Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0522843522, Hardcover)

A sense of Australian uncertainty runs through the period 1916-1935: were Australians a people with their own country, their own responsibilities, their own history to make? Or were they essentially Britons, relocated merely by some chance in a far corner of the globe? Was it their destiny to look forward bravely to an unknown future, or to look backwards on a fading imperial past? Clark takes up and follows as a reprise the themes of earlier volumes, and leaves a nation poised on its greatest trial of destiny - the outbreak of World War II. So concludes this great achievement of scholarship and vision - the story of a nation's soul.