This book covers the history of the Australian continent from the arrival of the first humans about 100,000 years or so BCE, up to the present. It analyses the ecological and environmental impacts of human beings on the continent, and attempts to delineate the ways in which human intervention and cultural formations over-rode experience in the era of British colonization, and continue to do so. They way in which the application of an inappropriate culture that stressed the establishment of small-scale agriculture as the primary mode of production mandated failure for white Australians in the colonial period depicted.