The Fatal Shore

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 show more 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.

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 show more 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

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, show more 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. show less

Covers the first eighty years of Australia's history following British colonization in 1788. It relates in detail the story of its convict past, driven by "the System" by which the British government divested itself of convicted criminals by shipping them to the far end of the world in order to relieve prison congestion.

Hughes provides a powerful degree of detail, and his prose often reads like narrative - almost too much so. I was frustrated whenever he skipped ahead in time and lost the thread of particular individuals or locations that I was caught up by, only returning a chapter or two later or sometimes not at all. A historian can only provide what the documentation conveys so these are necessary breaks, unfortunately. Hughes' show more recursive approach to his timeline adds layer upon layer. I can't suggest any better way of organizing the material, but it does become taxing to retread the same ground. It's also a challenge to sort out some of the chronology, or to recall which significant figures we've already been introduced to versus who is being described for the first time. Occasionally a term is used in passing and not explained until a chapter or two later, challenging me to understand or then remember who the Exclusives, the Emancipists and the Currency were. In those instances I had the impression he was writing for Australians and assuming a certain level of knowledge already.

Hughes paints a fair and realistic picture of the convict forebears of today's Australia. As is usually the case, the truth he reveals treads a middle path. Many convicts were sent to Australia on minor charges, and others weren't. Many were treated to a harsh existence there, and many were not. The stories of some bushrangers live up to their legend, and many do not. When he delves into personal stories they are typically instances of more extreme experiences, and he acknowledges when this was probably not typical. Some of the individuals' tales he investigates are (I gather) legendary figures in Australian mythos. Others are special finds whose accounts he dug up through research, providing first-hand views that confirm or contrast with historical repute. I was looking forward to reading the exploits of Sir John Franklin since he is a significant figure in Canadian history as well, but he pales here next to the pages given to his subordinate Alexander Maconochie who provided the one bright spot in the early history of Norfolk Island.

Convictions were often difficult to achieve in British court, given the lack of policing at the time. The crown attempted to compensate by issuing particularly heavy sentences for light infractions, hoping this would dissuade the crime rate (spoiler: it did not). A pickpocket might be issued a death sentence, life imprisonment, or transport. Transport meant exile to Australia, the far side of the world, from which few people ever returned. As it turned out, that was not so grim as it sounds for the male convicts (for the women it was almost universally a horror show): many found a superior life in their new home, where anyone with specialized skill was in high demand and land was easy to acquire. The crown again intervened, intent on ensuring that criminals did not begin to wish for transport rather than dread it. Harsh penance was imposed on newly arrived convicts, under which they must put on a brave face or be faced with harsher yet. Convicts were all but slaves, assigned to work and barely compensated for the duration of their sentence. If they rebelled in any manner they might find themselves in Macquarrie Harbour, Norfolk Island or some other cesspool of privation and torture. If they performed well, their master might charge them with a minor infraction to extend their sentence so he could get more free work out of them. Convicts who won their freedom were still not free of the social stigma, looked down on by free settlers and the local government. Their offspring fared better, while contending with the contemporary belief that crime was in the blood. Statistics tell a different story: children of convicts proved to be the most law abiding segment of the population. Those portions of the colony which were earliest at putting the System behind them fared best in the longer term.

I was glad to see that Hughes does not get so caught up in telling the story of the convicts that he forgets about the aboriginal people of Australia. There are some interesting differences but mostly sad and unsurprising similiarities between their story and that of the North American indigenous peoples. Whether they cooperated with or resisted white colonizers, their fates proved all the same. show less

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 show more 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. show less

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 show more 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! show less