Grace Karskens has written a new history of the Hawkesbury-Nepean river of New South Wales.
Six years after Sydney Cove was settled, former convicts and soldiers began to set up tiny farms along the banks in the impossibly beautiful riverlands, where Aboriginal people had been living for at least 50,000 years.
The settlers who took land on the river from the mid-1790s were there because of an extraordinary experiment devised half a world away.
Grace says modern Australia was not founded as a gaol, as we usually suppose, but as a colony.
Colonisation kicked off a slow and cumulative process of violence, theft of Aboriginal children and ongoing annexation of the river lands.
Yet despite that sorry history, Dyarubbin's Aboriginal people managed to remain on their Country, and they still live on the river today.
Further information
People of the River is published by Allen & Unwin.