Part history, part travelogue, part memoir, this is the inspiring story of how a one-time British colony, settled by only two kinds of citizens - convicts and jailers - turned itself into a proud, prosperous and confident country, the greatest sporting nation on earth, where the citizens of its high-leisure cities enjoy a lifestyle that is the envy of the world. Through the eyes of ordinary people struggling with their passions, hopes, dreams and ambitions, Phillip Knightley describes the journey that has taken the Great South land from a dark, racist and often murderous past to a working multi-cultural society. The shocking treatment of the Aborigines, the determination of Australians to make a clean break from the ills of the Old World and create a new society where everyone had a "fair go", the love-hate relationship with Britain that led to the slow but traumatic detachment from "the Mother Country," drive this sweeping story of a people whose discovery of the "middle way" could serve as a guide for our future.