Elizabeth and John: The Macarthurs of Elizabeth Farm

*Winner, 2023 Ernest Scott Prize*

*Winner, 2023 NSW Premier’s History Awards, Australian History Prize*

*Shortlisted, 2023 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, Australian History Prize*

A landmark and revealing joint biography of Elizabeth and John Macarthur, from one of Australia’s most respected historians.

Elizabeth and John Macarthur were the first married couple to travel voluntarily from Europe to Australia, arriving in 1790, both aged 23, within three years of the initial invasion. John Macarthur soon became famous in New South Wales and beyond as a wool pioneer, a politician, and a builder of farms at Parramatta and Camden. For a long time, Elizabeth’s life was regarded as contingent on John’s and, more recently, John’s on Elizabeth’s. In the multi-award-winning Elizabeth and John, acclaimed historian Alan Atkinson draws on his work on the Macarthur family over 50 years to explore the dynamics of their strong and sinewy marriage, and family life across two generations. With the truth of Elizabeth and John Macarthur’s relationship much more complex and deeply human than other writers have suggested, Atkinson provides a finely drawn portrait of a powerful partnership.

’Based on fifty years of research and reflection by one of this country’s most original and creative scholars and finest writers, here is the story of the world made by settler Australia’s greatest family, the Macarthurs. No Australian historian has ever explored the inner lives of a married couple, their family and their milieu with such skill, passion and intensity. No one has brought to any subject in Australian history deeper insight into dreams, ambitions and tragedy that the British occupation of this continent entailed. Elizabeth and John is a stunning achievement by one of Australia’s greatest-ever historians.’ - Frank Bongiorno

’Enthralling and powerful. Alan Atkinson writes with the easy, lyrical elegance that comes of deep historical understanding and fine, slow history. In Elizabeth and John he weaves together the lives of the Macarthurs with the life of the mind, and brilliantly navigates the mysterious mirror maze between them.’ - Grace Karskens

’At once intimate and epic, inspired and deeply compassionate, this is the kind of book that can only come from a lifetime of close reading. Meticulously researched, imaginatively conceived and breathtaking in its ability to retrieve past worlds - both private and public. An exceptional work of biography and history written by one of Australia’s most original historians.’ - Mark McKenna.

Alan Atkinson is an Australian historian who first graduated in 1970. He has written a number of books, including The Europeans in Australia, in three volumes, the third of which won the Victorian Prize for Literature. He is an honorary professor and Doctor of Letters with The University of Sydney, and an honorary senior research fellow with The University of Western Australia.