A highly awarded work of non-fiction, Dancing with Strangers is a close analysis of the initial encounter between the British settlers of New South Wales and Australia's first peoples.

Dancing with Strangers is Inga Clendinnen's seminal account of the moment in January 1788 when the First Fleet arrived in Sydney Harbour and a thousand British men and women, some of them convicts and some of them free, encountered the Australians living there. 'These people mixed with ours,' wrote a British observer after landfall, 'and all hands danced together.' What followed would shape relations between the peoples for the next two centuries.

Winner, Kiriyama Prize 2004
Winner, Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction, NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2004
Winner, Best History Book, Queensland Premier's Literary Awards 2004