DJ Mulvaney & J. Peter White, ed.
Australians to 1788, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, Broadway, NSW, 1987
A volume in the set Australians: A Historical Library. Twenty-three authors contribute under the main headings ‘The creation of Aboriginal Australia’, ‘Continuity and diversity: varieties of Aboriginal life’ and ‘The invasion’. Fittingly, 90 per cent of the book is devoted to the time before 1788 although Geoffrey Blainey sketches Sydney in 1788 and concludes: ‘The huts and tents and tall masts and axe-made clearings and fences and livestock were – unknown to the Aborigines – really the wrappings of a high explosive. The detonator was Europe.’ (p. 443)
