Author of the highly acclaimed Taming the Great South Land: A History of the Conquest of Nature in Australia and An All Consuming Passion: Origins, Modernity, and the Australian Life of Georgiana Molloy, Bill Lines turns his critical gaze to the twentieth-century history of Australia in this forthright and highly committed study. That history, he believes, has been marked by a total disregard for limits, and an arrogant belief in the desirability of progress and growth. The devastation wroughty upon the Australian landscape by Europeans has dire consequences which will be felt far in the future. Lines expertly weaves into his picture the stories of his own family, beginning with his grandparents who emigrated to Australia early this century, and culminating in his own experience of the loss of an idyllic boyhood landscape to the onslaught o0f progress. The grand epic continually refers back to intimate, personal level, making this, above all, a very human story.