We Are the Land: a history of Native California

Abstract

and its favouring of free settlers; displacement and genocidal mass slaughter of the native population became the rule. Modern Australia as we know it began not in 1788, but in the third decade of the nineteenth century. Karskens describes many occasions when aborigines and settlers hunted, worked and lived together, native children were adopted, and aborigines worked for wages in kind on settlers’ farms. Until the 1820s, governors frequently pardoned (‘emancipated’) suitably qualified convicts and granted them land. But within three decades the rights of convicts had been reduced to those related to their condition as people in servitude. As Alan Atkinson put it, the status of convicts became more strictly defined than had been the case, first in the American colonies and then, after the American Revolution, in New South Wales and other Australian colonies (‘The free-born Englishman transported: convict rights as a measure of eighteenth-century empire’, Past and Present, 144, (1994) 88–115). Karskens’ learned, lucid book is an inspiring example of how history should be written.