The Fatal Shore: History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia 1787 - 1868

by Robert Hughes

An extraordinary volume--even a masterpiece - about the early history of Australia that reads like the finest of novels. Hughes captures everything in this complex tableau with narrative finesse that drives the reader ever deeper into specific facts and greater understanding. He presents compassionate understanding of the plights of colonists--both freemen and convicts - and the Aboriginal peoples they displaced. One of the very best works of history I have ever read.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Australia, World History, Historical, Travel, Classics

618 pages, Paperback

First published December 12, 1986

About the author

Robert Studley Forrest Hughes, AO was an Australian art critic, writer and television documentary maker who has resided in New York since 1970. He was educated at St Ignatius' College, Riverview before going on to study arts and then architecture at the University of Sydney. At university, Hughes associated with the Sydney "Push" – a group of artists, writers, intellectuals and drinkers. Among the group were Germaine Greer and Clive James. Hughes, an aspiring artist and poet, abandoned his university endeavours to become first a cartoonist and then an art critic for the Sydney periodical The Observer, edited by Donald Horne. Around this time he wrote a history of Australian painting, titled The Art of Australia, which is still considered to be an important work. It was published in 1966. Hughes was also briefly involved in the original Sydney version of Oz magazine, and wrote art criticism for The Nation and The Sunday Mirror.

Hughes left Australia for Europe in 1964, living for a time in Italy before settling in London, England (1965) where he wrote for The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph, The Times and The Observer, among others, and contributed to the London version of Oz. In 1970 he obtained the position of art critic for TIME magazine and he moved to New York. He quickly established himself in the United States as an influential art critic.In 1975, he and Don Brady provided the narration for the film Protected, a documentary showing what life was like for Indigenous Australians on Palm Island.

In 1980, the BBC broadcast The Shock of the New, Hughes's television series on the development of modern art since the Impressionists. It was accompanied by a book of the same name; its combination of insight, wit and accessibility are still widely praised. In 1987, The Fatal Shore, Hughes's study of the British penal colonies and early European settlement of Australia, became an international best-seller.

Hughes provided commentary on the work of artist Robert Crumb in parts of the 1994 film Crumb, calling Crumb "the American Breughel". His 1997 television series American Visions reviewed the history of American art since the Revolution. He was again dismissive of much recent art; this time, sculptor Jeff Koons was subjected to criticism. Australia: Beyond the Fatal Shore (2000) was a series musing on modern Australia and Hughes's relationship with it. Hughes's 2002 documentary on the painter Francisco Goya, Goya: Crazy Like a Genius, was broadcast on the first night of the BBC's domestic digital service. Hughes created a one hour update to The Shock of the New. Titled The New Shock of the New, the program aired first in 2004. Hughes published the first volume of his memoirs, Things I Didn’t Know, in 2006.

Reviews

[Debbie W. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why I chose to read this book:
1. I have always been interested in Australia's penal colony history. I added this book to my WTR list after reading some GR friends' reviews. Even author Christina Baker Kline references it in her book The Exiles; and,
2. January 2023 is my "Books That Come From a Land Down Under" Month!

Praises:
1. author Robert Hughes has written a well-researched, comprehensive record about the "founding" of Australia, namely the British "System" (the ancestor to the Gulag) that transported convicts from 1788 to 1868 to penal colonies in Australia, Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), and Norfolk Island.
Some information he includes:
- the horrendous living and working conditions of the "laboring poor" in 18th-century London;
- how criminals were prosecuted. Majority of convicts were transported for larceny;
- a detailed description of 1788's First Fleet (11 ships!) to Sydney Cove;
- how convicts were treated prior to transportation, incidents while sailing and upon landing in Australia, and life on land in the early years;
- attitudes and behaviors of various governors and commandants towards the convicts. Although some were empathetic and brought improvements to the penal colonies, most were sadistic and downright cruel;
- one in seven convicts were women. Contrary to popular belief, they were not transported for prostitution as that was not a transportable offense. Hughes describes their horrible ordeals while in transport as well as in the colonies; and,
- the eventual abolition of the System and its aftermath;
2. Hughes recognizes and acknowledges that little had been recorded about the Aborigines and their history prior to colonization; however, he does include information about how they lived, what they ate, how they hunted and their tribal lifestyle. He also includes a large portion about Aborigines living in Tasmania and their eventual extinction on that island. Aborigines were also bribed by soldiers to track escaped convicts, adding to the extreme hatred of these indigenous people;
3. Hughes includes 58 pages of Footnotes and Bibliography, 30 pages of black & white photos, illustrations and portraits, and 9 pages of maps (which I frequently perused!); and,
4. while visiting Australia in 1995, we were disappointed to find no evidence of convict history, especially in Sydney. Hughes explains why in his final chapter.

Some Personal Points of Interest:
1. by the 1820s, colonists started developing their unique Aussie accent;
2. some political insurrectionists from other countries, including Canada, were transported to Australia; and,
3. I learned the origin of many Australian place names.

New Vocabulary I Learned:
- Luddite: someone opposed to technology/destroyed machinery
- holystone: brittle sandstone used to clean and whiten a ship's deck
- refractory: stubborn/unmanageable
- kakotopia: a state in which the worst possible conditions exist in government, society, law, etc. (e.g. Norfolk Island penal colony)

Niggle:
It lacks the narrative writing style common in many of today's nonfiction publications. As one GR friend so eloquently stated, "ponderous"!

Overall Thoughts:
Everything I wanted to know about Australia's convict System and more! Hughes sure did his homework. Makes a great reference guide!

Recommendation?
History isn't pretty, and the founding of Australia is downright ugly. If history, specifically Australia's, intrigues you, then I highly recommend this book!
Not for the faint of heart nor those who prefer light reading.

August 2023 Update:
While cleaning house a few days ago, I came across a poster my husband and I purchased in 1995 while visiting Old Sydney Town titled The First Fleet: 1788.
With a brief overview, this poster depicts all eleven ships and the tonnage of each, as well as all the names of officials, midshipmen, marines, seamen, and of course, the convicts on each ship. An * marks the names of those passengers who passed away while onboard.
Departure and arrival dates at each port are given, as well as a "List of Provisions, Livestock, etc." (including "Plants and Seeds") that were also brought onboard.
A smaller poster was also attached depicting a map of Early Sydney: 1803-1810 listing the principal residents.
A most thrilling find!
Both posters make a fine addition to this informative volume!

[Orsodimondo · Rating 5 out of 5]

L’ALTRO LATO DELLA FRONTIERA



La povertà non è un fatto naturale, diceva Mandela, è creata dall’uomo, e l’uomo può mettervi fine.

Gli inglesi della fine del Settecento e dell’inizio dell’Ottocento prendevano alla lettera questa massima, e agivano in base al seguente principio: la povertà non è un fatto naturale, se sei povero è colpa tua - due volte colpa tua, perché vuol dire che non vuoi diventare ricco.
Se nel tuo stato di povertà commetti un crimine, per esempio attenti alla mia proprietà, anche solo rubando un frutto, sei colpevole quattro volte, e la legge (la mia legge, quella che io ho confezionato su misura per difendermi) ti punirà otto volte.
La proprietà e il rispetto della stessa erano alla base della legge. Per reati che avrebbero meritato una semplice multa, si finiva in galera e poi condannati all’impiccagione, infine graziati, ma deportati oltre oceano.


Apollo Bay, sulla costa sud orientale.

Robert Hughes è stato soprattutto ottimo critico d’arte: in questa occasione si dedica ad altra musa e si inventa grande storico. Facendo uso di una quantità impressionante di fonti (da quelle ufficiali agli studi altrui, a uno sterminato numero di diari e carteggi privati, opera di ufficiali e semplici militari, di detenuti e deportati, di viaggiatori e governatori, tutti scrivevano e hanno lasciato le loro memorie – l’analfabetismo doveva essere davvero basso già allora in Inghilterra), imbastisce un magnifico libro che per me è una lezione di come si fa e si divulga la Storia: Hughes dimostra ampia e profonda conoscenza di una vasta materia che va dall’economia e la politica, alla storia militare, alla biologia e zoologia e farmacia, a come si costruivano le vele e gli alberi maestri delle navi, a come si usano le ricerche i dati e le fonti più diverse, con la capacità descrittiva di chi è abituato a frequentare opere pittoriche, con sapienza linguistica, ironia, passione, la giusta distanza...

E come dice il sottotitolo, siamo davvero nel regno dell’epica: la nascita del nuovissimo continente, l’ultima frontiera degli occidentali ha l’aura del mito.



Per risolvere il problema della criminalità interna e del sovraffollamento carcerario, l’Inghilterra pensò di prendere i classici due piccioni con una fava: convertire le pene più severe, incluse quelle con sentenza d’impiccagione, in deportazione oltre oceano – la nuova terra avrebbe fornito tessuto per le vele e legno per le navi, lana e grano – avrebbe ripulito la madre patria della feccia umana e creato una nuova colonia strappandola agli interessi francesi (che in realtà, erano modesti in quella parte del mondo)…


Ayers Rock

Le cose non andarono esattamente così: da un punto di vista strettamente economico non ci fu ritorno, ogni deportato costava più di quanto potesse produrre, la nuova terra si dimostrò ostica, non in grado di procurare quanto sperato.



L’Australia fu inizialmente popolata di carcerati e guardie, il nucleo originario furono ladri, assassini, prostitute, truffatori, oppositori politici irlandesi e scozzesi, e i loro secondini.

Hughes racconta passo per passo come si sviluppò l’insediamento e si allargò e divenne quello che conosciamo: lo fa con descrizioni che qua e là mi hanno lasciato senza fiato per la bellezza, la vivezza, l’ingegno e il colore.
Su tutte, l’arrivo della prima flotta, il primo impatto dell’uomo bianco con quella terra sconfinata sconosciuta inesplorata indefinita:


Il porto di Sydney.

Fu un momento che possiamo paragonare alla rottura di un diaframma. La baia dove si stavano inoltrando le undici navi britanniche non recava impronte della storia europea. Il suo tempo, fino all’attimo che vide le vele gonfie e le prore rampanti doppiare il South Head, non aveva conosciuto date. Gli aborigeni e la fauna intorno a loro possedevano quel paesaggio da tempo immemorabile e nessun altro occhio umano li aveva mai veduti. E adesso, la campana di vetro della distanza veniva infranta, irreparabilmente.

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book I’ve been meaning to get to for years. I listened to this as an audio book, but about half way through it became very clear that I was going to need to buy the damn thing.

Kids in Australian schools – both when I was growing up and also now from talking to my daughters – tend to learn basically bugger all about Australian History. You know, kids are told something about Captain Cook, maybe a bit about the fact that there were convicts (although generally they are told these were mostly sent out for minor crimes – poor things – during the Great UK Hanky Shortage, it is surprising how many were supposed to have been transported for stealing hankies or bread) and then straight onto the gold rush and everything is just dandy.

This book is certainly not the kind of stuff we were taught in high school. It is an utterly devastating read. The recounting of the horrors of Norfolk Island is like reading about Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib on steroids. Commandant after commandant arrived and, it seemed, tried to outdo the previous one in barbarity. Each time you would think things simply couldn’t get worse, and yet they always seemed to.

Price, a new commandant set to outdo all of the previous monsters of the island, was simply perverse. When ships would arrive with convicts the captain might say to him, ‘That man is quiet and has been no trouble at all’ – now, any normal person might be expected to show some kindness towards such a prisoner – but Price did the exact opposite, believing that such a recommendation only showed the hypocritical nature of the convict. There is speculation that Price was one of those stereotypical repressed homosexuals that projects his self-loathing onto those around him by inflicting infinite punishments on men he suspected of being homosexual. There is little question he was obsessed with sodomy. Although, to be fair, he was hardly the only one. As Hughes points out, taking a group of men in their twenties, removing all comforts from them (in fact, whipping them literally for looking sideways or singing), removing any hope they may ever have of living through their torment and then to expect them not to seek comfort in each other’s arms seems too stupid to believe.

But the savagery of the punishments almost defies belief. Men receiving so many lashes of the cat-of-nine-tails that dogs were able to lick at the pools of blood left at their feet and ants could walk away with lumps of meat that had splattered from their backs. Or men would receive a sentence of 300 lashes, but be given 100 one week and then being brought back a week later once their back had begun to scab over to receive another hundred – often there were maggots feasting on their putrefied flesh by this stage.

Often female prisoners were not able to be housed in the prison factory they were required to work in. So, they had to find alternate accommodation to rent. But this accommodation generally cost their entire wage. With no money left over to buy food they had the choice of either prostitution or starvation. As Hughes points out, none of the women were sent to Australia as prostitutes, it was not a transportable offence, but few were able to avoid being raped on the way over and then prostitution when they got here.

Hughes makes it clear that not everyone sent over was as poorly treated as those on Norfolk Island or Tasmania or Morton Bay. But these places existed to serve a purpose and that purpose was much like the Gulags of the Soviet Union – you didn’t need a large percentage of the population to be sent to such hells to make people understand it was a good idea to do their best to avoid going there.

Some of the things detailed in this book defy belief. The men grouping together to draw lots to see which of them would be murdered and who would be the murderer and who the witnesses to the murder was perhaps the most disturbing story I’ve ever read. Being good Christians they understood that suicide would mean eternal damnation – and they figured they had spent enough time suffering the punishments of an arbitrary, absolute tyrant to risk God’s endlessly innovative tortures. So, they decided that if one of them would murder one of the other prisoners the guy murdered would get straight to heaven, the guy who killed him would get to confess his sins in Sydney to a priest before being hanged and so he would get into heaven too and those who witnessed the murder might also end up hanged too – and if not, they might not be lucky and not end up being sent back to the island. Therefore one welcomed murder, a kind of group euthanasia, would end up a win-win-win.

There had been a convict rebellion on Norfolk Island and after the trial a Catholic priest was sent in to tell the convicts who were to live and who were to be executed. I need to quote this, as it sums up all of the horrors of the convict system better than anything else I can imagine.

“Those who were to live wept bitterly, whilst those doomed to die, without exception, dropped to their knees, and with dry eyes, thanked God that they were to be delivered from such a place. Who can describe their emotions?”

Dear God! And the living shall envy the dead.

This is a fascinating book. Although you might not think so from this review, there are parts of it that are quite funny – Hughes has a dry-as-dust sense of humour. Some of it might even reinforce your belief in human dignity, courage and perhaps even goodness. But there is a great deal of this book that makes your blood boil. An absolutely stunning book – I can’t praise it too highly.

[robin friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Historical Masterpiece

As luck would have it, I recently [2001] had the opportunity to make a brief business trip to Australia. I knew very little about Australia and thought the best way to get some brief but non-superficial background would be to learn something of its history. I opted to read Robert Hughes's book which tells the story of Australia's founding and of its convict past. The book is lengthy, even too lengthy to complete on the 14 hour flights from the West Coast of the United States to Sydney and back. But the story was fascinating, and the book was well worth the attention and effort.

Hughes tells the story of the discovery of Australia, the decision of Great Britain to "transport" its convicted to the continent, the various kinds of lives the convicts found there, the aboriginal settlers and their treatment by the newcomers, and the ultimate creation of a new society. There are harrowing accounts of the passage from Britain to Australia in the convict ships, and still shocking accounts of the secondary places of punishment created in Australia for repeat offenders -- places such as Norfolk Island, Port Aurthur, and Macquarrie Bay. Hughes describes these nineteenth century camps as precursors of the Gulag in our own time, and I am afraid he is correct. They reminded me to of Andersonville Prison in our own Civil War but on a much broader, more wicked scale. The description of the prisons and barbaric punishments were to me the most vivid portions of the book.

Besides the horror stories, there is a great deal of nuanced, thoughtful writing in the book about the settlement and building of Australia and of the dangers of facile over-generalization about how the convicts fared, or about virtually any other historical subject. Some were able to serve out their sentences and rise to prosperity and a new life. Others were shamefully abused. The history of the aboriginal peoples too is described and it is an unhappy subject, alas.

Hughes begins with the early days of the transport and concludes when the system was finally abolished in the 1850's as a result of protests and of the Australian gold rush.

After reading this book, I thought I had realized my goal of learning something of Australia. More importantly, I felt part of the land even though I hadn't seen it before and will likely never see it again. Places that I read about and that were only names took on character and importance.
I have read a substantial amount of United States history but hadn't read about Australia before. This book is well-documented, eloquently written and has a feel for the pulse of its subject. It is an outstanding work of history and is sure to broaden the human perspective of the reader.

Robin Friedman

[zed · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought this a fascinating history and analysis considering that I had yet to read a comprehensive history of transportation to Australia. Fairly long with the text of my copy being 603 pages then add a further 80 pages that covered Appendices, Abbreviations, Notes, a Bibliography and the index. The end notes were very good, and the bibliography is an excellent source for anyone interested in the subject.

The title comes from the Moreton Bay song.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moreton...
“I am a native of Erin's island but banished now to the fatal shore,”

To quote author Robert Hughes “…..the truly durable legacy of the convict system was not ‘criminality’ but the revulsion from it: the will to be as decent as possible, to sublimate and wipe out the convict stain, even at a cost – heavily paid for in later education – of historical amnesia.”
In reality the vast majority of the 160,000 transportees did their time and were emancipated with few going back to mother England as life was far superior in the new world of Australia. The “stain” was really the inhumane treatment that was meted out to a few reoffenders and later those transported to Van Diemen’s Land and Norfolk Island that was a form of sadism such was the treatment of those convicts.

In terms of crime most were petty offences committed in England; it was those that reoffended that were mostly transported who were usually poverty-stricken such were the times. There were exceptions, forgers for example, and the Irish transportees were mostly sent for political reasons. Crime has always been a subject that politicians will use to shore up support and Hughes exposed that hypocrisy often both in England and in the colonies. For example, as the debate that was heading towards abolition was hotting up there were those in the ruling class of New South Wales that had claimed that the mass transportation was the cause of massive criminality in the descendants of the transportees. In New South Wales itself, such was the separation of classes, there was a disgust towards those that had been emancipated, but once it looked that there was not going to be free labour with abolition they changed their mind as to that with reports of criminality being a “monstrous caricature” by Whig politicians.

Hughes wrote this book back in the 1980s and I think I have personally seen a slight change in attitude towards our convict past. From what I can ascertain it is better taught in schools, though my generation still seems to think “we just turned up”. Hughes' asks would Australians have done anything different if it had not begun as a jail. He surmises that we would not have had a collective amnesia to that past for as long as we had. We preferred (and in some cases still do) Mother County history, for example. There are still residues of that attitude to this day, think of the lack of support for a republic through to the more buffoonery examples of a recent Australian Prime Minister knighting a British prince. And for all that comment I am as guilty, having had in the past a preference for foreign history over just about all things Australian. It took a visit to Norfolk Island to really open my eyes to our past and not just read interesting snippets or immerse myself in our WW2 history.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

I read a review from a good reads friend who stated that “…….Robert Hughes writing is, well, florid. He writes well but he is just too adjectival for my tastes.” And I have to agree with that. I spent a lot of times looking up archaic words and event’s that were interesting to me as such, but is not normally my style of history telling. This is also very much an opinionated telling, and I do prefer to make my own mind up and not be lead. Be that as it may, I think this is a must-read for anyone interested in the subject and does modern Australians a great service in explaining a past that some just are not interested in due to the so-called “stain” of criminality or even the perception that it is “boring”. It is not boring and is in fact a very interesting colonial history and with that I recommend this book highly.

[Paul Haspel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fate must have seemed cruel indeed, to those first Britons transported as convicts to Australia. The 15,900-mile voyage of the “First Fleet” from Portsmouth, England, to Botany Bay in New South Wales, took almost eight months – about as long as a manned flight to Mars would take today. Once the convicts and their guards arrived, they found an unfamiliar and seemingly harsh landscape where everything seemed to be the reverse of what they had known back in England. And yet, from such inauspicious beginnings, a great nation was born, as Robert Hughes makes clear in a book filled with equal doses of horror and paradox.

The Fatal Shore takes its title from an early-nineteenth-century convict ballad that chronicles the process by which convicts transported to Australia were “assigned” to free or paroled planters:

“The very day we landed upon the Fatal Shore,
The planters stood around us, full twenty score or more;
They ranked us up like horses and sold us out of hand,
They chained us up to pull the plough, upon Van Diemen’s Land.”

Author Robert Hughes, a well-known art historian, gained throughout his long literary and scholarly career a reputation for being a bit of a contrarian; and in his preface to The Fatal Shore he notes how, for many years, “Amnesia seemed to be a condition of patriotism” in Australia; in contrast to the justifiable pride with which Australians celebrated the heroism of ANZAC soldiers at Gallipoli in 1915, “there seemed to be so little in our early history to which we could point with pride” (p. xiv). Knowing full well that some Australians would resent his evocation of the difficult heritage that is the convict system, Hughes nonetheless stubbornly, and characteristically, forged ahead, working from his belief that “whether or not England should feel ashamed of creating the System, Australians certainly had cause to be proud of surviving it and of creating their own values despite it” (pp. xiv-xv).

The early chapters of The Fatal Shore not only chronicle the beginnings of the “First Fleet” settlement, but also set forth the world of Georgian England from which the convicts were sent – a world in which property rights often trumped human rights. A society-wide assumption that criminality resulted from a sort of genetic predisposition made it easy for affluent and powerful Britons of that time to conclude that the proper solution was a sort of “quarantine” – sending the country’s criminal element as far away from Britain as was humanly possible. The possibility that crime in Britain might have something to do with British society’s social injustices and inequities seems to have occurred to no one. The result of this way of thinking was the colonization of Australia; and Hughes’s verdict regarding the settlement of Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) – “a muddled and squalid affair” (p. 120) – could also be applied with regard to the colonization of other areas such as New South Wales and Norfolk Island.

Hughes devotes considerable attention to the fine points of the convict culture that developed in colonial Australia. He focuses, for example, on the particular travails faced by women convicts, LGBT convicts, and Aboriginal Australians. The convicts included not only ordinary criminals but also political prisoners from Ireland, transported for resistance against British rule; the speaker of one ballad called “Moreton Bay,” about a convict settlement in modern-day Queensland, laments that “I am a native of Erin’s island, but banished now to the fatal shore” (p. 421). With brutal punishments – hundreds of lashes – being customary for those who violated the system’s strict norms, convicts learned to master the “government stroke,” doing just enough work to avoid drawing notice and punishment from the authorities.

And then there were those who escaped into the wilderness and became bushrangers, continuing in a practical manner their opposition to the system. Those readers who like stories of the “flash lads” of Australian history – tales of wild anti-heroes like Ned Kelly – will enjoy the saga of Matthew Brady, an outlaw who distinguished himself by his chivalrous attitude toward women, and who responded to Sir George Arthur’s posting of a reward for his capture by defiantly, and waggishly, posting a notice of his own: “It has caused Matthew Brady much concern that such a person known as Sir George Arthur is at large. Twenty gallons of rum will be delivered to any person that can deliver his person to me” (p. 232).

Among the many grim accounts of millions of lashes being meted out, of ever-more-severe and torturous punishments being designed by British officials who believed that the only way to deter crime in Britain was to make the name of Australia synonymous with absolute terror, relatively few sympathetic figures emerge. One is Lachlan Macquarie, the Scottish-born New South Wales governor who found that the “idea of Australia as a theatre of horror acted out for a distant audience was not to his moral taste”, and who was seen by faraway British officialdom as “too lenient because he, alone among the early governors of New South Wales, really thought about the rights of these prisoners” (p. 301). Another Scot, the British naval officer Alexander Maconochie, would emerge during his governorship of Norfolk Island as “the one and only inspired penal reformer to work in Australia throughout the whole history of transportation” (pp. 488-89). These exceptions aside, however, Hughes’s account of life in the penal settlements of N.S.W., Norfolk Island, and V.D.L. is, by and large, a grim and protracted litany of cruelty and horror, where colonial officials unleash their latent sadism in an effort to break the spirit of convicts, and convicts endure the unendurable because their spirit is all they have, and they are determined not to let that spirit be broken.

Hughes also shows how the Australian transportation system was presented in literature and art. Two of Charles Dickens’s novels have a strong Australian connection – David Copperfield (1850), where the improvident Mr. Micawber leaves England at novel’s end to make a new start in Australia, and Great Expectations (1860), in which Abel Magwitch, a transported-for-life New South Wales convict who has illegally returned to England, turns out to be the mysterious benefactor of the novel’s protagonist, Pip. More specific to the Australian convict experience is Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life (1872), a long and uneven novel that nonetheless conveys with vividness the horrors of the System.

I first read The Fatal Shore when it came out in 1986, a year before my first visit to Australia in 1987. I re-read it this year, while on my second visit to Australia. Much has changed in those thirty years, but the great and enduring spirit of the Australian people, and the beauty of the Australian landscape, remain unchanged. The always-controversial Hughes raised more than a few hackles when he published The Fatal Shore; some Australians seem to have felt that he was blowing the proverbial whistle, or airing too much metaphorical dirty laundry, in presenting in such detail the horrors of colonial Australia. Today, however, Hughes is honoured with a plaque on Circular Quay’s Writers’ Walk, in the heart of Sydney, and all is, to some extent, forgiven. And The Fatal Shore, now as then, provides a compelling look at Australia’s beginnings.

[Pam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though written almost 35 years ago, The Fatal Shore is a remarkably fresh book about poor planning and abuse of power. Partly this is because the book is so well written. Like other things Australian (the author grew up in Australia) it offers a panoramic, big view. No doubt I’m not the only reader who was somewhat misinformed about the continent’s beginnings, both native and colonial. My views have been influenced by books and movies with a somewhat romanticized coloration and “roots” songs like “Wild Colonial Boy.” —So mistakenly cheery.

Hughes has style and thoroughness. Epic thoroughness. This is not to say the book is repetitive. Well, expect lots of flogging throughout. It’s very complete. I found it almost an ordeal to read and digest it all. It’s arranged chronologically beginning with the British government of the late 18th century and its attempts to deal with increased crime and the criminals they didn’t know what to do with. Sadly, with no penitentiary system other than bursting, rotting hulks in the Thames they opted to send convicted “capital “ felons to a new colony far, far away. Out of sight, out of mind. Murderers and the most serious of felons were hung not transported. The remaining convicts were transported to a basically unknown and misunderstood land to accept term punishments of 7, 14 and full life. This “mercy of the king” seems very close to slavery although the convicts were not strictly owned by individuals and might with luck and good behavior eventually win partial releases, full releases and sometimes the right to return to Britain though few took that option. Many didn’t live to see the end of their terms.

The result of transportation was barbarically cruel in most cases and women (yes there were woman and children) had it particularly rough. Women often became virtual sex slaves to the managers and ruling class or sold themselves to get by.

Transportable felony crimes were sometimes not what we would consider felonies at all, especially with the “first fleet.” Orphan children stealing property to get by, women with no chance of making their way honestly in Britain and the most pitiful of criminals were transported as felons. Crimes against property were always considered heinous. Imagine being shackled and cuffed in a ship for five months and transferred to an unknown place to be worked in a chain gang, poorly fed and clothed for 7 years for stealing 8 cucumbers from someone’s garden. Hughes says it was so. Later Irish political prisoners and difficult religious dissenters joined the mix as well as more serious criminal types.

We are shown that transportation of a “criminal” class was expected to rid the British isles of crime—of course it didn’t. No one seems to have thought of dealing with the poverty and displacement caused by the early Industrial Age that pushed people from their time honored work in rural areas. The poor, the starving and the unsightly were considered criminal and sent away. Their punishment in Australia was ghastly and cruel and drew sadistic behavior from their supposed guardians and masters. The nomadic aboriginal people were abused and treated in the worst way.

Hughes follows the 80 some years of the system through almost 700 pages. Not exactly cheery reading but eye opening. The good news is that Australia is now populated by good, normal people, proof that there isn’t a genetically criminal class that was part of the basis for transportation.

[Jill H. · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing book!!!! This 600 page tome covers the founding of Australia from the First Fleet of the transportation of convicts landing at Botany Bay through the end of the transportation in 1868. The continent of Australia was an enormous jail and the author uses letters, diaries, and other written history to paint a picture of inhumanity that reads more like fiction. As he spins his tale, he destroys some of the myths that Australians still accept as truths and verifies others through his impeccable research. We travel along the coasts, over the Blue Mountains. to the island of Van Dieman's Land (present day Tasmania) and into the outback with some of the brave, often foolhardy pioneers that settled the land.....escaped convicts, free men, and immigrants with the taste for adventure. We see the attempted annihilation of the aborigines as the colony expanded into the continent and the ecological effects of "civilization". There is so much here that I suggest you read this brilliant and disturbing book...it is compelling.

[John Farebrother · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adjectives fail me to describe the stupendous scope and brilliance of this book. Epic is right. It is a history of early Australia, on the one hand of the native inhabitants, the Aborigines, and on the other, of the wretched souls who found themselves transported to the other side of the world, and who quickly supplanted them. The good the bad and the ugly. The author's detailed researches appear to have left no stone unturned, as he reveals even the taboo aspects of multitudes of desperate humanity forced to live together in unsanitary and inhuman conditions. He also describes the British regime in Australia as the closest thing to a police state that ever existed in British territory, which after reading the book, I can only agree with. But it is not only the scope, detail and understanding of the book that makes it remarkable. It is highly readable, indeed hard to put down. I knew very little about Australia before I read this book, which I bought because it was recommended on Channel 4 News on the occasion of the author's death in 2012. Now I feel I have a thorough understanding of the issues and events that made Australia and Australians what they are today.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fatal Shore is a brilliant history of how even the destitute and outcasts of Great Britain made a superior contribution to world civilization equal to what they had done in the Americas, Asia, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. What a great people! And Australia--what a great country today! Peoples who could not absorb what the British had to offer still suffer from backwardness to this day and will most likely remain that way.

[Mat · Rating 5 out of 5]

As an Australian, I have to say 'hats off' truly to Robert Hughes. This is a tremendously exhaustive and amazing work in which Hughes manages to trace the history of Australia in scrupulous detail. In fact, there's almost 'too much' detail but for me, I just lapped it up. Much of the details about indentured men were new to me. This should, without a doubt, be required reading in history classes in Australia. Absolutely fantastic. In fact, I learnt more by reading this book than I did from 2 years of history classes at high school.
It's all here - the slow destruction of the Aborigines by both diseases brought by the white man to which they had no immunity as well as the rampant slaughter of the natives of Tasmania, the plight of the convicts (whose lot was perhaps even worse than the natives) including the horrid and hard history of Van Diemen's Land (modern-day Tasmania) and even worse the plight of those who were sent to Norfolk Island (something I knew nothing about until I read this book).
There are, of course and fortunately, tales of courage which will warm the cockles of any Aussie's heart.
Most importantly I leanred where the Australian concept of 'mateship' (from g'day mate) came from. Many of the early Australians suffered together - that is, they faced common hardships (one example is the fellowship that was spawned from chain gangs). And what a legacy it has produced. If you go to Australia today, you will see much beauty - the beauty of the Blue Mountains, the rainforests up north, the white beaches and especially the Great Barrier Reef but what is striking about it all, after reading this book, is how deceptive that beauty is - a beauty which has managed to hide all of the many tales of woe and struggle that can be found in Australia's past.

I read this book about 8 years ago and it's nigh time I pick it up again and brush up on the history of my own country. I owe it to my ancestors.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Superb.

P.S. Someone did tell me though that some of Hughes' research has recently been challenged. I will find out whether these claims are substantiated or not and edit this review accordingly, if need be.

[Rob · Rating 3 out of 5]

I find that Robert Hughes writing is, well, florid. He writes well but he is just too adjectival for my tastes.
As a big slice of information and ideas this is a good book but not a great book. I would have no hesitation about recommending it, but there are better books such as John Hirst's book 'Convict Society And It's Enemies'.
Hughes analysis is pretty good and I do find that even though I thought I knew how grim the early period of European Australian history was, I was not prepared for the cruelty and sadism described by this book. More so than the British navy Australia was founded on 'rum, sodomy and the lash'.
On the influence on the Australia of today I think Hughes is basically right. In Tasmania the influence was woeful, especially with the coupling of being an island. People generally want to get off islands and the young and ambitious Tasmanians have over the past 160 years. There is a legacy of convictry in Tasmania much like that of slavery in the deep south of America. In NSW, because they received more Irish convicts and there was a leavening of more Irish politicals, this in time meant that the working class in NSW (and the East Coast generally) developed a chip on their shoulders about the Australian (Protestant) ruling class.
In the end the book was too much of chore. How many florid descriptions of floggings can a reader take?

[Jason Koivu · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really solid look at Australia's ignoble European invasion.

The British turned the native soil of the Australian Aboriginal people into a prison island. Author Robert Hughes does an excellent job of giving the reader an overall idea of what it was like to be transported to this distant penal colony, which was tantamount to a death sentence. Just surviving the voyage was torture enough.

Once the poor prisoners (yes, I have some sympathy for some of the prisoners, whose crimes could be as inconsequential as petty theft) arrived they were greeted by a land devoid of comfort and compassion. Australia is hardcore. Australia does not fuck around. Hughes conveys this quite well.

['Aussie Rick' · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book, one of the finest history books I have read covering Australia. I found the book easy to read, the narrative flowed along full of facts but never dull. Its not stuffy and boring like a lot of history books but a very good yarn. I have sent copies to friends around the world and they have all enjoyed the book as well. Its history at its best, some very interesting stories about Norfolk Island and Port Arthur and cannibal convicts, a very enjoyable tale. Maybe some Australians aren't too happy with this side of our history but never the less its still our history and this book makes it enjoyable to read about.

[Lauren Albert · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this in college when the paperback came out in 1988. I remember being enthralled by it which was notable since I wasn't at that time a history reader. I had years of thinking I should re-read it and never did. What a wonderful book. It is not a pretty story--not because the people who settled it were convicts, especially since many were, by our standards, minor offenders or political prisoners, but because of the conditions they faced and the treatment they received. It was not pretty for those in charge either for that matter. There were so many details that I won't go into them all--just read the book. It's worth it.

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I was at school, we were taught that most of the convicts transported to Australia were decent but unfortunate people, who were sent here unfairly, usually for petty and justifiable crimes like stealing handkerchiefs, or loaves of bread to feed their starving families. It turns out that's not quite true, and there's no avoiding the fact that the fledgling nation of Australia was built in significant part by hardened criminals. Of course the story is complicated, and The Fatal Shore tells that story of the first 100 years or so of settlement in vivid detail. The book focuses on the penal settlements in and around Sydney, Norfolk Island and Van Diemen's Land, and especially on the convicts themselves, who often led hellish lives at the hands of sadistic overseers. Australia in the early days was a really nasty place to be if you were a convict - or indeed a native.

Reading these accounts of early Australia, I'm struck by just how recent it all was. I'm amazed that mere decades after the end of transportation, Australia was able to develop a national identity and the political will to achieve Federation, implement a stable system of government, and eventually grow into a prosperous and law-abiding nation. Our history is often glossed-over or ignored, but it's important to hear the full story.

[Brian Griffith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This tale of a nation's founding is an emotionally gripping account of ordinary people's lives. It's very powerfully done.

[Ms.pegasus · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a long book (600 pages plus footnotes), and reading it felt like journeying down a long road. Yet, it is a significant book. Hughes has applied extensive research to Australia's penal colony era – a period spanning 1787 when the First Fleet made its initial delivery of convicts to 1868 when the final shipment landed at Fremantle in Western Australia. Even as late as the mid-1960's, the period was glossed over by Australian textbooks. As Hughes states in his inimitable way, Australians, prior to World War II, were particularly sensitive about their country's first settlers: “None wanted to have convict ancestors, and few could be perfectly sure that some felon did not perch like a crow in the family tree.” (p.158)

Hughes perfectly captures the dual vibe that clings to this island-continent. Colonial Australia's history is England's history from a different vantage point. After 1776 England lost the option of shipping its criminals to America as indentured servants. A stop-gap measure, warehousing them in The Hulls (dilapidated transports ships and rotting warships) was proving unsatisfactory, an all too visible embarrassment that was expensive to maintain and a dangerous health hazard. Australia became the new Siberia. From 1831-1840 the convict population rose as economic conditions in England declined and crime increased. Irish dissidents added to these numbers and reinforced the sentiment that even the harshest punishments might still be insufficiently brutal. Directives from Whitehall and reports from Sydney literally rode on ships passing in the night. Hughes concludes that the system nurtured the sadistic tendencies of a stream of governors, proconsuls, and military officials overseeing the penal colonies.

The book does present some difficulties for readers unfamiliar with the main historical figures of this period. Chapters are organized by topic rather than chronology. Separate chapters are devoted to three major settlements: Port Jackson (Sydney Harbor in New South Wales); Van Diemen's Land, renamed Tasmania in an effort to erase its convict past, settled in 1804; and Hobart on the Derwent River on Norfolk Island (established in 1825). Each settlement followed a slightly different demographic progression, forming rigid social classes, a contrast to the welcoming egalitarian image the country often projects.

England soon found itself caught between contradictory goals. Emigration was to be encouraged. It would alleviate overpopulation in the mother country and speed the prosperity to be reaped from its colony. Convicts could be transformed from economic dependents to “assigned labor,” thus earning their keep. Moreover, the emigres would dilute the tainted blood of the “criminal class,” and bolster morality, a not unimportant consideration for Victorian policymakers. On the other hand, the government wanted to preserve the hellish reputation of the penal colonies as a deterrent to would-be criminals in England.

Hughes eloquently presents these competing visions – utopia vs. dystopia. He describes Norfolk Island, site of the most infamous of penal colonies, as approached from the sea: “...an apparition, a rolling cap of green meadow and spiring trees, raised out of the Pacific on pipes and pillars of basalt as though offered to one infinite blueness by another....[From land] One sees nothing but elements: air, water, rock and the patterns wrought by their immense friction. The mornings are by Turner; the evenings by Caspar David Friedrich, calm and beneficent, the light sifting angelically down toward the solemn horizon.” (p. 457)

The beauty belies its occupancy, a land that served as England's “criminal waste disposal system.” (p.161); an instrument to perform a “social amputation” of England's so-called criminal class. (p.582)

I was an admirer of Hughes television series “Shock of the New.” Binge watching several Australian television productions including “Banished” gave me the motivation to actually tackle this book.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not quite done with Robert Hughes's excellent history of The System, otherwise known as the settlement of a continent with petty criminals, but since I'm actually going to Australia in a week (!), and I can see the writing on the wall as far as things getting crazier before I leave, I wanted to be sure to sneak in a blog entry now. More specifically, I wanted to recommend this book highly; despite the often brutal facts of the case, I have seldom enjoyed a history more.

ANYway, Hughes's prose is crisp and readable, and he has a fantastic story to tell. The Fatal Shore is not a novel, but it consistently evokes times, places and situations that make me want to read (or even write!) fiction set in early colonial Australia. He has a fine eye for detail, and uses primary sources to great advantage. I find that biography and history sometimes struggle with the constant transition between covering broad trends and including enough specific detail to keep things interesting, but Hughes has the technique down. Witness his description of the arrival in Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) of the mediocre early Lieutenant-Governor Thomas Davey:

"The two men hated one another on sight. Davey thought Macquerie a Scottish prig; and Macquerie considered his new lieutenant-governor a wastrel and a drunk, who manifested 'an extraordinary degree of frivolity and low buffoonery in his manners.'
"So he did. Davey marked his arrival in Hobart Town in February 1813 by lurching to the ship's gangway, casting an owlish look at his new domain and emptying a bottle of port over his wife's hat. He then took off his coat, remarking that the place was as hot as Hades, and marched uphill to Government House in his shirtsleeves. Nicknamed 'Mad Tom' by the settlers, he would later make it his custom to broach a keg of rum outside Government House on royal birthdays and ladle it out to the passerby."

As well as enjoying the hilarious image of port being emptied over Davey's wife's hat, I love how this short passage communicates vividly and succinctly so much about the dueling characters of the two colonial administrators. Also, "low buffoonery"? Definitely going in my arsenal of excellent old-timey put-downs.

Hughes's talent for choosing just the right detail to resonate and amaze is spot-on. Describing the widespread myth among early Irish convicts in Australia that there existed an overland route to China, and the tragic escape attempts that resulted, he notes that "Since none of them had a compass (and few possessed any idea of how to use it even if they had had one), they went out armed with a magical facsimile consisting of a circle crudely sketched on paper or bark with the cardinal points but no needle." What could more forcibly communicate the pathetic desperation of these people, uprooted from everything familiar and dumped into a foreign and hostile environment?

Likewise, when Hughes is describing what passed for "education" at the boys' jail at Point Puer in Van Diemen's Land, where children were put through perfunctory scholastic and religious paces after a twelve- or fourteen-hour day of hard labor, he relates that "a few of the boys could parrot bits of an Anglican catechism, but none could recite the Commandments in correct order or show much grasp of scriptural history. Even their hymn-singing had declined, to the point that 'the screaming is almost intolerable to any person whose ears have not been rendered callous.'" The image of the exhausted, damp and caterwauling boys, often transported for trifles like "stealing two pairs of stockings," is both chilling and touching. Also chilling is this passage about the children of soldiers and free settlers, who

"played flogging games and judgment games as freely as their descendents would play bushrangers. 'I have observed children playing,' wrote one colonial observer in 1850, 'at the Botany Bay game of Courts and Petty Sessions, and noted the cruel sentences which were uniformly passed on those who were doomed to be 'damned,' and the favour and partiality which was extended to others! Justice appeared never to be thought of: - the gratification of a licentious and an unlimited Power being all they sought."

Although I'm not one to idealize the innocence of children, this paragraph certainly gives a clear view of the dark side of culture-formation.

And there is plenty of dark stuff in The Fatal Shore, from sadistic prison wardens to snobbish would-be-aristocrats, to prisoners whose flesh was crawling with maggots while they were still alive. Yes, there's even a vivid first-person account of cannibalism. The most difficult chapters for me to read, though, were those dealing with the plight of women and Aborigines, and with the role of homosexuality in the colony.

This book comes right on the heels, for me, of James Wilson's The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America, and there were some depressing similarities between the two histories, despite an entire hemisphere's separation. The insane sense of entitlement felt and exercised by the European colonists; the gradual (or not-so-gradual) descent into a cycle of violence; the issuance of self-righteous tracts setting down legal boundaries, which the native people are unable to read as they are available solely in English: it all rings unpleasantly familiar in the ears of a United States citizen.

Perhaps the most confusing and circular part of European/Native relations in both America and Australia, is Europeans' fixation on a settled, capitalist existence as the only kind of life they were willing to acknowledge as legitimate. On both continents, the colonists assumed that nomadic peoples were "wasting" the land, that their movable lifestyle obliterated any claim they may have had to it - a tragedy of epic proportions, considering that connection to the land was usually much more integral to the native peoples' sense of self than it ever was to Europeans. Equally galling to the European interlopers was the lack of a fiat money system among native peoples, which the Europeans, tellingly, took as a sign of godlessness and dissipation. This is especially ironic in Australia, which was being settled in the first place because England had come to so fetishize Property that people were sentenced to death for offenses like "poaching a rabbit," "stealing a length of ribbon," or "cutting down an ornamental shrub." As a newborn infant could have predicted, this led to SO MANY death sentences that most of them had to be commuted, hence the waves of convicts and their attendant administrators, eager to convert the natives to their own property-loving way of life. In Tasmania, as in the American south-east, native people were herded into what were essentially concentration camps, where "they were shown how to buy and sell things, so that they might acquire a reverence for property." Awesome idea, guys! And those were the progressive settlers; most just wanted to kill as many natives as possible.

The chapters on treatment of women was also horrifying. Much of it, such as the passage describing how the new female convicts were sold at the country store, were grotesque parodies of still-familiar attitudes:

"The same woman might be sold several times during her Norfolk Island sentence, with Potter 'in most cases reselling them for a gallon or two of rum until they were in such a Condition as to be of little or no further use.' The sales would be held in an old store where the women had to strip naked and 'race around the room' while Potter kept up a running commentary on their 'respective values.'"

Female convicts were essentially the slaves of slaves, but the most infuriating part from an intellectual perspective is that they were looked down on as "prostitutes" as a result. Even female convicts who were never sold and re-sold on Norfolk Island, even those who had long-term, loving relationships, were viewed as whores by the self-styled "respectable" colonists:

As the historian Michael Sturma points out, the idea that the convicts shared the same ideas about sexual behavior as their superiors is very dubious: 'Working-class mores [in England] differed markedly from those of upper and middle classes...[A]mong the British working-class, cohabitation was prevalent. It is highly unlikely that working-class men, and in particular male convicts, considered the women convicts to be in some way sexually immoral...The stereotype of women convicts as prostitutes emerged from...an ignorance of working-class habits.'"

Huh, how eerily familiar. It's disturbing how difficult it is to perceive, let alone acknowledge, value systems that differ from our own. It's also interesting - and problematic - to me, how few modern people know about the widespread acceptance of cohabitation among the Victorian working classes. The Victorian era is so often seen as the epitome of prudishness and ramrod respectability, wherein premarital sex is the Ultimate Evil that can befall a virtuous young woman, and while there was certainly truth to the stereotype, it's also important to remember that there were other realities as well.

If the way that misogyny played out in early Australia was tiresomely predictable, the role of homosexuality was much more complex, and tricky for a modern young lefty like myself to digest. [More on my blog.]

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've never known very much about Transportation or the early history of Australia, and now I wish I'd paid more attention when I was at school over there. Obviously growing up English I was fully aware of the history between the two countries and the insults flung back and forth - 'Pommies', 'convicts' and the like, but there never was any real understanding of the history of those insults.

So it's interesting to see just how deeply rooted Transportation, or the 'System' as it was known, was in Australia's early history. It wouldn't be far wrong to say that Australia as a colony would not have existed at all, or if it had, it is unlikely any free settlement could have survived, let alone prospered, were it not for convict labour. It was the absolutely bedrock of society, the sine qua non, and yet at the same time a source of deep shame to the 'Exclusives', the upper-crust of free society, who tried to white-wash it out of knowledge and history. Indeed, as Hughes argues, it is only really in the last 20 years that early Australian history has been taught in schools - prior to that, there was a national blinkeredness, a desire to pretend that Australia society was not built on 'the Stain' or 'the Taint'.

This book is both a history of Australia and an insightful look into whether the penal experiment of Transportation succeeded. The main aims of Transportation were to eradicate England of the criminal element, in the misguided belief that criminality was hereditary and ingrained, rather than something caused by poverty, inequality and lack of opportunity; and to serve both as a horrifying deterrent to potential criminals and as a source of reformation and redemption for those criminals exiled from their homeland. In both respects, Hughes argued, it can be considered a failure, not always, not exclusively, but fairly comprehensively. There was a chance for redemption for some; some ex-convicts certainly found life in Australia an opportunity to better themselves and gain wealth and position, but they could rarely escape their convict past - 'one a convict, always a convict' - and there was a definite social gulf between the 'Exclusives' and the 'Emancipists'.

This is the first book by Hughes I've read and I'm definitely keen to read more. His 'Rome' is on my Christmas list!

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely a masterpiece. Hughes really tackles every aspect of the founding of Australia, which is more interesting than you might think, if you're not exactly packing for Sydney any time soon.

When eminences like Susan Sontag, Arthur Schlesinger and Gore Vidal plug your book with comparisons to some of the greatest social chroniclers of all time, you know (or hope, at least) you're into something great. I wasn't disappointed.

Hughes brings up nearly everything which contributed to Australia's founding- colonialism, racism, prison systems, London's throbbing street life and criminal underclass, the elements of reform and resistance, the terrain, the flora and fauna of rural Aussie geography....the whole thing is gloriously written, exhaustively researched and historically comprehensive with a rather witty and pessimistic air at the folly of man, which (one senses) comes from that of a rueful idealist.

I'm definitely going to re-read this someday, some of the incidental tales he tells of some of the brave, hunted souls who tried to get away are just too juicy not to retell....

Absolutely recommended, if you like your history eloquent, novelistic and thorough.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Fatal Shore chronicles the 80-year period beginning in 1787 during which the British government colonized Australia by transporting convicted criminals from the British Isles. Fear of crime and the belief in a “criminal class” prompted changes in British laws. One of the changes was the institution of the convict transportation system. As Hughes writes, “Australia was settled to defend English property … from the marauder within. English lawmakers wished not only to get rid of the ‘criminal class’ but if possible to forget about it.”

When the first convict ship arrived at Botany Bay on the east coast of Australia, the continent was home to some 300,000 Aborigines, whose ancestors had been living there for at least 30,000 years. The convict transportation system brought 160,000 white men, women, and children to Australia in bondage. As the years went by, these convicts were joined by an increasing number of free settlers, but Australia’s history was indelibly marked by its early involuntary settlers.

For years, many Australians wanted nothing more than to erase, or at least forget, this “stain” on their national identity that arose from the unsavory nature of the country’s founding. Hughes’s book is intended to tell the full story, unhappy as much of it is. He certainly succeeds in that.

The book is massive and exceptionally detailed. Hughes paints colorful portraits not only of the governors and other leaders, but also of many convicts. He spares no detail of the horrific punishments that were inflicted on them, including the inhumane treatment of the worst offenders in places like Norfolk Island and Port Arthur. Hughes’s penchant for detail even extends to the inclusion of the lyrics of many convict songs.

This is all very educational. I’m sure it would be especially interesting for Australian readers. As a reader from North America who has never been to Australia (although I would love to go!), I would have been satisfied with a shorter overview of Australian history. I found myself getting somewhat impatient with the narrative, especially in the second half or so of the book, which I think is not as well organized as the earlier portion.

If you’re looking for a deep dive into Australian history, you will almost certainly love this book. But for me personally, it’s only a three-star book. I liked it, but it was much too long and detailed for me to love it.

[David B · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert Hughes has written a towering account of the years during which Britain transported convicts to Australia, thereby beginning the colonization of a continent that would one day hold a place among the world's free nations. Hughes's fascinating text covers the exaggerated fear of a "criminal class" that, along with hopes of establishing a colonial presence in the region, caused England to spend so much treasure on the system of transportation. We also get much fascinating information about the difficult conditions on the new continent, the shameful treatment of the native Aborigines, and many harrowing accounts of the horrendous treatment prisoners received there. In the end, a rising tide of public disapproval and a gold rush that weakened the system's financial incentive resulted in the end of transportation. Hughes treats all of this--and much more--in exhaustive detail that is never dull. With the eye of a novelist, he includes the stories of many interesting figures from Australian history, fully contextualized within the epic sweep of his narrative. This book is a real winner.

[Tittirossa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Millenni di pace e fatti-propri e poi il Governo inglese decide di liberarsi in modo definitivo di quel che definisce la feccia della società e va a prendere possesso di un territorio che fa di tutto per ributtarli a mare, ma loro indomiti resistono, anche se non riescono a distruggere del tutto una civiltà composita che era riuscita a integrarsi perfettamente in un ambiente ostile, e che non aveva visto invasori fino al 1770 (in Tasmania gli inglesi avranno più successo, e in stile Haiti, non rimarrà più nessun aborigeno).

Libro magnifico.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a Canadian I am aware of how truly difficult it is to make life in the colonies seem interesting. I am lost in admiration for this Australian who has managed to write a fascinating history of the famous penal system that figured so prominently in his country's early history. I wish Canadian historians could find similar tales about themselves and tell them so well.

[Aaron Million · Rating 3 out of 5]

Robert Hughes attempts to capture the British founding of the penal colony that we now know as Australia in this highly entertaining read. Many parts of this book read like fiction. Sadly, that is more due to the horrible atrocities committed by the authorities on the convicts, the convicts on the convicts, the convicts on the Aborigines, the Aborigines on the convicts, and the authorities on the Aborigines. Yes, nobody was very nice! This is definitely not an uplifting story, nor did I expect it to be. I mean, you are reading about the founding on a penal colony: how friendly and upbeat can you realistically expect it to be? Unfortunately, what crops up again and again throughout history appears here as well: human being degrading others and performing violent acts upon them, many times for no good reason whatsoever.

Hughes introduces the reader to so many fascinating characters that at times they can seem to run together. However, a few of the main ones stand out for one reason or another: Lachlan Macquarie, Alexander Maconochie, and George Arthur. There are also cameos from Charles Dickens and William Gladstone. The main character, though, is that of "transportation". That is the British term that was used to define a sentencing of being removed from the British Isles and banished halfway around the world to an unknown land, Australia. This came about mainly because Britain had a vile penal code; one could be arrested and sentenced to years in prison for such fairly minor things as stealing a potato or forging a check. Not much distinction seemed to be made between these low-level crimes, and those of the most horrific sort such as rape and murder. England had no penitentiaries in those days, and the Crown needed to figure out what to do with all of the convicts it had in its midst. Shipping some of them to America was out of the picture after the American Revolution. Yes, Britain did, each year, send a small number of convicts to America to be overseen by Southern planters, sadly echoing slavery. But with America now off-limits for convict shipment, and the West Indies only physically able to take so many, Britain needed Australia as a dumping ground for its undesirables.

One thing that was interesting here is learning that many of the convicts, as mentioned above, really committed crimes that barely qualified as such - things that certainly would not result in jail time of much length now, yet induced sentences of 7 or 14 years, or life. Many of the thieves stole out of sheer hunger, nothing much more than that. And some of them were just kids. To lump these people in with someone who was a murderer seems incomprehensible today. Yet it was done. This incongruous mix continued in Australia, Norfolk Island, and Van Diemen's Land thanks to a succession of tyrants as lieutenant governors or governors. Rehabilitation was not thought of by hardly anyone outside of Maconochie, who was driven out because he was so far ahead of his time. The convicts were treated brutally, beaten badly, tortured, and left devoid of any hope of release, left alone a release from pain. Indeed, some deliberately killed others just so they themselves could get a death sentence and thus be spared further suffering.

Much of the book actually does not take place on the central landmass of Australia. This was somewhat of a surprise to me. Hughes focuses a lot of time on Norfolk Island, one-thousand miles to the east, and Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) off the SW coast. This is because the penal colonies at those two places were more brutal, the regimes more repressive, and in the case of Van Diemen's Land, lasted much longer than anywhere else. And a fair portion of the book, especially early on, is given over to the political and judicial climate in England, the first exploratory voyages to Australia, and the first convict ship voyage in 1787-88. I actually found these parts to be the most interesting of the book, as later on it seems to delve into one brutality after another.

Something that I thought would be spoken about but that Hughes only scratched the surface of was Australia's weather and topography. While it is mentioned, it is more as a sidebar. I would have liked to have seen Hughes go into more detail about the climate in various parts of the continent, how much it differed from north to south, what parts were mountainous, etc. As well, he mentions one time that Australians developed a different accent from the English back in Britain, but he does not explain why or how this happened. Overall this is an interesting book, and anyone looking for Australian history will want to read this. While I did like the book, towards the end I was ready to be done with it. I think that the constant downtrodden nature of the convicts and their situation, the never-ending brutality, and the idiotic political decisions made both in Australia and London wore me down.

Grade: C+

[F.E. Beyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

We learn zero about Australian history in New Zealand schools, obsessed, like most countries, by our own history. The Fatal Shore details past horrors of a familiar place, a culture that doesn’t feel foreign to me. The emotional baggage wasn’t there though; I haven’t had a lifetime of experiencing the politicisation of Australia’s history.

The scene is set with descriptions of the landscape and the Aboriginal people. Then, after investigation of life in Georgian England, we follow the path of the first fleet of convicts that arrived in Botany Bay in 1788. The structure of the book isn’t chronological, different places are mentioned and then returned to in more detail. This causes some information to be repeated and I was sometimes a bit confused as to what year and place was being described. However, this is an exhaustive and often gripping history of convict Australia.

I'd always wondered about Macquarie as there are many places named after him. He was a somewhat liberal governor of New South Wales, the other governors sound pretty awful. It’s amusing that the trendy Darling Harbour is named after a bit of a tyrant. Slowly, New South Wales improved and many, convict or not, started to enjoy a life better than they could have expected in England. But if you fell foul of the authorities there were always the new penal colonies: Van Diemen’s land, Norfolk Island, Brisbane and then finally Western Australia. These places ensured that hell on Earth existed. This expansion was disastrous for the Aborigines.

The most shocking story is of a group of convicts that escaped in Van Diemen’s land (Tasmania) and ended up eating each other. That some convicts on the mainland thought they could escape overland to China, it seems that they had no clue where they were and felt completely disoriented in this new land. This book was written in the eighties, but the attitudes and views of the author don’t seem outdated. Maybe this is because this book, while it does judge those involved, concentrates more on chronicling what happened - as good history books should.

[notgettingenough · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here's another thing about Australia. It has its priorities right. So, when I heard Greece is in some trouble, the consequences of which might destablise the world economy, I went to ABC.net to check it out.

Not a WORD about Greece. Honestly, I don't see what all the fuss is about. The really top world news stories are:

Lleyton Hewitt out of Wimbledon
A person who was born in Australia (ie tenuous connection, but we still want him) has made the NBA draft.
Cocaine still popular in the US

and the real biggie:

Grave fears - GRAVE FEARS, in case you don't register the import of this story - held for lost Emperor Penguin.

Presumably this story has pushed Greece off the front page in other parts of the world? SURELY. This penguin took a wrong turn at Albuquerque, on his way to Antarctica and ended up in New Zealand. What could be more important than that?

I think we can add another question to the binary decision making tree for Aussies:

New Zealand? Or Antaractica?

Hmm. Ummm...I dunno. This one's kinda tricky.


-----------

I've been thinking about I Ching lately and I can see that in a way, maybe it helps people focus on thinking about their decisions in life. But I can't see it working for Australians.

As Stewart Lee said recently, of all the places in the world to have compulsory voting, it's one whose population survives on the following binary tree of decision-making:

Get out of bed in the morning? Or not?

Shorts? Or trunks?

Sit in the shade? Or in the sun?

Beach? Or pool?

Fosters? Or Carlton?

The moment you add a complication to this. Say,

Hang out with mates? Or girlfriend? Or both?

The moment you do that, they are already looking lost.

And as we really don't have a two-party system any more, we really have to get rid of the whole compulsory voting thing.

Or do we?

[Mark Hartzer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although “The Pogues” used the phrase for an album title, the term “Rum, Sodomy & the Lash” is actually from an abbreviated quote by Winston Churchill while describing British Naval tradition. It also fits well with the founding of Australia although it could also include ‘deprivation, misery, cruelty and ignorance’.

I spent a long time reading "The Fatal Shore", partly because it is pretty long, but also because the writing is excellent enough to savor at a measured pace. My understanding of Australia up to now has been pretty much kangaroos; Steve Irwin & Crocodile Dundee. I had been meaning to read Hughes’ “The Fatal Shore” for many years as I had really enjoyed “Culture of Complaint” and “American Visions”.

It does not disappoint. But it is not an easy read. 600+ pages detailing the horrors of the British convict transportation system in the 18th & 19th centuries is often tough going. I learned more about flogging than I ever wanted to know, but that was the system at the time.
I had hoped that the reason convict transport ended was because of growing enlightened thought during the Victorian years, (although that was part of it). In actuality (spoiler alert!), it was the discovery of gold on the continent.

Reading history is often troubling because you really can’t overly judge people’s actions as the laws, codes and mores at the time were significantly different than during our present time. Yet the deliberate cruelty and indifference to the poor are pretty hard to stomach. Heaven forbid if you were poor and female, or even worse, an aborigine. I’ve read some terrible stuff about what we Americans sometimes did to the Indians, but I’ve never heard that we skinned and stuffed them.

Anyway, a great book with deservedly positive reviews.

[J.S.]

Putting this one back on the shelf for another day. Apparently I'm not as interested in Australia as I thought.