The author draws heavily, with meticulous acknowledgment, on previous scholarship. Her project is to use it and her own explorations on the ground and below it (she has been an historical archaeologist) to recreate lives as they were lived and to keep the variety of lives before us, and thus avoid the false unity of ‘the life of the city’. She does have her own take on broader issues. She insists, rightly in my view, that Sydney society was pre-industrial and strongly communal. This is somewhat at odds with her other characterisation of Sydney as a consumer society. That the convicts were urban people used to the new products of a prosperous commercial society – particularly tea – can be accepted, but a consumer society is something else again.

On relations between settlers and Aborigines, Karskens is properly respectful of Inga Clendinnen’s wonderful Dancing with Strangers (2003), but has her quarrels with it. If the dancing symbolises a moment of harmony in early race relations, we should not forget that this relaxation of the Europeans’ guard was preceded by the demonstration of their superior weaponry. Karskens does not accept that Governor Phillip’s punitive expedition was merely a piece of harmless theatre: Watkin Tench, who was in charge of it, did fire on and wound an Aborigine. Against other historians, Karskens contests the view that the bush imprisoned the convicts. She claims that this masks the readiness of convicts to wander off, explore the bush and be delighted by it. Nevertheless, as her own account makes clear, the bush would not sustain escapees: you needed supporters to hide and feed you, and the best escape route was by sea. That authority did not have to worry too much if convicts wandered off gave more freedoms to them all.

Karskens does not bother much with the administration of the convict system – and indeed, for her period, there was not much system to it. She summarises the convict experience well enough in a line or two: there was indulgence for the well behaved and savage punishments for offenders, an approach that authority took with the Aborigines as well. Her interest is in the lives convicts made for themselves, often against the wishes of authority. This was the theme of her earlier book, The Rocks: Life in Early Sydney (1997), which was that second Sydney built by convicts and ex-convicts on the steep broken ground on the west of Sydney Cove. Of the convicts themselves, she takes an indulgent view. If élite opinion declares that convicts were drunken, brutal or ignorant, she will turn somersaults rather than accept this view, a common enough response in the academy. So we must believe that the thieves and scavengers of British cities in the late eighteenth century were on the whole very decent people.

The book is large and divided into four sections, which strangely are not identified in the table of contents. The introduction tells us that the first deals with ‘Sydney’s deep time history, the evolution of landscapes and ecologies, and the arrival and first encounters of Aboriginal and European settlers’. The second ‘tracks the emergence of the town and the rural hinterland’. The third ‘explores the contrasting ways in which educated colonists, convicts and women responded to the local Sydney environments’ (I thought the convict evidence on this theme was thin). The fourth section, dealing with settler–Aboriginal relations, offers a more sustained account than the panorama of the earlier chapters, but for all its insights seems to overwhelm the book and lose touch with its distinctive themes.

This final section opens with the bold claim that ‘Sydney was an Eora town’, the Eora being the local Aboriginal people. I was sceptical of this claim, but finally was persuaded. After the Aborigines ‘came in’ to the town in 1790, they remained there for thirty years, living among but apart from the Europeans, their semi-nakedness being tolerated, having their own spaces and conducting their own affairs without interference, and interacting with the Europeans. The most surprising was the conclusion to a struggle of two Aboriginal men fighting over a woman whom they were almost tearing apart: an Irish tailor intervened and took the woman for himself. Karskens writes of the urban Eora that, with all their adaptation, ‘there was this stable core, a sense of rightness in one’s skin, and complete indifference to appeals for improvement, to shame and guilt’. This is Karskens at her interpretative best.

Later, she berates the colonists for looking at particular reasons for Aboriginal decline – loss of hunting grounds, drunkenness, venereal disease and so on – instead of seeing dispossession itself as the cause. Dispossession, she claims, created a deep-felt grievance. She cites no Aborigine as feeling this. And it does not look as if it was felt by the Aborigines, whom Karskens has earlier described as so spirited, so independent, so comfortable in their own skin. They were certainly dispossessed. The lack of a sense of grievance is the missing element in so many accounts of Australian race relations.

The book is sumptuously produced, with the support of various public bodies. This allows for a generous allotment of colour plates which Karskens uses as evidence in her text, most notably in her reinterpretation of the outcome of Phillip’s punitive expedition. But the plates are not numbered. Maps cost much less, but there are few of them, and some are difficult to read. There is no general map, in the old way ‘of places mentioned in the text’. A book about places, and you have to know Sydney and the Cumberland Plain to follow it! Inevitably, the book would mean more to those who already know the ground that Karskens traverses, but something more could have been done for those ‘camping out’ in the rest of the continent.