Mark McKenna is one of Australia’s leading historians. Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Sydney, he is the author of several prize-winning books, including LOOKING FOR BLACKFELLAS’ POINT: an Australian History of Place, which won the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction and Book of the Year in the 2003 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.
Seven years in the making, his biography of Manning Clark won the 2012 Prime Minister’s Award for Non-Fiction and four national literary awards; while FROM THE EDGE: Australia’s Lost Histories , won the 2017 NSW Premier’s Australian History Prize. RETURN TO ULURU was published in 2021. His essays and articles have been widely published in Australia and overseas.
In The Shortest History of Australia, Mark McKenna offers a compelling new version of our national story. This is a modern Australia permeated by First Nations history; a multicultural society with an island mindset; a continent of epic beauty and extreme natural events; a country obsessed by war abroad but blind to its founding war at home; and a thriving nation-state still to realise its political independence.
McKenna’s wise and humane history reveals the surprising in the familiar, and reframes the past so we can see the present more clearly.
