Author(s): James Boyce

Australian Non fiction

The vivid, ground-breaking history of early Tasmania.

Almost half of the convicts who came to Australia came to Van Diemen's Land. In this definitive history, James Boyce shows how they were changed by the natural world they encountered. Behind the official attempt to create a Little England was another story of adaptation, in which the poor, the exiled and the criminal made a new home in a strange land.

Van Diemen's Land won the Tasmania Book Prize in 2009 and the Colin Roderick Award in 2008. It was short-listed for the NSW, Victorian and Queensland premiers' literary awards, the Age Book of the Year and the Australian Book Industry Awards. Tim Flannery called it 'a brilliant book and a must-read for anyone interested in how land shapes people' and Richard Flanagan described it as 'the most significant colonial history since The Fatal Shore.' This beautiful, now illustrated hardcover edition includes a new foreword by Flanagan.