Van Diemen's Land

Product Description

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.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.
James Boyce is the acclaimed author of Van Diemen's Land, 1835 and Born Bad. His books have been shortlisted for almost every major Australian literary award and he has won the Tasmania Book Prize on two occasions. He is also a professional social worker, who worked for many years in social policy and research and has been involved in the poker-machine debate for nearly twenty years.