The First Dismissal: Penguin Special

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

While violent revolution and social upheaval rocked Europe, far away in New South Wales, Governor Lachlan Macquarie was sowing the seeds for the Australian idea of the 'fair go'. Macquarie was a reformer and an emancipator. He believed that a person's worth - be they gentry, infantry or convict - lay in what they were capable of doing, not what they had done in the past. He freed the brilliant, mercurial convict Francis Greenway and appointed him government architect for the buildings that would shape a new nation. But to the Tory British government of 1820, Macquarie and Greenway's unconventional alliance threatened NSW's very legitimacy as a penal colony. Here Luke Slattery breathes dramatic life into Australia's first political dismissal and, along the way, maps Macquarie and Greenway's bold collaborations and extraordinary architectural - and cultural - legacy.

Reviews

"A riveting read." --Courier-Mail
"Short and snappy . . . It is exciting to see a writer of Slattery's quality take on the the extraordinary history of colonial Australia with such zest and conviction and present it, properly, as a story with universal human meaning . . . [a] fierce little book." --Sydney Morning Herald

Author Bio

Luke Slattery is the author of Crisis in the Clever Country: Why Our Universities are Failing (with Geoffrey Maslen), Dating Aphrodite: Modern Adventures in the Ancient World, and Reclaiming Epicurus: Could an Ancient Philosophy of Happiness Save the World