My aim was to write a book which was short rather than long. Hence I chipped away at each chapter in order to reduce its length. At the same time I tried not to make the story too tight, too abbreviated: I did not want it to taste like condensed water.

I divided this history of Victoria into three parts in order to give more weight to the kind of social history which we often neglect. The first part examined Victoria from the coming of the Aboriginals to the end of the boom in the early 1890s. The second part looked at everyday life, especially around the turn of the century, with glimpses backwards and forwards. And the third part took up the story in the depression of the 1890s and ran through to the present.

I am grateful to Ian McLaren who gave me, many times, the benefit of his knowledge of Victorian history and its sources; to the Royal Historical Society of Victoria for permission to use extracts from my essay on the history of leisure which was published in The Victorian Historical Journal of February 1978; to Thomas Nelson Australia and David Syme & Co whose book 125 Years of Age published some of my remarks, repeated here, about David Syme and his newspapers; to Frank and Keir Strahan for finding many of the illustrations used in the book and to the University of Melbourne Archives for allowing us to use them; to Marion Adams, Eric Bird, Anna Blainey, Max Chamberlain, Sir Ernest Coates, Sir Ronald East, Judith Keene, Margaret Manion, Dinny O’Hearn, Bob Phillips, Colin Richards, George Slater and Frank Waters for guiding me to information or for correcting errors; to Liz Carey who typed the manuscript; to Suzie Boxshall who drew the maps; to Elizabeth Wood Ellem who made the index; and to Susan Haynes for her skill as editor and publisher.