Mark Cully
Waves of Plenty: Immigration and the Making of Australia
Black Inc., 2026
The definitive story of how immigration made Australia
Many Australians can trace family journeys to new lives in Australia. In this landmark work, Mark Cully tells the full story of immigration to Australia, from pre-colonial origins through colonisation, the gold rushes, the post-war immigration boom, the end of the White Australia policy, and the modern era of unbound temporary migration.
Rigorously researched, the book dismantles persistent myths, gives human faces to statistics, and maps the forces that transformed a distant colony into one of the world's most diverse societies. Cully traces how immigration has changed Australia, making it bigger, younger, richly diverse, less provincial and more powerful.
This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand where Australia came from, the fraught politics of immigration, and lessons for the future.
“Supported by an expert economist’s keen eye for detail and filled with scintillating facts, Waves of Plenty weaves individual stories against the backdrop of larger social, economic and political forces to show how the most pivotal periods of migration shaped our nation.”
About the Author
Mark Cully was chief economist for the Department of Immigration and Citizenship and the Department of Industry, as well as chair of the OECD's Working Party on Migration. As head of macroeconomic policy in the Treasury, he led the design of the JobKeeper program during the pandemic. He is an expert panel member of the Fair Work Commission and a visiting fellow at ANU's Crawford School of Public Policy.
