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

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Pan Books, 1988 - 688 pages
In Robert Hughes The Fatal Shore the reader is given the incredibly detailed history of a nation and people that was often not taught to its own schoolchildren as the past has long been considered a source of shame. This is the riveting story of the founding of Australia from its initial shiploads of criminal convicts landing on the continent in 1788 until independent nation status. It took only 80 years but Australia became a nation despite the inauspicious colonial beginning.

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Contents

The Harbor and the Exiles I
1
A Horse Foaled by an Acorn
19
The Geographical Unconscious
43
Copyright

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About the author (1988)

Robert Hughes was born in Sydney, Australia on July 28, 1938. He studied art and architecture at the University of Sydney. He pursued art criticism mostly as a sideline while painting, writing poetry and serving as a cartoonist for the weekly intellectual journal The Observer. He left Australia and spent time in Italy before settling in London, where he became a well-known critical voice and wrote for several newspapers. He was chief art critic for Time magazine for over 30 years. He wrote several books including The Fatal Shore, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America, Things I Didn't Know, and Rome. He also hosted an eight-part documentary about the development of modernism from the Impressionists through Warhol entitled The Shock of the New. It was seen by more than 25 million viewers when it ran first on BBC and then on PBS. He also wrote a book by the same name about the series. He died after a long illness on August 6, 2012 at the age of 74.

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