Description

Today’s Australian States of Tasmania and Victoria, originally parts of the British Colony of New South Wales, were then known respectively as Van Diemen’s Land and the Port Phillip District. George Armytage, a free settler with ancestral roots in the north of England, founded a family dynasty in the first of these frontier lands, then expanded it in the second, and later beyond.

Author Dennis Green traces the momentous social changes through which the family lived and made its fortune: convict transportation, squatters, frontier conflict, bushranging, gold rush, and the regulation of land sales. Many settlers gave up, but the Armytage spirit and achievement thrived.