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This thesis enlarges the history of Australian settlement. I submit that when tents are foregrounded in the historical landscape we are obliged to re-imagine the material and social circumstances as well as the cultural evolution that accompanied the highly uncertain process of colonisation. Combining both chronological and thematic approaches, a number of key historical events are analysed and structured into a narrative of camping. I show that the absence of tents from existing histories (except as ‘colour’) is a consequence of historians’ favouring received ideas of civilisation, progress, and permanence. The corollary to this has been a de-emphasis of the dependence of settlers on temporary habitation. A re-balancing of the narrative requires a concept of ‘ephemeral settlement’ to define the recurring periods between arrival and permanent occupation. The camp emerges as a site of contact, possibility, and new beginnings. From the first English camp at Sydney Cove there began throughout the colonies a cycle of periods of dependence on tents and other temporary structures. Living outdoors exposed settlers to their new natural environment and reshaped domestic and social experience. Pastoralists took up a nomadic existence living under tarpaulins or in versions of Aboriginal bark shelters (gunyahs). The widespread use of gunyahs suggests a largely unrecognised cross-cultural sharing of knowledge arising from unavoidable common circumstances. Camping out became an accepted part of colonial travel and quickly became recognised as a quintessential ‘Australian’ experience. On journeys of exploration the camp was the point of orientation and camping itineraries preceded maps as guides to the overlanders who pushed out the frontiers. The gold rushes introduced a long period of unsettlement in which a large proportion of the population was camped out, and it was this social condition that underwrote the political character of the goldfields. In the second half of the nine