Introduction: Connecting past, present and future

Australia's economic history is a remarkable story and one worth telling: the transformation in a little over two centuries of a largely subsistent indigenous economy and a small, initially impoverished, convict settlement to a nation of nearly 23 million people with advanced economic, social and political structures and among the highest standards of living in the world. It is the history of vast lands with rich exploitable resources, cyclical shocks and changes, and the new peopling of a continent to build a modern economy of workers and consumers. It is the history of business, community and government, of the interactions of private and public sectors. It is about nation building through the creation of major infrastructure, but also through leveraging the benefits of international economic linkages. It is also about tackling adversity - economic depressions in the 1840s, 1890s and 1930s and military conflict in 1914-18 and 1939-45. At the same time it is about building prosperity - in the 1860s to the 1880s, from 1945 to the 1970s, and most recently and quite spectacularly from the 1990s to the present. It is the recognition of some of the costs of that economic growth, particularly the severe impact on the prior Indigenous (i.e. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) population and on the environment, and how to redress those impacts. Finally, like all good history, Australia's tale is about human volition and behaviour and the institutions that are created to harness and govern that human endeavour - for our purposes, specifically how this has worked out in 'Terra Australis Incognita' through its economy. The history of Australian development, thus, has resonance for the country's own sense of itself. It also has interest for others, both as part of the global human story and for its distinctive insights. Australia's economic history has of course been written by previous generations, among them Coghlan, Shann, Fitzpatrick, Sinclair, Boehm, Schedvin and the Butlins, as Coleman explains in Chapter 1 of this volume. Nevertheless, this is a good time to rewrite our economic history.