This course adopts a thematic approach, focusing on work and workers in a series of formative contexts: Aboriginal society; the convict system; pastoralism and mining; colonial plantation economies; domestic labour and the family; small farming; manufacturing and industrialisation. It seeks to analyse the interactions of race, class, gender and ethnicity in Australia's development, to examine their role in forming a national identity, and to locate a 'settler society' within the world economy. At a more general level, this course will link Australia's experience with that of other colonised countries: for instance, by seeing how labour forces are created, and how Australians themselves have contrived this in Queensland, Fiji and Papua New Guinea. It will also clarify and trace to their source Australians' perceptions of their own society and of other societies that impinge upon it, whether through immigration or as neighbours in Asia and the Pacific.