 Cover of 2001 paperback edition | |
| Author | Geoffrey Blainey |
|---|---|
| Country | Australia |
| Language | English |
| Subject | History of Australia |
| Publisher | Sun Books |
Publication date | 1966 |
| Pages | 365 (1968 illustrated edition) |
The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia's History is a history book by Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey.
First published in 1966, the book examines how Australia's geographical remoteness, particularly from Great Britain, has been central to shaping the country's history and identity and will continue to shape its future. The long distance between Australia and the centre of the British Empire, along with the United States, made Australians unsure of their future economic prosperity.
Blainey writes about how the tyranny had been mostly surmounted and may have even worked in Australia's favour in some ways.
In one of the book's early chapters, Blainey challenges the notion that Australia was settled by Britain in the 18th century solely to serve as a place of exile for convicts. Blainey's assertion that strategic and commercial factors also influenced Britain's decision to establish a penal settlement in New South Wales led to significant debate among historians in Australia. [1]
The expression "the tyranny of distance" from the book's title has become common parlance in Australia. Although Blainey is widely credited with coining the term in his 1966 work, the term appeared five years previously in the geographic research of William Bunge. [2] Bunge uses the term in quotation marks, indicating that the phrase may have had earlier usage.
Reflecting on the 50th anniversary of the book's publication, historian Graeme Davison stated: "The Tyranny of Distance changed our map of the Australian past. It was a bestseller and a mind-changer... Few books on Australia have been as popular and influential." [3]
During the COVID-19 pandemic, a news article in the conservative magazine Quadrant cited the book in relation to how Australia's relative isolation from China's viral epicentre may have been favourable in containing the virus within Australia. [4]
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies is a 1997 transdisciplinary non-fiction book by Jared Diamond. In 1998, it won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book. A documentary based on the book, and produced by the National Geographic Society, was broadcast on PBS in July 2005.
Alan Louis Charles Bullock, Baron Bullock, was a British historian. He is best known for his book Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1952), the first comprehensive biography of Adolf Hitler, which influenced many other Hitler biographies.
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Geoffrey Norman Blainey is an Australian historian, academic, best selling author and commentator. He is noted for having written authoritative texts on the economic and social history of Australia, including The Tyranny of Distance. He has published over 40 books, including wide-ranging histories of the world and of Christianity. He has often appeared in newspapers and on television. He held chairs in economic history and history at the University of Melbourne for over 20 years. In the 1980s, he was visiting professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University. He received the 1988 Britannica Award for 'exceptional excellence in the dissemination of knowledge for the benefit of mankind', the first historian to receive that award and was made a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2000.
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The Tyranny of Distance may refer to:
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William Wheeler Bunge Jr. was an American geographer active mainly as a quantitative geographer and spatial theorist. He also became a radical geographer and anti-war activist in the US and Canada.
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Sun Books was an Australian publisher of paperback books, founded in Melbourne in 1965 by Geoffrey Dutton, Max Harris and Brian Stonier. Sun's three founders were all former employees of Penguin Australia who, having grown frustrated by the latter's tepid interest in home-grown content, had resigned in order to establish the imprint, envisioned as a publisher of “quality paperbacks for the sophisticated Australian reader ”, and a platform for local literary talent. Prior to its acquisition by Macmillan in 1981, Sun had published over 330 titles, of which 187 were first editions.
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