In the century and three-quarters of Australian history, a quite remarkable adaptation to a strange new environment has led from an inauspicious convict beginning to the creation of a stable new western community, democratic, relatively egalitarian, highly urbanised, heavily industrialised, one of the richest nations on earth. If the past three-quarters of a century have been preoccupied with the deliberate fostering and perfection of this urbanised society, these modern achievements still rest heavily on the remarkable performance in the first century, the period of the first pioneering trials and the later massive efforts to come to terms with and to control, for highly productive economic purposes, the vast resources of the Australian continent.

It is possible that the problems of control and utilisation of territory will again become an important issue in Australia and that not only the experience of the earlier attempts to develop technical and physical control but also the basic pattern of resource allocation in this process will become increasingly relevant. This book deals with the final forty years of the nineteenth century, the phase of Australian economic development dominated by the problem of utilising these natural resources. Although the study of this phase necessarily touches on many facets of Australian economic history, I have focused attention on the process which appears central to the success of these efforts, the creation of physical assets in the provision of large-scale rural equipment, the construction of new communications, especially railways, together with some other types of social capital and, finally, the establishment of urban assets of houses, factories and shops. These simple objects determined not merely the economic success but the basic security of the new Australian society; and they remain the base on which much of modern Australian life depends.

Technical economic history of any country, in the sense of economists' appraisal of actual realised processes of growth, is still unfortunately rare. I have found even less guidance in the few essays which exist elsewhere examining the sequence of economic growth in terms both of aggregate behaviour and the performance of major investment components.