"Australia celebrates one hundred years as a nation in 2001. This book part history, part travelogue, part memoir tells the inspiring story of how a one time British colony of convicts turned itself into a prosperous and confident country. Through the eyes of ordinary people, Phillip Knightly describes Australia's journey, from federation and the trauma of the First World War, the desperate poverty of the Depression, with its attendant spectres of secret armies and near civil way, the threat of invasion in the Second World War and the imagination that followed it, and the slow but steady decline of the relationship with Britain, the 'Mother Country' as Australia forged its own unique identity."