Albany Unravelled

Albany Unravelled is a new and fascinating account of the foundation and history of the King George's Sound/Albany region of Western Australia, written in honour of its upcoming Bicentenary in 2026. Ranging from pre-settlement, through the town's years as a whaling port, up to just before the Great Depression, experienced local authors Steffan Silcox and Douglas Sellick paint in miniature, as it were, and adhere strictly to verifiable fact to correct both sensationalist and agenda-driven histories. It would be wrong to call Albany Unravelled merely a local history. Just as each of us lives in a village made up of the inhabitants of our daily lives, regardless of where we live, all history is in the best sense local history. In particular the story of early Australian colonisation is by necessity intimate, because the decisions of a relatively small number of people had enormous influence on the nation we were to become. As one of the earliest and most isolated settlements in Australia, Albany's story is both representative and unique. The product of years of research and sifting of primary material, this book is likely to remain the definitive one-volume history of the region for many decades to come.