AustLit

'Familiar images of Sydney, displaying its sparkling harbour, opera house and bridge, belie the darkness of its short history. For Delia Falconer, in her recent ‘biography’ of Sydney, the city’s ‘fundamental temperament is melancholy’ (2). Over two hundred years of European settlement have brought countless tales of grim encounters in quiet alleys, graves found in the bush, bodies bobbing to the surface of rivers. And there is an older shock, hidden in the landscape, the sudden, calamitous arrival of an alien civilisation. ' (Author's introduction)