I came across this today (Nov 2009) -this is the text of an old web page review I'd done.
_________

I suppose it is only fitting that on the last mail delivery day before Australia Day, I had my first of several hundred action figures arrive, - and that they were all Diggers from 1942-4 New Guinea.

Also that I completed Robert Hughes' defining volume of the founding of Australia throughout its years as the British crown's penal colonies.

When considering modern Australia, it is important to consider that the State of Victoria's involvement in the transportation system was limited, and that the State of South Australia was never a penal colony, so that while Hughes touches on Victoria, it is only briefly when discussing the gold rush of 1851 which did so much to end the use of the Eastern Australian colonies as convict posts. South Australia is not germane to this historical discussion of convict Australia, so people wanting more information on that State's history will have to look elsewhere.

I spent a fair amount of time with this book while I was undergoing the scrutiny of the Australian immigration process during this past year. As such, I had some time to consider my own thoughts of my mostly preconceived ideas of the founding of a set of colonies that were to become a country. I have to confess, that as an ex-patriot of the United States, I had a certain “American-centric” view of the process of a country that underwent a European discovery, and subsequent expansion that led to a greater union of the whole. Granted, that is a very general description of 19th Century American history which ignored the very real growing pains of sectional regionalism that can still impact my home country, albeit in a much more subdued manner than what had resulted in a bloody civil war.

Australia's founding might have looked similarly, but this lasted for only a very brief time; this similar appearance is a trap for people who won't look further. A large part of early Australian expansion came from the need for additional and more remote penal colonies.

Hughes introduces the reader to narrative descriptions of Europeans' voyages of discovery down this way, the Dutch, French, and ultimately Captain James Cook, whose ship, the Endeavour, sailed into Botany Bay in 1770. Cook's journey also took his crew to Norfolk Island, an island that had potential resources of naval store timber, as well as flax. These were prime factors in Britain's investigating the potential for a colony on the mainland of Australia.

Initially, the failure or dire needs of the Crown's criminal justice system also factored into sending a fleet of what would now be called “private contractors'” ships to establish a colony. The fleet was originally to land at Cook's Botany Bay. While Cook managed to overlook Sydney Harbour back in 1770, this was something that Captain Phillip would not do in 1788.

Phillip described Sydney Harbour as, “...large enough to anchor all of the navies of Europe and still have room left.”, or something similar.
Hughes does not write this book with a strict eye to pure chronological sequencing, rather preferring to stay within a sequence within a given topic. For example, his chapters include topics such as the Koori ( a term he doesn't actually use), the experiences unique to women, sailors, Irish, Jacobites, etc... Geographically speaking, the majority of this book is focused upon Sydney and its surrounding areas and offshoot settlements up the coast, Van Diemen's Land (modern Tasmania), and Norfolk Island.

For myself, I found the history of Norfolk Island, as well as Van Dieman's Land to be the most interesting, and at the same time alarming and revolting portions of this book. The fact that Hughes is so effective at describing this period in Australia's history and its accompanying personalities is testimony to his huge contribution to the understanding of colonial Australia convict history. At times this history compared to the very things we have fought against; this is not a pretty or a warm and fuzzy story, but rather, it is a very important one evermore so, in light of the fact that few people before Robert Hughes had ventured to examine this period in such depth before.

The book is extremely well documented with notes and footnotes; there is a massive bibliography, as well as a detailed index. Hughes' research methodology appears to be solid. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. However, it does bear noting that I'd starting reading this book about 20 years ago when I was much younger, and Australia's relevance to my life was still in the future. I am glad that I put Fatal Shore down back then, as when reading it during these past few months, the topics addressed were much more meaningful to me. It made a huge difference in my enjoyment of this book.

ST Feb 2007 ( )

There's no doubt that the lash and hangman's rope played an important role in early New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania). About 1830, the death rate by execution was about 1 per 1000 of the European population of NSW (30 per year out of 30,000). The first criminal trial in Australia led to a sentence of 150 lashes for being drunk and abusive. Thus began the operation of law in Australia, only a fortnight after the colony commenced. But a few months later, in Cable v Sinclair, two young convicts successfully sued the master of a first fleet ship because their luggage had gone missing on the voyage. English law would not have allowed attainted convicts to sue, let alone hold property. One of those convicts, Henry Kable, went on to a career as constable, jailer and merchant, even if his finances did crash spectacularly. This was a new land with a new approach to law and egalitarianism.
Hughes emphasises blood and the lash, glorying in it. He tells a great story, like an airport novel. But he doesn't tell us anything about the ordinary social and commercial life which began so quickly after the first colony began in 1788. He tells only half the story, and as a result, academic historians ignore his work. There are many much better histories of convict Australia than this. Try Grace Karskens, The Rocks, for a start.
Some of the men and women of early NSW were dishonest, gaining what they could when they could. That applied to officers as well as convicts. But they had relationships (often without marriage) and children, developed trade, lived their lives as well as they could. The surprise is that the place was so successful, not that it was so bloody. And of course the most significant blood lost was that of the indigenous people, a story not unique to Australia. ( )

An engrossing, thoroughly researched, well-written, powerful, and profoundly disturbing book.

The last lecture on the syllabus of my academic advisor's Western Civ course was titled "The Lessons of History." Ernie Sandeen explored the potential lessons we might have learned from our semester's study, then proceeded to demolish each in turn. At the end of the session, he offered this depressing summary: "The lesson of history, I've learned, is that there are no lessons to be learned. Everyone draws conclusions; often different people draw flatly contradictory lessons from the same events."

This book is like that. ( )

Robert Hughes has written an excellent history of the founding of Australia. This work is well researched and documented. What is more important to me is that it is highly readable. It's long (600 pages) but never tedious.

Robert Hughes is a very good writer. He has used enough personal stories and description to make the history come alive, as well as providing historical context about life in both Australia and Britain.

Excellent. ( )

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.

Hughes's writing is clear and evocative, which is, I think, the primary reason I so enjoyed his book. I read a good amount of biography and popular history, but dislike the current trend toward "nonfiction" that is actually a novel masquerading as fact (The Devil in the White City, I'm looking at you!). Nothing against historical fiction, but I really feel that there is a marketing niche in book publishing right now that's trying to have its cake and eat it too: capitalize on the growing popularity of nonfiction by almost marketing certain novels as true fact. Which seems kind of scummy to me personally. The Fatal Shore, on the other hand, is as readable and welcoming as a novel, without the addition of fictional characters or subtly fantasist alternative realities. (Again, nothing against subtly alternative realities; I just dislike becoming embroiled in asinine debates with the people who read these historical novels as straight history, and start spouting off the "facts" they learned from them.)

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. Since the vast majority of the convicts were men, and since the jails were gender-segregated, homosexual activity among convicts was prevalent. To the bigwigs back in England, sodomy was "the unimaginable crime," unspeakable and disgusting regardless of the circumstances, so not a lot of effort was expended on distinguishing the pairings that resulted from genuine attachment, in which convicts bestowed the last, most human parts of themselves on loving another person, from those that represented stereotypical prison rape or other coercive power-plays. There's no doubt that both kinds of relationship existed, along everything in between, but to the mainstream English mind all was equally repulsive; in fact, one English reformer who visited Norfolk Island in the 1830's was especially shocked to see the male/male convict relationships which seemed genuine and caring, "parodying" a traditional marriage. As it turns out, the menace of sodomy was a key speaking-point in the movement to abolish the transportation system, as ex-convicts published memoirs about their horror at coercive sex, and the English public shuddered at the idea of any homosex at all.

For the modern mind, all of this is fascinating and difficult to parse - particularly when Hughes goes on to discuss how the perception of rampant sodomy among convicts contributed to the virulent homophobia of post-transportation Australians, who wanted to purge their society of "the convict stain." Anything suggestive of convictry was to be energetically suppressed, including homosexuality. In some cases, this homophobic urge was maintained after all consciousness of a convict past had been forgotten. If nothing else, reading this section was a good reminder that the "progressive" values of one age are often couched so differently as to be unrecognizable next to those of two hundred years later.

I seldom stopped underlining and note-taking throughout my reading of The Fatal Shore, and I could go on and on. However! Packing, list-making, and pattern-sizing await. Suffice to say, it was a very evocative and thought-provoking read, and one I highly recommend. Anyone with a passing interest in colonial, English or Australian history, gender studies or penal history would be well-advised to give it a look.

Absolutely brilliant. The author seems to enjoy the horrors he is describing. ( )

2139 The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes (read 3 Apr 1988) A blurb for this book calls it "The epic of Australia's founding." It tells of the convicts shipped to Australia from 1788 to 1868, and how they were treated. It is a gruesome story, and told me much I did not dream of. Some of the treatment of prisoners is simply so atrocious one cannot understand how they survived. I am glad I read the book, but maybe I'd been better to read a plain history of Australia than this long account of this aspect of its beginnings. ( )

This novel of the early settling of Australia and the transportation of convicts to penal colonies is an ambitious undertaking. Hughes does a good job of incorporating historical research into a readable novel. Very entertaining. ( )

I was hoping for a more exciting read. this book was hard to get through -- very slow. I'm glad I read it for the history knowledge but I would not recommend it for a good read. ( )

This book certainly delivers depressing scenes and themes. Australia was settled as an English penal colony- obviously, there are many scars there, and a whole lot of brutality. Enough, in fact, to write a whole 600-page book. Plus appendices.

I was thoroughly engrossed in this book until about page 500. And then it just started to bog me down. Hughes spends a large portion of the book recounting how many times people were whipped. He even sets up a chart to show you the average number of whippings per person in Australia over a certain number of years. He describes the whip (called a cat o' nine tails) in minute detail. He describes the "art" of properly whipping someone. He talks about the lash marks people would get on their backs. I feel like I know more about whippings than I ever thought I would.

Granted, he has a reason to go on in such detail- whipping was (apparently) quite a normal part of life in colonial Australia. He also touches on the subjects of the Australian class system, its obsession with wiping out the "Stain" of being descended from a convict colony, sexism, sodomy, politics, bushrangers and racism.

It's all very interesting- but perhaps not read all at once, in so much detail. After a time, I just couldn't bring myself to read about the many ways that prisoners on Norfolk Island were tortured. Or about the horrible conditions that female convicts lived in. I think the most interesting part of the book was the section on the Australian bushrangers. I guess that's kind of obvious- really, who would not want to read about Ned Kelly's forebears? It was really interesting to read about how Hughes believes the Australian contempt for authority arose out of the bushranging, Robin Hood-like myth. Of course, it doesn't really eliminate the fact that bushrangers generally were criminals, but everyone likes a daredevil hero to remember and write songs about!

Most of the bushrangers, in case you were wondering, received several whippings. Which caused me to wonder- if you are sending a low-income criminal on a very long sea voyage to the other end of the world, without family or friends and a very low chance of ever returning... isn't that punishment enough? Do you really need to continue to whip and beat him for years afterward? It is so bizarre, really, to imagine the entire =thought= process of a colony being set up for punishment reasons. Seems a great deal of trouble to go through to get rid of criminals. But Hughes does explain that as well!

I think the most important- and certainly, the most disturbing- part of Hughes' book, however, was when he touched on the Australian relations with the Aborigines. To put it mildly, Australia does not have a very good track record in its treatment of the native population. Granted, most colonizing forces entering new lands do not treat native populations well. But sometimes, the treatment of the native Australians seems absolutely inhumane. The population was absolutely decimated- especially in Tasmania. For example, see this passage from the book (a long one- I apologize):

The last [Tasmanian native] man died in 1869. His name was William Lanne... Realizing that his remains might have some value as a scientific specimen, rival agents of the Royal College of Surgeons in London and the Royal Society in Tasmania fought over his bones. A Dr. William Crowther, representing the Royal College of Surgeons, sneaked into the morgue, beheaded Lanne's corpse, skinned the head, removed the skull and slipped another skull from a white cadaver into the black skin. This gruesome ruse was soon unmasked, for when a medical officer picked the head up, "the face turned round and at the back of the head the bones were sticking out." In pique, the officials decided not to let the Royal College of Surgeons get the whole skeleton; so they chopped off the feet and hands from Lanne's corpse and threw them away. The lopped, dishonored cadaver of the last tribesman was then officially buried, unofficially exhumed the next night and dissected for its skeleton by representatives of the Royal Society.... Lanne's skeleton then disappeared; and the head, which Crowther consigned by sea to the Royal College of Surgeons, vanished, too. It seems that the ineffable doctor had packaged it in a sealskin, and before long the bundle stank so badly that it was tossed overboard."

Would I recommend the Hughes book? Yes- it's interesting. It presents so many facts, and really has so many improbable stories and entertaining characters in it. I got bogged down towards the end- which really, can easily happen with a book of that length. Not EVERY page was fascinating, but I do think I know much more about Australia's beginning history than I did before. ( )

Magnificent history of the transportation of convicts to Australia and the penal colony itself. Hughes sprawling masterpiece is wonderfully researched and beautifully written - a poignant evocation of this fascinating chapter in Australia's history. A must read for history lovers. ( )

Fascinating, captivating, novel-like account of the genesis of Australia's colonial "founding" as a penal colony for Britain's most unwanted. Thick as a brick, packed with facts, but written in such a compelling way that it's an interesting, but sobering, read. Read it many years ago, when it was first published, but it still sticks with me. ( )

www.thebookpond.se ( )

Founding of Australia ( )

Bought this book because it was getting rave reviews, but found it very slow going, and never finished reading it.

This disappointed me because I expected something different.
I was hoping for a general history of Australia, but this was very much a history of nothing but Australia as a penal colony; starting with the first ship of convicts, ending with the last ship of convicts, and covering nothing else, not even, for example, relationships with the aborigines.

I imagine this is material of substantial interest to some people, but for me it was rather too much. ( )

Excellent narrative; very entertaining; a must for anybody interested in Australian history. ( )

The early days of Australian settlement ( )

The best book on the history of Australia I have read. Hughes is a magnificent writer.

Fascinating account of the settlement of Australia. Quite enlightening. ( )

I always had a soft spot for Australia, feeling that they were a lot like us Americans, and now I have some facts to go with it. A really horrible way to settle a new land, but really nice people resulted. One line summary: convicts, yes, and some even worse people than that. ( )