Review of Beverley Kingston, 'A History of New South Wales' (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pb ISBN 0 521 54168-9, pp. x, 299.

In 2006, Beverley Kingston, Honorary Research Fellow in the School of History at the University of New South Wales, offered the early twenty-first century her very human and wise perspectives on the white peoples' experience of their daily life in New South Wales, from the arrival of the First Fleet to the present. Later in the year she would do the same in a very personal discussion - at unusual length - with Quentin Dempster on television in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's perspectives programme, 'State Line'. Her book, published earlier, 'A History of New South Wales', is the first history of the premier state to have been issued in over a century. It is also both political and social, cultural and insightful, as to many of the events which we tend to list in somewhat perfunctory fashion. The treatment is, perhaps, much of what might have been expected from a reflective historian who has also written well about the experiences of women in work in Australia, we well as the witty and perceptive Basket, 'Bag and Trolley: A Short History of Shopping in Australia' (1994).