The settlement of Australia and New Zealand were among the most ambitions experiments in social engineering ever attempted. But the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who made it happen are often absent from the standard histories.

This is my case for including ordinary people in national history. It describes an emerging genre of history known as the 'new history from below', which focuses on individual experiences to give agency to those left out of the history they helped to make. This approach to national history, I believe, will provide us with a more accurate account of our past and help resolve the corrosive impact of the 'History Wars'.