DAVID A. DAY has written more than twenty books to great acclaim, both here and overseas. Apart from six political biographies, including prize-winning biographies of John Curtin and Ben Chifley, he has written several books about the Second World War and others on Antarctica. His landmark history of Australia, Claiming a Continent, won the South Australian Festival Prize for Non-Fiction, while his book, Conquest: How societies overwhelm others, has been translated into several languages. A graduate of Melbourne and Cambridge universities, and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, he has been a research fellow at Clare College in Cambridge, a visiting fellow at Churchill College in Cambridge, a professor of history at University College Dublin, a visiting professor for two years at the University of Tokyo, and a visiting fellow at Aberdeen University in Scotland. He has served as the official historian of the Australian Customs Service and the Bureau of Meteorology and been an Australian Research Council senior research fellow at La Trobe University in Melbourne, where he is currently based.