Robert Hughes (1) (1938–2012)

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 show more 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. show less

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.

Hughes’ substantial life of Goya appears to have been a lifelong dream. From the opening chapter in which we learn of the near-fatal automobile accident that immobilized him for much of a year, but also revitalized his desire to complete this work, we hear the recognizable voice of Hughes, often irascible, fiercely intelligent, obliquely sentimental, but insistently objective when it comes to the actual artworks. Reading a Hughes description of one of Goya’s paintings and then turning show more the page to see its reprint on the following page is like hearing a precise echo before hearing the sound that triggered it. And for the most part Hughes’ descriptions avoid illicit interpretation. When he doesn’t have documentary evidence from Goya’s life, in writing and not just through hearsay, Hughes refuses to countenance innuendo. A painting of a maja is just a painting of a typical Spanish woman if there is no proof that it is of Godoy’s mistress (or Goya’s). And while that deflates some of the potential narrative arc to this life, it solidifies the firm foundation on which Hughes’ opinions, when he offers them, are to be believed.

The writing is always readable and compelling, with just enough cutting asides to remind you that Hughes was an art critic during the cutthroat days of the New York art world in the 80’s.

Recommended for those who want to know more about Goya’s work or for those who want to hear again Hughes’ very particular voice. show less

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 show more 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. show less