of the Macarthur household and the life of a single woman of means in Georgian England and early colonial Sydney.