Tim Flannery's brilliant anthology reveals Sydney's strange and secret life, from its unruly beginnings to its arrival as the 'queen of the south' a century later. Sydney was born like no other city before it: 1500 souls - both convicts and their gaolers - struggled during the tempestuous summer of 1788 to establish an outpost of empire in a remote and incomprehensible new land. Superbly edited and introduced by Tim Flannery, The Birth of Sydney includes the voices of its settlers and inhabitants from Aboriginal women to Irish rebels and Russian sailors. Charles Darwin, Anthony Trollope and Mark Twain join a host of others in these pages to write the biography of Australia's first city.