Book excerpt: In 1788 Britain founded a tiny new colony half a world away. For the next two centuries millions of young men and women from all over the British Isles - but mostly from England - settled in Australia. They brought with them the best traditions of the "mother country", believing that their manifest destiny was to create a new and better Britannia. Yet for the last forty years the cultural fire that these young pioneers carried with them from the British Isles hearth has been assailed from all sides. Whether Anglo-Australia eventually survives or succumbs, its fate may well be a microcosm of what awaits the rest of the British diaspora.