Grace Karskens at Ballina Library

Rivers are the life-blood of the Australian continent. They have been magnets for both Aboriginal people and settlers, whose histories became entangled with one another and with the rivers themselves, for better or worse. People of the River: Lost Worlds of Early Australia is new kind of history, a book that explores the landscapes and peoples of Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury-Nepean River, from Deep Time to the colonial era, and the long struggle for this Country. This is an epic Australian story, one that is echoed on rivers up and down the east coast of Australia.

Grace Karskens is Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, where she taught for twenty years. Grace writes about early colonial Australia, Aboriginal history and environmental history. Her books include The Rocks: Life in Early Sydney (1996), Inside the Rocks: the Archaeology of a Neighbourhood (1999) and the award-winning The Colony: A History of Early Sydney (2009). Grace’s latest book, People of the River: Lost Worlds of Early Australia (2020), won the Prime Minister’s Award for History, the NSW Premier’s Award for Australian History, the Henry A Wallace Award for Best Book in Agricultural History (US) and co-won the Ernest Scott Prize for Australian History.

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