Summary:The urge to preserve, to search for the past in order to package and present it, is a powerful impulse. This act of making history is not only the domain of academic historians and professional myth-makers. Thousands of amateur enthusiasts, driven by curiosity and local knowledge have explored documentary, oral and environmental sources to shape their own histories and perceptions of the land and its people, black and white. This book explores the historical imagination of these antiquarians, naturalists, ethnologists, archaeologists and collectors. In doing so, it searches for the roots of historical consciousness and environmental sensibilities in European Australia