It is with the arrival of the First Fleet that Cedar, Seals and Whaling Ships (Allen & Unwin, $29.95 pb, 32 pp), the second volume, begins. With the broad outline of the series providing both context and structure, the making of roads, the exploitation of natural resources, and the role of sailing and navigation, assume new meanings. Such scenes and stories may be more familiar, and Nicholson plays them like an old fiddle:

It is November 1830, and the waterfront at Sullivan’s Cove is busy – busier, you might think, than tiny Hobart Town really needs its port to be.

So begins the new book, evoking the arrival, the hasty unloading and the sailors of many nations that crowd the wharf and surrounding pubs. Also introduced through the vignette is the true story of eight men whose lives were lost in a whaling accident, and the words of the captain: ‘We searched for two days, but we found no trace of them!’ Welcome to colonial Australia. This, before the age of mechanisation, shows us the sheer physical difficulty, and often the brutality, of making – or plundering – a living in this new place. After cataloguing the meagre resources of the First Fleet and setting down the beginnings of settlement in New South Wales, the book describes in visceral detail the experience of whaling, including the rapid exploitation of bay whales and the appalling living conditions of the sailors. In the chapter ‘Exploiting the Land’, Nicholson points to recent research to suggest that John Macarthur’s wife Elizabeth may have had more of a hand in the raising of merino wool than has been recognised. He also notes the rapid destruction of Australia’s red cedar forests, and the fact that Aboriginal groups had more than fifty words for red cedar.

Nicholson, a former architect, revels in the physical evidence of the era. His drawings in pen, pencil and occasional watercolour show the buildings, boats, and beasts that populated early Australia. Chapters are devoted to the establishment of roads and to the shipping trade and shipbuilding, a business strictly controlled in the early years. That this rich, vivid narrative of Australia’s economic origins is a mere thirty-two pages (including a glossary and index) underlines what a skilful writer Nicholson is.

The anthology of explorers’ diaries and journals, Where is Here? 350 years of Exploring Australia (edited by Tim Flannery, Text, $22.95 pb, 330 pp), does the heavy lifting for students and teachers of Australian history. Flannery has chosen the key events and players from the European discovery and exploration of Australia, beginning with Jan Carstensz’s landing in the Gulf of Carpenteria in 1623. The Dutchman’s views set something of a template for centuries. Men like Carstensz – Dampier, de Vlamingh, Phillip, Batman – appraise much yet value little of the island continent, apart from what might be in it for them. Many of the forty-four entries touch upon encounters with Aboriginal people. It is also difficult to read the diaries and journals without reflecting upon the wider environmental history of Europeans in Australia. The theme of misreading the country and plain misunderstanding is constant; scenes of violent conflict between Europeans and indigenous people abound.

Of Aboriginal contact, one is almost relieved to read the 1848 journal of Ludwig Leichhardt, in Kakadu. ‘I could not help thinking how formidable they would have been had they been enemies instead of friends.’ Such affection, feeling, and respect is not common.

The book depicts scenes of extraordinary physical endurance. One example is Charles Stuart’s leading a party of scurvied men through drought country (in search of that elusive ‘large body of inland waters’), as the mercury bursts the thermometer’s glass. There is pleasure, too, in identifying what the writer describes: Joseph Banks first sights an animal ‘as large as a greyhound, of a mouse colour and very swift’.

Flannery has such rich source material to draw upon that very little in the way of explanation or footnoting is required; his introductions to entries are concise. These are portraits of the explorers as much as their discoveries. One feels nineteenth-century breath on the neck, sometimes greedy, sometimes brave, sometimes of purer scientific inquiry. The extracts from the diaries of Joseph Banks and Matthew Flinders reveal the more genuinely curious and scientific side of the exploring impulse. By contrast, Western Australian explorer David Carnegie shamefully and brutally imprisons an Aboriginal woman in 1896 to gain better access to the Indigenous peoples’ waterholes. Plus ça change?

Jackie French’s history of Australia, Gold, Graves and Glory (Scholastic, $14.99, 186 pp), the third book of the Fair Dinkum Histories, begins in 1850 with the arrival of the gold rush. This event was not an unalloyed good:

The government wasn’t sure it wanted a gold rush. As it was, there weren’t enough people to do all the jobs, now that transportation of convicts had effectively stopped. Who’s to look after the sheep, plant the wheat and build the houses, if everyone rushed off to find gold?

But rush they did and this energetic social and economic history charts what happened next, in the same informal tone.

The impact of the gold rush allows French to draw together key moments and themes in Australian history. These include the Eureka Stockade, the often-violent relations with Chinese miners and settlers, bushrangers, selectors and squatters, and the Aboriginal experience. The book also tries hard to encompass more than the east coast, pointing to changes elsewhere in Australia.

Pages are busy with text boxes, illustrations, and typeface changes, but the overall look is reasonably consistent. Many section headings distract from the narrative. Cartoons and illustrations, by Peter Sheehan, provide comic relief but bad puns abound:

A woman at home: ‘My husband never sends me any money.’

Postman: ‘It’s a miner problem.’

Not all of the gags sit comfortably with the text. The look of the books may draw inspiration from the popular Horrible History series, but here the text is more orthodox and avoids most of the gross-out opportunities. While the portrait of bushrangers is occasionally romanticised, French is reasonably clear on racism and its origins: ‘Australian settlers … ignorance would cause problems in Australia for at least the next hundred years.’

Nonetheless, the book provides an accessible and reasonably complex overview of a volatile era ending as the more robust colonies, transformed by the economic and social changes triggered by gold, move towards Federation.

The Jerilderie Letter is one of the key documents in Australian history, but what does it mean to young readers today? Having the opportunity to read Ned Kelly’s own words in a context that is clear and meaningful will help anyone who reflects on Kelly’s life and the meaning and making of the Kelly myth. In its original form, that prospect is far from appealing to any but the most determined scholar. Although Kelly was literate, he dictated the letter to gang member Joe Byrne. ‘Joe had good handwriting,’ editor Carole Wilkinson comments in her brief introduction, ‘but he wasn’t good at punctuation. The original letter is difficult to understand. It is a raving, rambling rant.’ So, how to make it readable, without bowdlerising the original?

In Ned Kelly’s Jerilderie Letter (Black Dog Books, $16.95 pb, 58 pp), Carole Wilkinson make the 8000-word original into something tighter and more coherent. In doing so, she projects the pungency, humour, and menace of the original letter for the modern reader. Kelly emerges like some kind of gangster-rapper cloaking his sins, always invoking the harm done to him, talking up his own menace.

A concise ‘who’s who in the Jerilderie letter’ helps the reading experience. No less important are Dean Jones’s twenty-one black-and-white illustrations. They offer a cinematic dimension that highlight key moments and conflicts. The images aid in pacing the text, and the balance of the two elements is carefully judged. The result is a seemingly modest book that tells a big story; it is as good a path into the Kelly myth, as young readers will discover. An afterword, glossary, timeline, and guide to other resources complete the work.