The history of Australia is the past of a continent and a Commonwealth, of ancient and modern times, Indigenous people and settlers. The Cambridge History of Australia captures the expertise of 67 historians, across generations and fields of knowledge, to present a fresh account of the nation's past. Volume I, Indigenous and Colonial Australia, deals with Australia's history to 1901, when the colonies federated. The result of that Federation was the first new nation of the twentieth century. Volume II, The Commonwealth of Australia, encompasses Australian history as it has unfolded since 1901.

These volumes succeed a limited number of multi-authored antecedents, which form a telling historical sequence. On one view, the new Cambridge History of Australia follows the inter-war Cambridge History of the British Empire. Part One of Volume VII dealt with Australia, Part Two with New Zealand. Formally adviser to the three British editors of the eight-volume series, Ernest Scott of the University of Melbourne commissioned chapters from the ledgling Australian historical profession to produce a history that revealed the successful British settlement of Australia and the growth of a country coming to appreciate ‘the responsibilities as well as the privileges which nationhood involves’. Published in 1933, the book was used widely for two decades.

It was succeeded in 1955 by a new collaborative history edited by Gordon Greenwood of the University of Queensland, which was sponsored by the committee responsible for celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Australian Commonwealth in 1951. Its title, Australia: A Social and Political History, signalled a reorientation away from the Cambridge History's emphasis on exploration, settlement and constitutional development, and towards the growth of a distinctive society. Greenwood assembled younger practitioners in the emergent field of Australian history with the expectation that they could guide the student and provide the ‘layman’ with ‘an intelligent understanding of the development of his own society’.