James Boyce at Paperchain Bookstore Manuka

Join us at Paperchain Bookstore Manuka to hear James Boyce, author of Origins: The Making of Australia 1788-1825, in conversation with Mark McKenna.

This fascinating book sets aside the clichés of Australian history and asks us to look again.

What really happened when exiled criminals made a home in an occupied and defended country? How were they changed by this new world? What can the first years of settlement tell us about Australia today?

The First Fleet left Britain at the height of the enclosure movement, when traditional rights to communal land were being rapidly extinguished. Many convicts brought those older ideas about land with them, and the first years of the colony saw a distinctive new society develop. Later, it was supplanted by a system favouring free settlers, large land grants and a creed of unstoppable progress. But the first thirty-five years of the colony tell a different story.

In Origins, James Boyce brings this formative period to life. The protagonists include convicts, Aboriginal people, soldiers, governors, and the country itself. The picture that emerges will change how you think about Australia's origins.

‘This is wonderful. Shrewd, lucid and revolutionary.’ —David Marr, author of Killing for Country

‘Startlingly original: a book that allows us to see Australia anew’ —Mark McKenna, author of The Shortest History of Australia

‘With this fine history James Boyce captures the earliest years of Australia, rendering the texture of its people, time and place with clear, beautiful prose. Origins recounts how the colony's particular mix of precarity, power, violence, cultural entanglement and Country itself shaped an emerging society in ways that were unique, complex and far from inevitable.’ —Anna Clark, author of Making Australian History

'Illustrative, accessible and dedicated to truth-telling . . . Origins interrogates historical biases and overlooked contexts while remaining attentive to First Nations experiences and the ongoing consequences of colonisation.' —Books+Publishing


James Boyce is a multi-award-winning historian. His first book, Van Diemen’s Land, was described by Richard Flanagan as ‘the most significant colonial history since The Fatal Shore’. He is also the editor of Inga Clendinnen and the author of Losing Streak, Born Bad, Imperial Mud and 1835, which was The Age’s 2012 Book of the Year.


Mark McKenna is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Sydney and the Australian National University. He is the author of several prize-winning books, including From the Edge: Australia's Lost Histories, Looking for Blackfellas' Point, Return to Uluru and An Eye for Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark, which won the Prime Minister's Literary Award for nonfiction and the Victorian, New South Wales, Queensland and South Australian premiers' awards. His latest book is The Shortest History of Australia.

This event is free but as space is limited please book to secure your place.