steve_angelkov's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
informative
mysterious
medium-paced
5.0
I discovered this book, listening to Alistair Campbell’s answer (on the rest is politics podcast) to which book he would have liked to have written.
“The Fatal Shore” by Robert Hughes is a compelling exploration of the inhumane and barbaric practice of transporting convicts to Australia in the 18th and 19th centuries. Hughes skillfully captures the brutality and suffering endured by those subjected to this harsh system, shedding light on the historical injustices.
Drawing a haunting parallel to modern conservative policies of transporting illegal immigrants to Rwanda, one can’t ignore the continuance of inhumanity. The book invites readers to confront the disregard for human dignity that persists in certain immigration policies today. This connection is eerily resonant with the past, reminding us of the importance of compassion in policy-making.
One striking aspect in the book relating to the ‘transportation’ is that some of the crimes for which individuals were convicted in the past were indeed trivial in nature, exposing the arbitrary nature of the punishment.
A 17,000 mile journey by sea, convicts are generally not returning home, after they serve their sentence.
The level of brutality afflicted to the convicts with cat o’nine tails lashes and the brutality handed out the to indigenous aborigines is shocking.
This highlights the absurdity of subjecting people to life-altering sentences for minor offenses.
Paradoxically, the modern legislation transporting illegal immigrants to Rwanda can be seen as a form of the British Empire policy cannibalizing itself. It’s a stark reminder that the historical legacy of such policies can influence contemporary decisions, sometimes in ways that betray the principles the empire once claimed to uphold.
“The Fatal Shore” remains a thought-provoking book, urging us to learn from history and re-evaluate the moral dimensions of our current policies.
“The Fatal Shore” by Robert Hughes is a compelling exploration of the inhumane and barbaric practice of transporting convicts to Australia in the 18th and 19th centuries. Hughes skillfully captures the brutality and suffering endured by those subjected to this harsh system, shedding light on the historical injustices.
Drawing a haunting parallel to modern conservative policies of transporting illegal immigrants to Rwanda, one can’t ignore the continuance of inhumanity. The book invites readers to confront the disregard for human dignity that persists in certain immigration policies today. This connection is eerily resonant with the past, reminding us of the importance of compassion in policy-making.
One striking aspect in the book relating to the ‘transportation’ is that some of the crimes for which individuals were convicted in the past were indeed trivial in nature, exposing the arbitrary nature of the punishment.
A 17,000 mile journey by sea, convicts are generally not returning home, after they serve their sentence.
The level of brutality afflicted to the convicts with cat o’nine tails lashes and the brutality handed out the to indigenous aborigines is shocking.
This highlights the absurdity of subjecting people to life-altering sentences for minor offenses.
Paradoxically, the modern legislation transporting illegal immigrants to Rwanda can be seen as a form of the British Empire policy cannibalizing itself. It’s a stark reminder that the historical legacy of such policies can influence contemporary decisions, sometimes in ways that betray the principles the empire once claimed to uphold.
“The Fatal Shore” remains a thought-provoking book, urging us to learn from history and re-evaluate the moral dimensions of our current policies.
wanderingmilliner's review against another edition
challenging
dark
informative
slow-paced
fourtriplezed's review against another edition
5.0
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_Bay_(song)
“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/2809884622
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.
The title comes from the Moreton Bay song.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moreton_Bay_(song)
“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/2809884622
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.
freemajo's review against another edition
4.0
4.5 stars rounded down
Hughes shines a light on the founding of Australia as a distant penal colony for Britain by illuminating hundreds of first hand accounts from the convicts, lawmen, and sailors alike. His expansive vocabulary and use of references alternates between being a delight and a bit much, and in the end the work feels overlong yet just right, if that makes sense.
Hughes shines a light on the founding of Australia as a distant penal colony for Britain by illuminating hundreds of first hand accounts from the convicts, lawmen, and sailors alike. His expansive vocabulary and use of references alternates between being a delight and a bit much, and in the end the work feels overlong yet just right, if that makes sense.
meltheissa's review against another edition
681/1208 pages on my ereader.
It is a long book, and I just got bored of it, and had plenty of other books I wanted to read.
Good book for insights into convict Australia, and might come back to at some point, but I'm done for now.
It is a long book, and I just got bored of it, and had plenty of other books I wanted to read.
Good book for insights into convict Australia, and might come back to at some point, but I'm done for now.
nickfourtimes's review against another edition
5.0
1) "A static culture, frozen by its immemorial primitivism, unchanged in an unchanging landscape---such until quite recently was, and for many people still is, the common idea of the Australian Aborigines. It grows from several roots: myths about the Noble Savage, misreadings of aboriginal technology, traditional racism and ignorance of Australian prehistory. It is, in fact, quite false; but in the experience of white city-dwellers there is little to contradict it. Nobody can guess how Sydney Harbor began to unfold itself to its white prisoners on January 26, 1788, just by subtracting the poultice of brick, steel and tar from its headlands, pulling down the Harbor Bridge and the Opera House and populating the beaches with black stick figures waving spears. The changes have been too radical for that. 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 nineteenth 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."
2) "To deprive the Aborigines of their territory, therefore, was to condemn them to spiritual death---a destruction of their past, their future and their opportunities of transcendence. But none of them could have imagined this, as they had never before been invaded. And so they must have stood, in curiosity and apprehension but without real fear, watching from the headlands as the enormous canoes with their sails like stained clouds moved up the harbor to Sydney Cove, and the anchors splashed, and the outcasts of Mother England were disgorged upon this ancestral territory to build their own prison."
3) "Soon the Englishmen ran out of beads and ribbon, but the hesitant contacts went on through the afternoon as more tribesmen gathered on the beach. King gave two Aborigines a taste of wine, which they spat out. Names for things were exchanged. But the great enigma, for the Aborigines, was the sex of the whites. They poked at the marines' breeches. Finally King ordered one of his men to satisfy their curiosity. The embarrassed marine fumbled at his fly, and the first white cock was flashed on an Australian beach. 'They made a great shout of admiration,' King wrote, 'and pointing to the shore...we saw a great number of Women and Girls, with infant children on their shoulders, make their appearance on the beach---all in puris naturalibus, not so much as a fig-leaf. Those natives who were around the boats made signs for us to go to them & made us understand their persons were at our service. However, I declined.'"
4) "It was a squally day, and thunderheads were piled up in livid cliffs above the Pacific; as dusk fell, the weather burst. Tents blew away; within minutes the whole encampment was a rain-lashed bog. The women floundered to and fro, draggled as muddy chickens under a pump, pursued by male convicts intent on raping them. One lightning bolt split a tree in the middle of the camp and killed several sheep and a pig beneath it. Meanwhile, most of the sailors on Lady Penrhyn applied to her master, Captain William Sever, for an extra ration of rum 'to make merry with upon the women quitting the ship.' Out came the pannikins, down went the rum, and before long the drunken tars went off to join the convicts in pursuit of the women, so that, Bowes remarked, 'it is beyond my abilities to give a just description of the scene of debauchery and riot that ensued during the night.' It was the first bush party in Australia, with 'some swearing, others quarrelling, others singing---not in the least regarding the tempest, tho' so violent that the thunder shook the ship exceeding anything I ever before had a conception of.' And as the couples rutted between the rocks, guts burning from the harsh Brazilian aguardiente, their clothes slimy with red clay, the sexual history of colonial Australia may fairly be said to have begun."
5) "The realities of the lash were only apparent where the cat-o'-nine-tails met the skin. Neither the man inside the skin nor the other wielding the cat was apt to think that an act of reformation was taking place. What happened was crude ritual, a magical act akin to the scourging-out of devils. All punishment seeks to reduce its objects to abstractions, so that they may be filled with a new content, invested with the values of good social conduct. But the main use of prison, from the viewpoint of the respectable, is simply to isolate and neutralize the criminal. Australia met this requirement perfectly. Since it was not a building but a continent, it could receive a whole class, with room to spare. And it was a class, not just an aggregation of individual criminals, that the English authorities thought they saw."
6) "Clark got away eventually and was briefly reunited with his Betsy Alicia in June 1792. After that, his diary ceases before he could see his ideal again. In December 1792, he returned to service in the war against France. Early in 1794 Betsy Alicia died in childbirth, and the child was stillborn. A few months later, Clark's darling boy, Ralph, then a nine-year-old midshipman, died of yellow fever on board ship in the Caribbean, during a fight with a French ship. Clark was on board, too, and was killed in battle the same day. However, that was not quite the end of Clark's line, for at the time of his death he had a three-year-old daughter, whom he scarcely knew. She had been born to a convict woman, Mary Branham, on Norfolk Island in July 1791. At Clark's insistence, she had been christened Alicia. There is no reference to her mother in his journal."
7) "If these strange people showed so little solidarity among themselves, what common rights would their invaders assign them? In practice, almost none. The government simply declared all Australian land to be Crown land; and the idea that Aborigines might have some territorial rights by virtue of prior occupation was settled to the entire satisfaction of the whites by a New South Wales court decision in 1836, which declared that the Aborigines were too few and too ill-organized to be considered 'free and independent tribes' who owned the land they lived on. Even the humanitarians could salve their consciences by reflecting that the Aborigines were, after all, nomads---and to a nomad, one tract of land is 'as good asâ' another. This absurd misreading of nomadic life meant that Aborigines could be driven without compunction out of their ancestral territory and into new conflicts, not only with the whites, but with other tribes."
8) "The government arranged a funeral procession for the last Tasmanian on May 11, 1876. Huge crowds lined the pavements to watch her small, almost square coffin roll by; they followed it to the cemetery, and saw it lowered into a grave. It was empty. Fearing some unseemly public disturbance, the government had buried her corpse in a vault of the Protestant Chapel in the Hobart Penitentiary the night before. So Trucanini lay not 'behind the mountains,' but in jail. In 1878 they dug her up again and sloughed the flesh off her bones, then boiled them and nailed them in an apple crate, which lay in storage for some years. The crate was about to be thrown out when someone from the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery read the faded label. The bones were strung together, and the skeleton of Trucanini went into a glass case in the museum, where it remained until feelings of public delicacy and humanitarian sentiment caused it to be removed, in 1947, to the basement. In 1976, the centenary of her death, the authorities---not knowing what else to do with this otherwise ineradicable dweller in their closet---had it cremated, and the ashes were scattered on the waters of the D'Entrecasteaux Channel. Just 140 years had passed since the day in 1836 when the virtuous and unbending proconsul, Sir George Arthur, had been ushered weeping onto the Elphinstone at the New Wharf and, to the cheers of several hundred free Vandemonians, had sailed away to England, his baronetcy and the deserved gratitude of the Crown."
9) "On October 13, the men were hanged in two sets of six on the gallows that looked over Kingston beach and the Pacific beyond, before the assembled convicts, with all the military standing by with primed muskets to crush any restiveness. No voices were raised but those of the condemned, who joined together in singing a hymn. Rogers had sat up all night with them, praying; he and the Roman Catholic chaplain, Father Bond, walked with the men to the scaffold, where their irons were struck off although their arms remained 'severely pinioned.' The trapdoor crashed, the bodies fell, the ropes thrummed on the beams. The mutineers' corpses were cut down, coffined, loaded unceremoniously into bullock-carts and dumped in an old sawpit outside the consecrated ground of the cemetery, by the sea's edge. Rogers, cassock flying, trotted up too late for the burial; by the time he reached the edge of the mass grave, where the new commandant had stood grimly staring at the remains of the Ring, the gravediggers had done their work and the coffins were already under earth. As a token of infamy, the sawpit was unmarked, but the hump of earth over the bodies remained clearly visible decades later; it received the name of 'Murderers' Mound.'"
2) "To deprive the Aborigines of their territory, therefore, was to condemn them to spiritual death---a destruction of their past, their future and their opportunities of transcendence. But none of them could have imagined this, as they had never before been invaded. And so they must have stood, in curiosity and apprehension but without real fear, watching from the headlands as the enormous canoes with their sails like stained clouds moved up the harbor to Sydney Cove, and the anchors splashed, and the outcasts of Mother England were disgorged upon this ancestral territory to build their own prison."
3) "Soon the Englishmen ran out of beads and ribbon, but the hesitant contacts went on through the afternoon as more tribesmen gathered on the beach. King gave two Aborigines a taste of wine, which they spat out. Names for things were exchanged. But the great enigma, for the Aborigines, was the sex of the whites. They poked at the marines' breeches. Finally King ordered one of his men to satisfy their curiosity. The embarrassed marine fumbled at his fly, and the first white cock was flashed on an Australian beach. 'They made a great shout of admiration,' King wrote, 'and pointing to the shore...we saw a great number of Women and Girls, with infant children on their shoulders, make their appearance on the beach---all in puris naturalibus, not so much as a fig-leaf. Those natives who were around the boats made signs for us to go to them & made us understand their persons were at our service. However, I declined.'"
4) "It was a squally day, and thunderheads were piled up in livid cliffs above the Pacific; as dusk fell, the weather burst. Tents blew away; within minutes the whole encampment was a rain-lashed bog. The women floundered to and fro, draggled as muddy chickens under a pump, pursued by male convicts intent on raping them. One lightning bolt split a tree in the middle of the camp and killed several sheep and a pig beneath it. Meanwhile, most of the sailors on Lady Penrhyn applied to her master, Captain William Sever, for an extra ration of rum 'to make merry with upon the women quitting the ship.' Out came the pannikins, down went the rum, and before long the drunken tars went off to join the convicts in pursuit of the women, so that, Bowes remarked, 'it is beyond my abilities to give a just description of the scene of debauchery and riot that ensued during the night.' It was the first bush party in Australia, with 'some swearing, others quarrelling, others singing---not in the least regarding the tempest, tho' so violent that the thunder shook the ship exceeding anything I ever before had a conception of.' And as the couples rutted between the rocks, guts burning from the harsh Brazilian aguardiente, their clothes slimy with red clay, the sexual history of colonial Australia may fairly be said to have begun."
5) "The realities of the lash were only apparent where the cat-o'-nine-tails met the skin. Neither the man inside the skin nor the other wielding the cat was apt to think that an act of reformation was taking place. What happened was crude ritual, a magical act akin to the scourging-out of devils. All punishment seeks to reduce its objects to abstractions, so that they may be filled with a new content, invested with the values of good social conduct. But the main use of prison, from the viewpoint of the respectable, is simply to isolate and neutralize the criminal. Australia met this requirement perfectly. Since it was not a building but a continent, it could receive a whole class, with room to spare. And it was a class, not just an aggregation of individual criminals, that the English authorities thought they saw."
6) "Clark got away eventually and was briefly reunited with his Betsy Alicia in June 1792. After that, his diary ceases before he could see his ideal again. In December 1792, he returned to service in the war against France. Early in 1794 Betsy Alicia died in childbirth, and the child was stillborn. A few months later, Clark's darling boy, Ralph, then a nine-year-old midshipman, died of yellow fever on board ship in the Caribbean, during a fight with a French ship. Clark was on board, too, and was killed in battle the same day. However, that was not quite the end of Clark's line, for at the time of his death he had a three-year-old daughter, whom he scarcely knew. She had been born to a convict woman, Mary Branham, on Norfolk Island in July 1791. At Clark's insistence, she had been christened Alicia. There is no reference to her mother in his journal."
7) "If these strange people showed so little solidarity among themselves, what common rights would their invaders assign them? In practice, almost none. The government simply declared all Australian land to be Crown land; and the idea that Aborigines might have some territorial rights by virtue of prior occupation was settled to the entire satisfaction of the whites by a New South Wales court decision in 1836, which declared that the Aborigines were too few and too ill-organized to be considered 'free and independent tribes' who owned the land they lived on. Even the humanitarians could salve their consciences by reflecting that the Aborigines were, after all, nomads---and to a nomad, one tract of land is 'as good asâ' another. This absurd misreading of nomadic life meant that Aborigines could be driven without compunction out of their ancestral territory and into new conflicts, not only with the whites, but with other tribes."
8) "The government arranged a funeral procession for the last Tasmanian on May 11, 1876. Huge crowds lined the pavements to watch her small, almost square coffin roll by; they followed it to the cemetery, and saw it lowered into a grave. It was empty. Fearing some unseemly public disturbance, the government had buried her corpse in a vault of the Protestant Chapel in the Hobart Penitentiary the night before. So Trucanini lay not 'behind the mountains,' but in jail. In 1878 they dug her up again and sloughed the flesh off her bones, then boiled them and nailed them in an apple crate, which lay in storage for some years. The crate was about to be thrown out when someone from the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery read the faded label. The bones were strung together, and the skeleton of Trucanini went into a glass case in the museum, where it remained until feelings of public delicacy and humanitarian sentiment caused it to be removed, in 1947, to the basement. In 1976, the centenary of her death, the authorities---not knowing what else to do with this otherwise ineradicable dweller in their closet---had it cremated, and the ashes were scattered on the waters of the D'Entrecasteaux Channel. Just 140 years had passed since the day in 1836 when the virtuous and unbending proconsul, Sir George Arthur, had been ushered weeping onto the Elphinstone at the New Wharf and, to the cheers of several hundred free Vandemonians, had sailed away to England, his baronetcy and the deserved gratitude of the Crown."
9) "On October 13, the men were hanged in two sets of six on the gallows that looked over Kingston beach and the Pacific beyond, before the assembled convicts, with all the military standing by with primed muskets to crush any restiveness. No voices were raised but those of the condemned, who joined together in singing a hymn. Rogers had sat up all night with them, praying; he and the Roman Catholic chaplain, Father Bond, walked with the men to the scaffold, where their irons were struck off although their arms remained 'severely pinioned.' The trapdoor crashed, the bodies fell, the ropes thrummed on the beams. The mutineers' corpses were cut down, coffined, loaded unceremoniously into bullock-carts and dumped in an old sawpit outside the consecrated ground of the cemetery, by the sea's edge. Rogers, cassock flying, trotted up too late for the burial; by the time he reached the edge of the mass grave, where the new commandant had stood grimly staring at the remains of the Ring, the gravediggers had done their work and the coffins were already under earth. As a token of infamy, the sawpit was unmarked, but the hump of earth over the bodies remained clearly visible decades later; it received the name of 'Murderers' Mound.'"
stewg's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.75
edgeworth's review against another edition
4.0
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.
"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.
horseyhayls's review against another edition
4.0
Epic. Made it obvious how little Australians are taught about convict history... (even with the Eurocentric spin our history classes have) and this book is almost thirty years old. I've heard Hughes described as more of a story-teller than an historian, but a pretty solid place to start with Australian history nevertheless.