Wow. wonderfully written. depressing. horrible. brutal. what an incredible story. very hard to believe that this was true and it most certainly was. ( )

I didn't review this at the time that I read it, which is a pity. Robert Hughes details a little-known facet of world history. Australia has not been the focus of the world's wars, since it is a self-contained continent. Thus it's history does not receive the same focus as does Europe's centuries as a charnel house, or even Asia's episodes of bloodshed and famine.

One would suppose, given its start as a penal colony, set forth in detail, that it would not have a promising outcome. We all know what really happened, and one of the book's shortcomings is not explaining too well how things turned around. That is, unless the explanation is that Tasmania, then Van Diemen's Land, and Botany Bay eventually received "the worst" of the convicts. Despite that quibble it is an amazing story. ( )

Much as the history books of my (U.S.) schoolyears, Australian history schoolbooks glossed over the genocide of the Aborigines, and the criminal background of their White Australian ancestors. As such, Hughes energetically researched English and Australian records to write this eye-opening history. He says of his effort:

P.7:
"Yet the effort to perceive the landscape and its people as they were is worth making, for it bears on one of the chief myths of early colonial history as understood and taught up to about 1960. This was the idea, promulgated by the early settlers and inherited from the 19th century, that the First Fleet sailed into an "empty" continent, speckled with primitive animals and hardly less primitive men, so that the "fittest" inevitably triumphed. Thus the destruction of the Australian Aborigines was rationalized as natural law. 'nothing can stay the dying away of the Aboriginal race, which Providence has only allowed to hold the land until replaced by a finer race,' remarked a settler in 1849."

The Aboriginal people's had been mostly left in peace, until England decided to rid its island of criminals by shipping them to the southeast of Australia.
P.46-7:
"there had been Asian landings in the 16th century, but none resulted in colonization. They were made by MaKasson traders from the island of Celebes, who ran down the northern monsoons in their slat - sailed praus to what is now Arnhem Land, on the North coast of the continent. The goal of their 1200 mile voyages was a sea slug, the trepang or bêche-de-mer. These creatures, which looked like withered penises when smoked and dried were Indonesia's largest export to the Chinese, who esteemed them as an aphrodisiac. Thus, until the 19th century, Australia's sole contribution to the outside world was millions of sea slugs."

Once squatted, the English persecution of Natives begins ( )

reads like lots of little stories and essays ( )

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.



( )

When I selected this book to read, I thought it was a more popular treatment of Australia's founding than it turned out to be. Although the book is well-researched, it tends to be slightly to the academic side. Hughes does not spare ugliness from his readers as he describes punishments sometimes received by transported convicts. The convicts were mostly thieves the British legal system thought needed reform. In places the author gets bogged down in uninteresting detail. This book reminds readers of how far Australia has come from its founding to its current respected nation status. ( )

This is a very good book, well written, exceptionally researched. If you want to learn about the early history of Australia, and you want a readable book, this is the one for youo. ( )

Part narrative, part documented history. Full on brutal. There were parts that were hard to read - the treatment of many of the convicts was horrific. This was definitely a rough punishment for a 12 year old pick pocket let alone the adult man or woman.
At least there is a lot of documentation concerning the men. Unfortunately, women being merely chatal (spelling). there is virtually no record of their lives.
I enjoyed the read, though, as I knew little to nothing about the beginning of Australia. It says a lot of what the "civilized" world thought of the lower classes/criminals and what was needed to "reform" them. On Australia, the great experiment of a penal colony, it was proven that the harsher the punishment ... well, it didn't create the results that were thought to have happened.
I appreciated that there was little comparative discussion between what we know today about convict treatment as compared to the time this was occurring. It is a factual accounting of what happened. ( )

In which Mr Hughes destroys most of the myths Australians tell ourselves, whether conservative ("we're not really descended from convicts") or, more usually, progressive ("the convicts were mostly political refugees"... nope. "The convicts and the indigenous peoples worked together to..." nope.) And does it in a highly entertaining narrative. It really isn't over-rated, though it is, perhaps, overlong. ( )

It was a first-rate read, though I found that it plods in a few places. The narrative gets thick here and there. Historians and critics can't always help themselves, I guess. The most interesting thing about the history of Australia -- I found -- is that after closure of the British penal colony, after gaining independence, almost the first thing the new Australian government did was establish its OWN penal system. As Art Linkletter used to say: People are funny. ( )

Good on you, Australia! A rough history, to be sure, but you have more than overcome. I'd often heard of the convict settlements, but had no idea of the brutality that was suffered, or the odds that were laid against the founding of the colony. Goes to show what humanity is capable of , both the bad, and the good. ( )

Growing up in Australia in the 1970s and 80s the Australian history I was taught consisted of Captain Cook, the First Fleet, explorers and the fact that sometimes they had spears thrown at them, bushrangers and a bit of local South Australian history. It was mentioned that there were convicts in Australia but nothing more. These days I’d like to think there would be more coverage of Aboriginals and convicts, with “The Fatal Shore” used as a primary text for covering the latter.

Extremely well written and as fine a tribute to those thousands of English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh men and women sent to Australia as one could wish, “The Fatal Shore” doesn’t flinch as it covers the godawful conditions the convicts were held in, from the foetid atmosphere on their boat trip over to the particularly non-PC working conditions they laboured under, the torture of the cat o’ nine tails if one got out of step and the ultimate penalty of Norfolk Island.

Intermixed in this is more sodomy than I thought possible, genocide and a streak of cruelty that still astonishes centuries later. ( )

This is disturbing, compelling and fascinating reading. A must read for all those interested in knowing more about the incredibly cruel and complex first 100 years of white Australia. It's an especially provocative reflection on the issue of punishment versus reform or rehabilitation, and also a great expose of the destructive force of power in the wrong hands. ( )

Fantastic history. The odd theory of exiling criminals to start a colony - the tragic history of the encounter between 18th century Western Civilization and the Native Australians - the bizarre end of the system with the Gold Rushes. Another lesson in "the past is another world". The details of the prison life are so disgusting and brutal - that part of the book seemed to last forever. I highly recommend this book. ( )

There's nothing like reading history to make you grateful. The past is a dark place.

Hughes doesn't strike me as entirely reliable, but he has a tremendous turn of phrase and eye for the novelistic detail. Highly recommended. ( )

History of Australia’s beginning as a penal colony. Well written but lengthy and detailed, with altogether way too much flogging. Wouldn’t recommend it for casual reading but it’s an impressive source for understanding the founding of modern Australia and Tasmania. ( )

This book fascinates me for its scope and depth of reporting/analysis, no matter how many times I've dipped into a chapter. ( )

This is what a non-fiction books should be: a wonderful, absorbing history book. He starts by describing Georgian England and the many crimes that could get you locked up or hanged. (He points out that there were more slang words associated with hanging than with sex.) The jails were full, so they put hulks of battleships in the Thames and filled them with prisoners. (Any of this sound familiar?) Still not enough room. I know – let’s send them “beyond the seas” to this new land we just discovered, and make them support themselves. They can send back flax and timber from Norfolk Island, plus this will keep Boney and the Frenchies from claiming this part of the world! Win-win! Well, it didn’t work out quite like that, but it’s a fascinating story.
Tons of interesting facts from primary sources – letters, criminal records, etc. One example: apparently descendents of Irish convicts in Australia pride themselves on being the scion of political prisoners, when in fact political prisoners were only a tiny percentage – most Irish sentenced to transportation were common criminals. The Irish were treated more harshly than other convicts; there was one rebellion that was quickly crushed. Political uprising was easily quashed by dispersing the rebels – ending up on a remote farm where none of the other convicts had the energy to care pretty much put an end to that.
Australians also get a kick out of the idea that their formothers were whores, but that actually wasn’t a transportable offence. They were just thieves, mostly.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff about class issues and how historians disagree about whether the convicts can be considered a class; there was much loyalty amoung them, but as time went by some of them acquired wealth and disassociated themselves. Of course the military people and the folks who came over to farm (with land grants and convict labor) never saw them as anything but convicts, and the children of convicts were just as bad as their parents.
Along the way he mentions a bunch of stories of people that deserve to be made into books or movies: bushrangers; Eliza Fraser who was shipwrecked, along with her husband, on an island off the Australian coast, married a convict who’d lived with the Aborigines, and eventually returned to England (there is a book about that one, Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves); William Buckley, who escaped and was taken in by a group of Aborigines because they thought he was the returned spirit of one woman’s husband and lived with them for thirty-two years; Mary Bryant and her family, who rowed to Timor in a six-oar cutter they stole from the harbor and claimed to be shipwreck survivors. James Boswell gave her a pension. ( )

All I know for sure about Australia is that it has cool birds. Everything else I’ve had to learn from Hollywood. Here’s what I’ve ascertained so far:
1) Tina Turner makes people fight on trapeezes.
2) Bowie knife-wielding Outback types turn into delightful fish-out-of-water characters, when you bring them to the big city.
3) Alligator wrestling and Great White Shark hunting are enormously popular.
4)This is the temple where Australians sacrifice kangaroos to a vengeful goddess they call “Olivia Newton-John”:


Fatal Shore turned out to be a wonderful book to help fill whatever gaps might still remain in my knowledge about the Land Down Under. This is the way I like history written- not too much detail about this king or that governor- more about the social trends and economic activity that drove events. Robert Hughes masterfully relates Australia’s early history as a British penal colony from 1790-1840. Looking at stock images of Australia‘s beautiful scenery now, it seems tragic that it was once used as a prison, but that’s how it started.

How could such a thing happen?
The answer is really a convergence of several factors. One thing that surprised me was the extent to which American independence prompted Australia‘s colonization. In 1790, America had just recently won her independence. Prior to this, British convicts frequently worked sentences of indentured labor on American farms in Virginia, Pennsylvania and the Carolinas. With American independence, this was no longer an option. England turned to warehousing criminals in hulking prison barges on the Thames. This soon proved expensive, however, and was a breeding ground for disease.

While some worried themselves about the convict problem, senior leadership in government was more preoccupied with the state of the navy. The loss of the American colonies created a strategic vulnerability, in that America had been Britain’s main source of quality shipbuilding materials. For over 100 years, the Crown felled America’s ancient forests to construct its world-dominating fleet. Denied that, the best alternative woods lay in Russia… a decidedly less eager supplier. Likewise, the best flax for canvass and hemp for ropes also came from the American colonies. Another source was needed urgently. As if ordained by the stars, promising timber and flax were both discovered on Norfolk Island, off the Australian coast in 1784. Suddenly, establishing a British presence there became a national security priority- both to develop the resources, and to deter French claims on the land (the French possessing territories in “nearby” Tahiti). But how could Britons be convinced to leave their friends and family for a remote continent filled with unknown challenges? Scientist and explorer Joseph Banks hit on an elegant solution: why not use convicts? His proposal came to the attention of the Secretary of State, Viscount Sydney, who aggressively championed the scheme. Thus began the era of “transportation”, as it was called …and none too soon; Britain was in the throes of a crime wave. Loss of American markets precipitated a dramatic falloff of exports, as well as a concurrent rise in commodity prices (Americas being the supplier of many raw materials). Massive unemployment resulted, starting in manufacturing, but spreading to other areas. Hired labor in the agricultural sector was hit hard; unlanded farm workers literally began to starve in the countryside. Crimes of desperation (stealing food, killing for food, and prostitution for food) broke out everywhere. Although many of these offenses were previously punishable by hanging, British judges were encouraged to commute the sentences to “transporation”. Hughes’ research here is impressive- he uncovers a wealth of letters bidding loved ones farewell forever from convicts embarking on the 14,000 mile one-way journey. That’s a long trip even in today’s small world; in 1790 it must have sounded the equivalent of being sent to the moon!

…And then it got complicated
But not in a bad way. Having established all this background information about why Australia was colonized with convicts, Hughes launches into how the grand social experiment played out. It starts with the brutal 14k mile journey from London to Botany Bay. Prisoners were packed below decks in squalor- fighting, hustling one another, getting seasick, killing and raping each other, stealing food, singing songs, telling stories, getting it on, bemoaning their fate, planning and attempting mutinies (2 attempted in the history of Transporation, neither successful), and passing the time in a thousand other ways. The text is peppered with song lyrics, dirty limericks, and excerpts from the ships’ logs. It reads like a novel- I seriously forgot this was nonfiction.

Once on land, the whole raison d'être for the colonies fell apart. The timber and flax on Norfolk Island had entirely different properties than those grown in America, and proved unsuitable for shipbuilding. No matter- England’s convict disposal problem was being relieved; alternative work would need to be found for them. At first, this meant construction of government buildings and the governor’s home. Later on, labor was directed to agriculture- which met with variable degrees of success, as colonists experimented with which crops took to the local soil and which did not. Free and convicted alike almost starved to death those first few years. If you like tales of survival (I’m looking at you, Karen) there is plenty here to satisfy. Eventually, wool became the first bumper export. With few natural predators, and practically limitless grazing land, raising sheep was extremely profitable. It was also a relatively unskilled endevor, so was easy to teach convicts, regardless of their previous education (or lack thereof).

The deal with transportation is that once a prisoner served his sentence (no less than 7 years, and more commonly 14 to 21 years), he would have an additional period of probation, where he was treated as an essentially free man, except he was not permitted to return to England. As a practical matter, most convicts shipped off to Australia never made it back to Britain. Their experiences in Australia varied from pastoral to unspeakably brutal. It mostly depended on the attitude of the local overseers and wardens, who were given wide latitude on how they treated their charges. Some, like the fair-minded and humane Alexander Macononchie regarded the isolation of Australia to be punishment enough. He administered a labor camp with a mind toward rehabilitation, and allocated a fair portion of the camp’s budget to teaching inmates trade skills to use when they got out. He was naturally beloved, and even received fan mail from prisoners after he left his station! In stark contrast, John Giles Price was a mean-spirited sadist who used every slightest excuse to have prisoners tortured in a sickening variety of creative ways. He was naturally not beloved, and died in a prison uprising when inmates beat him with their work tools until he resembled a gritty blood-colored paste on the cobblestones in front of his residence.

One point of curiosity I was hoping would be covered in Fatal Shorewas the matter of English-Aboriginal interaction. Hughes does quite well on this count, and again condensed obviously extensive research into pleasurable reading. The aborigines have inhabited Australia for at least 40,000 years, and live in small groups as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Their population was sparse, and the state of their technology ill-equipped to stand up to the British. On many occasions, they were slaughtered, mistreated, and otherwise abused in all the ways indigenous peoples have been by empires through the ages. But to leave it at that would be a bit of an oversimplification. In the British settlements, males outnumbered females eight to one, so it is not shocking to read that on gaining their freedom, a lot of ex-cons took up with “native” women, if opportunity allowed. Then there are cases of escaped convicts who were only able to survive in the unfamiliar environment by “going native” and joining up with aborigines as members of their community, living with them side-by-side in their traditional lifestyle. This wasn’t a common occurrence, but it happened. For the most part, contact with the British was not a positive thing, and the fate of the aborigines has many parallels with that of Native Americans. One interesting twist, though: whereas Native American populations were decimated by Europeans killing off buffalo herds, a sort of reverse dynamic played out in Australia…while the aborigines stood little chance of successfully fighting settlers directly, they soon learned they could destroy a settler’s livelihood by relentlessly picking off his sheep when he wasn’t around. Some settlers were bankrupted by this, and forced to abandon their lands. Unfortunately, the response to this was frequently organized colonial posses hunting aborigines, and even official payouts for killing them. Convicts could even earn reduced time from their sentences, and free settlers could earn cash rewards by turning in the heads of aborigines to local government offices.

CANNIBALISM!!

If I know my GoodReaders (and I think I do) there’s two things they love to read about: incest and cannibalism. Well come and get it! This is the infamous true story of Alexander Pearce and his gang. They escaped the savagely punitive prison in Macquarie Harbor, Tasmania (then called “Van Diemen’s Land”), and planned to live off the land. Unfortunately, none of these city boys had the skills to do so. They stumbled around the wilderness for several days, until the supplies they brought with them ran out. There were seven of them at first… then one of them got the bright idea they should draw lots and consume the loser. What’s that? That isn’t how you were taught camping in the Boy Scouts? Well, don’t judge- by all accounts, the unlucky Thomas Cox was delicious. Unfortunately, he didn’t last that long. When the gang started to get hungry again, some members weren’t so sure they liked the diminishing odds of drawing straws again. I don’t want to ruin the story here; it’s a good one, and it’s all true. You really should read this book!

Oh damn.. there’s a bunch of other stuff I want to talk about, but as usual my review is running long… long enough to test the patience of even the most determined reader. To show you how much more great stuff is packed into this book, I’m just going to throw together a little list of fun and fascinating subjects contained on these pages:
1) The plight (mostly) and delight (sometimes) of being a woman (free or convict) in early Australia
2) Irish solidarity among the convict population
3) Governors lying to the Colonial Office back in London
4) Fooling the French
5) Sad songs
6) Official vs. unofficial policies regarding homosexuality among the convicts
7) The insane, truth-is-stranger-than fiction tale of James Porter’s escape from Tasmania and his miraculous journey to Chile, where he managed to pass himself off as a nobleman (for a while)
8) The evolution of the Australian dialect as a distinct entity
9) Pirates, stowaways, and one amazing escape to Java on a homemade raft!
10) Cool birds
11) Australia’s first train (powered by convicts!)
12) Out-of-touch British nobles trying to live opulent lifestyles in the middle of a prison camp
13) Snarky tattoos
14) Sex in the great outdoors
15) Meddlesome American whalers
16) How some places got their names

What more can I say to convince you to read this? Looking back on it, I can’t believe how much information Hughes packed into 600 pages… and I also can’t believe how much fun this was to read! I must admit I came to this book in a state of almost complete ignorance about Australia. I have no illusions of expertise now, but Fatal Shore has at least hinted at how much more there is to learn about the place… the book is, after all, only a history of Australia’s first fifty years!

-G’day Mates!
( )

History of the founding of the Australian colony on a grand scale. Tells of the absolutely terrifying conditions and utter cruelty which prevailed for only too long. ( )

Great Britain has been blessed with good public relations. Its atrocities and global missteps have been, time and again, swept under the carpet, foremost among those crimes committed against the poor Irish. The horrors of the penal colony established in Australia has also been nearly forgotten. The gold rush in Australia, similar to that in California, allowed it a reboot of its history. The new immigrants swamped the comparatively few survivors of the earlier penal colony system. Thus, Australia's dark past has been buried and forgotten, except in the archives, song and folk memory.

Robert Hughes combines these three sources to present a vivid portrait of Australia's beginning as a British penal colony. The lack of decent planning and control made the penal system needlessly cruel. In contrast to the indenture system used to send the rabble to America, the criminals (mostly thieves) sent to Australia were considered doomed cases without rights as Englishmen and only fit for the whip (a pure theory X approach). This no way out approach created its own problem in that the administration had to create dedicated mini-hells within the penal system in Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) and Norfolk Island. The development of Tasmania was dented by the poor image created by the presence of relatively large numbers of ex-convicts. The economic failure of a penal colony doomed its existence. It took some time for the British ruling class to absorb the message of Les Misérables that it is circumstance not inherent evil that turns men into committing many crimes and that redemption is possible and far cheaper. Russia, China and the United States of today could learn from the Australian example that large prison systems dehumanize life and destroy economic value. As those deciding about the system are rarely those affected by the system, changes happen at a glacial pace. Today's beautiful and prosperous Australia is the best example that redemption even from wretched beginnings is possible.

Hughes' tour de force is highly recommended both as an introduction to early Australian history and as a testament to what men are willing to inflict on other men. ( )

I've been meaning to read this for a long time: when I visited Australia back in 1989, it was pretty obvious that the two books you were supposed to have read were Songlines and The fatal shore, not (as I had fondly imagined) Voss and Oscar and Lucinda. All the same, the main cultural reference point for 99% of the people I met seemed to be Crocodile Dundee... Anyway, somehow I didn't get around to Hughes until I chanced to see a secondhand copy a couple of days after hearing of his death.

Twenty-six years on, it's not quite as shocking a read as it would have been in the late eighties, because so many other writers have drawn on what Hughes says about the brutality and corruption of the British Gulag — we expect chain gangs, flogging and arbitrary abuse, and we're not surprised to find them here. We have become rather desensitised to the lash after reading so many graphic descriptions of it. What's more interesting and unexpected about the book is not so much the "what" as the "why": the way it seeks to develop a balanced view of what transportation was meant to achieve, how it fits into the history of penology, what its real effects on Australian culture and economic development were. In the process (as usual with that sort of analysis), it becomes clear that it's rather misleading to think of "transportation" as a single, uniform process. Ideas and objectives changed over the eighty years during which convicts were sent to Australia, as did the nature of the places they were sent to; the situation in New South Wales was quite different from that in Van Diemen's Land; convicts assigned to work for farmers fared quite differently from those working for the government; only relatively small numbers of convicts experienced the notoriously harsh conditions of places like Norfolk Island and Port Arthur, and so on.

British thinking on transportation seems — at least when seen from Hughes's steadfastly antipodean viewpoint — to have been at best intermittent and confused. It was obviously a lunatic idea to send a fleet of ships on a nine-month voyage to build a prison in a place that had been visited by Europeans only once before, for a matter of a few days. Of course, that's always in the nature of political approaches to crime and punishment: then as now, politicians were never quite sure what they wanted to achieve with their penal policy. The main concern seems to have been to shift the problem of crime out of sight without too much conspicuous expenditure of taxpayers' money. Insofar as there was a theory behind transportation, it was that crime was caused by a "criminal class". Removing the members of that class from the gene pool would eventually eliminate the problem of crime. Sending convicts to Australia and supporting them there cost a fortune in the early years of the project, but it was 100% successful in getting rid of them. Unfortunately, it turned out that there were always more criminals on the doorstep, however many were shipped away. Georgian thinkers didn't seriously consider the possibility that a great deal of crime (especially theft, the crime most often punished by transportation) might simply be the result of poverty and lack of opportunity. If they had, they might have realised that transportation was one penal strategy that did offer many convicts the chance to get out of the life of crime by learning a trade and building a new life in a place with greater opportunities. Obviously, it wasn't every pickpocket or burglar that could become a Magwich, but at least the chance was there. Ironically, it was this unintended positive consequence that ultimately doomed transportation as a policy: As Australia developed, it became increasingly difficult to present transportation as a deterrent, and the Australian gold-rush effectively made it impossible to continue. The government had to start building modern prisons in the UK.

A fascinating, lively read, with a good mix of detail and deeper analysis. I think Hughes was right to keep his viewpoint in Australia and look at what was happening London only from that perspective, but that does mean that you have to know a bit about British politics in the Georgian and early Victorian period to keep track of who was who. Probably not a problem for Hughes's Australian contemporaries, brought up on an anglocentric view of history, but perhaps tricky for American readers to follow. ( )

The forced movement of prisoners from England to Australia. Excellent ! ( )

This is the story of the transportation of convicts to Australia starting in the late 18th century and going on until the middle of the 19th century. The story is beyond belief and horrifying.
The book raises basic questions about the culture of England, Australia, Ireland, indeed, about 'culture' in general. It raises questions about sadism, sadism and the British military. After reading one wants to know more, much more. Here is one example of the kind of issue that comes up: the British industrial revolution produced huge amounts wealth, but also huge amounts of poverty and with that lots of crime. And hence the supposed need for transportation. Most political decisions concerning this issue were made from principals or perhaps we should say from prejudice. Getting facts was not part of the argument. How far have we come in treating wide spread crime? ( )

A few years ago I was visiting Bath Abbey and fell into conversation with one of the priests. When he found out I was from Australia, he mentioned there was a bridge nearby which still, to this day, has a worn and faded sign warning people that if they vandalise or steal from the bridge they may be "subject to transportation" to New Holland. "Perhaps," he said jocularly, "one of your ancestors vandalised that bridge!"

"Nah," I said casually, and with some relish. "He killed a guy."

The story, as I understand it, is that he and his brothers were poaching deer on a lord's estate. The gamekeeper caught them in the act, and in the ensuing fight they accidentally killed him. One was hung, one was imprisoned, and one was transported to Australia.

Like most Australians, I consider my convict ancestry to be nothing more than an interesting anecdote, one you can use to discomfit reverends in Somserset. Apparently it was not always so. Although the transportation system was winding down by the 1840s, and the very last convict ship landed in 1868, and more free settlers arrived in the gold rush years (in 1852 alone, more than twice as many free settlers arrived than the total number of convicts ever transported), Australians were for many years ashamed and embarrassed about what they considered "the convict stain." The ludicrous concept that criminal behaviour is genetically hereditary evidently took a long time to die.

In more recent years - prompted, in part, by reasonable historical examinations like Hughes' - Australians have grown less reticient about recognising their past. I only vaguely remember hearing a small amount of convict history, only in primary school, and mostly about the First Fleet. Specifically - and this is a common thread when I ask people of my age - I remember being taught something along the lines of, "The first settlers in Australia were English convicts, but that's OK, because back then you could be sent to jail for stealing a loaf of bread." (It's always a loaf of bread). It seemed to me that my Australian history education could do with some fleshing out, and The Fatal Shore is commonly regarded as one of the best histories on colonial Australia.

I expected to find this book quite difficult, and it did take me several weeks to read, but it was far easier than I thought. Hughes tells history in a narrative fashion, and has a strong talent for prose; some of his decriptions are wonderful:

Past the entrance, past another rust-streaked rock named Bonnet Island, the harbour opens to view. It is so long that its far end is lost in the greyness. The water is tobacco-brown with a urinous froth, dyed by the peat and bark washed into it by Australia's last wild river, the Gordon, which flows into the eastern end of the harbour. The sky is grey, the headlands grey, receding one behind the other like flat paper cut-outs. It is an utterly primordial landscape of unceasing interchange, shafts of pallid light reaching down from the low sky, scarves of mist streaming up from impenetrable valleys, water sifting forever down and fuming perpetually back. Macquarie Harbour is the wettest place in Australia, receiving 80 inches of rain a year.

(He claims, though, that "no-one has ever lived there or ever will," which isn't true - I've met the caretaker.)

Hughes has a keen eye for detail, selecting interesting journal entries and letters and ship's logs, and and amid the vast sweep of history there are dozens of fascinating individual stories. I particularly liked that of James Porter, a convict who escaped from Van Diemen's Land with several compatriots by comandeering a naval ship they had been building, sailing across the Pacific to Chile, convincing the locals they were British aristocracy and living happily there for several years until the Royal Navy finally tracked them down. Hauled back to Australia to face trial, Porter knew that he would be hanged, because the British took their navy very seriously and piracy was one of the worst crimes that could be committed. He escaped execution with one of the most awesome legal defences ever: because he'd stolen the ship before it was officially launched, he had not in fact stolen a ship at all, legally speaking - merely a collection of wood and sailcloth in the shape of a ship. The tales of Mary Bryant, Alexander Pearce, and Martin Howe were equally fascinating.

This is, of course, still a history book, and about halfway through I was getting a little weary of being buried under statistics. But there is far more of an emphasis on social attitudes and cause and effect, rather than dates and figures, which is of course the most important aspect of history. Hughes begins his story in England, examining why there was such an unprecedented crime wave in England in the mid-19th century (the Industrial Revolution caused widespread unemployment among tradesmen, coupled with an unprecedented population boom, which drove people into cities and plunged them into poverty), why transportation was seen as the solution (because of Victorian attitudes of a "criminal class," which could not be reformed, only purged), and why it was Australia that was chosen (the American colonies were gone, Australia was satisfyingly remote, and its natives were passive and easy to deal with).

The thing about The Fatal Shore is that it's not a comprehensive history of early Australia. It's a comprehensive history of the convict system, which comprises about 80% of early Australia's history, but not all of it. Virtually the entire book is focused on New South Wales and Tasmania, because that was where the bulk of the convicts were transported. Queensland gets only a brief chapter, and only relating to Brisbane. Victoria is mentioned only in the last 50 pages, and Western Australia only in the last 30. South Australia, the only state that never received convicts, is not mentioned at all. There is only one chapter on the Aborigines, and while it's more sympathetic to them than a book of that time might otherwise be (yes, it was written in 1987; yes, Australia really is that backward) it still gives short shrift to Australia's first people. Virtually nothing is mentioned of the Rum Rebellion, and Hughes is utterly silent about New Zealand - a different country, yes, but one in such close proximity to New South Wales, in such a distant part of the world, that surely it must have figured prominently in Australian society in the 19th century. The gold rush is discussed, but only in relation to how it was a factor in the end of the transportation system. One should be clear, when embarking upon this book, that it's not a history of colonial Australia but rather a history of the British convict transportation system.

Apart from that misunderstanding, I also felt that sometimes Hughes was stuck in an awkward place between being a dry textbook and being a historical narrative; his timeline jumps awkwardly, the book divided into chapters examining different aspects of the convict system (women, bushrangers, free settlers etc) rather than flowing chronologically. There's also quite a bit of repetition; I certainly read far more about convicts getting flogged on Norfolk Island than I needed to.

The Fatal Shore is thus not a perfect book, but still a good one. I have a much better understanding of Australian convict history now than I did from school (in particular, the fact that it's a very small part of our history; that fact about the gold rush settlers in 1852 really surprised me). It's not the last book you'd ever want to read to understand Australian history, but it's certainly a good place to start - and an enjoyable one, too. ( )