In the 19th century Australia went from a penal colony struggling to survive to a thriving, prosperous community with a glowing future.

George Matcham Pitt's life spanned the best part of that century. A larger than life character with a booming voice and a fondness for quoting from classic poets, GM, as he was known, began as a humble farmer on the Hawkesbury and went on to become an auctioneer, landowner and founder of one of Australia's first and best-known stock and station agents, Pitt, Son & Badgery.

Now his great great granddaughter, a Pom based in London, sets out to tell the story of this remarkable man and the extraordinary country he lived in: a place of squatters and swagmen, convicts and free settlers, battlers and chancers, explorers and entrepreneurs - the men and women who in an astonishingly short time transformed Australia from the worst country in the world to a country to be reckoned with.

While the Aboriginal people who had lived on the continent for upwards on 60,000 years unmolested, looked on.