Grace Karskens's groundbreaking book The Rocks: Life in Early Sydney won the 1998 NSW Premier's Award for Local and Regional History and established the author as a leading historian of colonial Australia. As Project Historian for the Cumberland- Gloucester Streets Archaeological Project, she combined history and archaeology to explore the lost world of the Rocks neighbourhoods in her book Inside the Rocks.
Grace Karskens writes with the passion and insight of a novelist, and the accuracy of a historian. . . . To read it is to have one's imagination stretched. --Thomas Keneally, author, Schindler's List Grounded in reality, free of stereotypes, and balanced in its judgment. It neither romanticizes nor condemns and thereby provides a foundation story that we can all recognize. --Sydney Morning Herald