Lion & Kangaroo: The Initiation of Australia

Winner of the Colin Roderick Award

Lion & Kangaroo is one of Australia’s great works of history, a rich chronicle of the nation’s coming-of-age.

With intelligence, wisdom and wit, acclaimed historian Gavin Souter captures all the milestones of Australia’s first decades, from the constitutional conventions of the nineteenth century to the turbulent years that followed World War I. Painting unforgettable portraits of scores of the most fascinating participants, he traces a national character in evolution.

Profound and insightful, it is impossible to comprehend contemporary Australia without first reading Lion & Kangaroo.

Praise for Lion & Kangaroo

‘A writer of great distinction … This book is the work of a man who can impose on the chaos of the past an order that lifts the work into the realms of art without doing violence to the events or sacrificing the standards of scholarship as defined by the academics. It is a great achievement.’ – Manning Clark

‘A superb evocation of Australian life in the years between federation and the First World War, showing how imperial sentiment dominated our lives and left a vacuum in Australia’s national identity … beautifully written, lucid, witty and compelling.’ – Gough Whitlam