The fatal shore torrent

The fatal shore: a history of the transportation of convicts to Australia The fatal shore , Vintage Books. Libraries near you: WorldCat. The fatal shore: a history of the transportation of convicts to Australia , Pan Books. Borrow Listen. The fatal shore: a history of the transportation of convicts to Australia, , Collins Harvill. The fatal shore , Knopf, Distributed by Random House. The fatal shore , Knopf. Places Australia , Australie. Times Edition Notes Bibliography: p.

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Active MediaWiki developers should instead download from Git to get the latest version of the MediaWiki software. How many florid descriptions of floggings can a reader take? Oct 12, Lauren Albert rated it it was amazing Shelves: history-british.

I first read this in college when the paperback came out in I remember being enthralled by it which was notable since I wasn't at that time a history reader. I had years of thinking I should re-read it and never did. What a wonderful book. It is not a pretty story--not because the people who settled it were convicts, especially since many were, by our standards, minor offenders or political prisoners, but because of the conditions they faced and the treatment they received.

It was not pret I first read this in college when the paperback came out in It was not pretty for those in charge either for that matter. There were so many details that I won't go into them all--just read the book.

It's worth it. View 1 comment. Sep 21, Jill Hutchinson rated it it was amazing Shelves: world-history. An amazing book!!!! This page tome covers the founding of Australia from the First Fleet of the transportation of convicts landing at Botany Bay through the end of the transportation in The continent of Australia was an enormous jail and the author uses letters, diaries, and other written history to paint a picture of inhumanity that reads more like fiction.

As he spins his tale, he destroys some of the myths that Australians still accept as truths and verifies others through his impec An amazing book!!!! As he spins his tale, he destroys some of the myths that Australians still accept as truths and verifies others through his impeccable research. We travel along the coasts, over the Blue Mountains. We see the attempted annihilation of the aborigines as the colony expanded into the continent and the ecological effects of "civilization".

There is so much here that I suggest you read this brilliant and disturbing book This is a great book, one of the finest history books I have read covering Australia.

I found the book easy to read, the narrative flowed along full of facts but never dull. Its not stuffy and boring like a lot of history books but a very good yarn.

I have sent copies to friends around the world and they have all enjoyed the book as well. Its history at its best, some very interesting stories about Norfolk Island and Port Arthur and cannibal convicts, a very enjoyable tale. Maybe some Australian This is a great book, one of the finest history books I have read covering Australia. Maybe some Australians aren't too happy with this side of our history but never the less its still our history and this book makes it enjoyable to read about.

Oct 20, Emily rated it it was amazing Shelves: read-in 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! More specifically, I wanted to recommend this book highly; despite the often brutal facts of the case, I have seldom enjoyed a history more.

ANYway, Hughes's prose 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! 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!

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. Davey marked his arrival in Hobart Town in February 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. 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.

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. 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.

Justice appeared never to be thought of: - the gratification of a licentious and an unlimited Power being all they sought. 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.

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. 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.

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.

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 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 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. Jul 21, Paul Haspel rated it it was amazing Shelves: australia. Fate must have seemed cruel indeed, to those first Britons transported as convicts to Australia. Once the convicts and their guards arrived, they found an unfamiliar and seemingly harsh landscape where everything seemed to be the reverse of what they had known back in England.

And yet, from such inauspicious Fate must have seemed cruel indeed, to those first Britons transported as convicts to Australia.

And yet, from such inauspicious beginnings, a great nation was born, as Robert Hughes makes clear in a book filled with equal doses of horror and paradox. Hughes devotes considerable attention to the fine points of the convict culture that developed in colonial Australia.

He focuses, for example, on the particular travails faced by women convicts, LGBT convicts, and Aboriginal Australians. And then there were those who escaped into the wilderness and became bushrangers, continuing in a practical manner their opposition to the system. Among the many grim accounts of millions of lashes being meted out, of ever-more-severe and torturous punishments being designed by British officials who believed that the only way to deter crime in Britain was to make the name of Australia synonymous with absolute terror, relatively few sympathetic figures emerge.

Hughes also shows how the Australian transportation system was presented in literature and art. I first read The Fatal Shore when it came out in , a year before my first visit to Australia in I re-read it this year, while on my second visit to Australia. Much has changed in those thirty years, but the great and enduring spirit of the Australian people, and the beauty of the Australian landscape, remain unchanged. The always-controversial Hughes raised more than a few hackles when he published The Fatal Shore ; some Australians seem to have felt that he was blowing the proverbial whistle, or airing too much metaphorical dirty laundry, in presenting in such detail the horrors of colonial Australia.

Aug 29, Ms. This is a long book pages plus footnotes , and reading it felt like journeying down a long road. Yet, it is a significant book.

Hughes has applied extensive research to Australia's penal colony era — a period spanning when the First Fleet made its initial delivery of convicts to when the final shipment landed at Fremantle in Western Australia. Even as late as the mid's, the period was glossed over by Australian textbooks. As Hughes states in his inimitable way, Australians, p This is a long book pages plus footnotes , and reading it felt like journeying down a long road.

Colonial Australia's history is England's history from a different vantage point. After England lost the option of shipping its criminals to America as indentured servants. A stop-gap measure, warehousing them in The Hulls dilapidated transports ships and rotting warships was proving unsatisfactory, an all too visible embarrassment that was expensive to maintain and a dangerous health hazard.

Australia became the new Siberia. From the convict population rose as economic conditions in England declined and crime increased. Irish dissidents added to these numbers and reinforced the sentiment that even the harshest punishments might still be insufficiently brutal.

Directives from Whitehall and reports from Sydney literally rode on ships passing in the night. Hughes concludes that the system nurtured the sadistic tendencies of a stream of governors, proconsuls, and military officials overseeing the penal colonies. The book does present some difficulties for readers unfamiliar with the main historical figures of this period.

Chapters are organized by topic rather than chronology. Each settlement followed a slightly different demographic progression, forming rigid social classes, a contrast to the welcoming egalitarian image the country often projects.

England soon found itself caught between contradictory goals. Emigration was to be encouraged. It would alleviate overpopulation in the mother country and speed the prosperity to be reaped from its colony.

On the other hand, the government wanted to preserve the hellish reputation of the penal colonies as a deterrent to would-be criminals in England. Hughes eloquently presents these competing visions — utopia vs. The mornings are by Turner; the evenings by Caspar David Friedrich, calm and beneficent, the light sifting angelically down toward the solemn horizon. When I was at school, we were taught that most of the convicts transported to Australia were decent but unfortunate people, who were sent here unfairly, usually for petty and justifiable crimes like stealing handkerchiefs, or loaves of bread to feed their starving families.

It turns out that's not quite true, and there's no avoiding the fact that the fledgling nation of Australia was built in significant part by hardened criminals. Of course the story is complicated, and The Fatal Shore tells th When I was at school, we were taught that most of the convicts transported to Australia were decent but unfortunate people, who were sent here unfairly, usually for petty and justifiable crimes like stealing handkerchiefs, or loaves of bread to feed their starving families.

Of course the story is complicated, and The Fatal Shore tells that story of the first years or so of settlement in vivid detail. The book focuses on the penal settlements in and around Sydney, Norfolk Island and Van Diemen's Land, and especially on the convicts themselves, who often led hellish lives at the hands of sadistic overseers. Australia in the early days was a really nasty place to be if you were a convict - or indeed a native.

Reading these accounts of early Australia, I'm struck by just how recent it all was. I'm amazed that mere decades after the end of transportation, Australia was able to develop a national identity and the political will to achieve Federation, implement a stable system of government, and eventually grow into a prosperous and law-abiding nation. Our history is often glossed-over or ignored, but it's important to hear the full story.

View all 5 comments. Aug 05, David rated it it was amazing Shelves: history-australia. Fatal Shore is a brilliant history of how even the destitute and outcasts of Great Britain made a superior contribution to world civilization equal to what they had done in the Americas, Asia, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. What a great people! And Australia--what a great country today!

Peoples who could not absorb what the British had to offer still suffer from backwardness to this day and will most likely remain that way. Dec 21, Caroline rated it it was amazing Shelves: british-history. I've never known very much about Transportation or the early history of Australia, and now I wish I'd paid more attention when I was at school over there. Obviously growing up English I was fully aware of the history between the two countries and the insults flung back and forth - 'Pommies', 'convicts' and the like, but there never was any real understanding of the history of those insults.

So it's interesting to see just how deeply rooted Transportation, or the 'System' as it was known, was in A I've never known very much about Transportation or the early history of Australia, and now I wish I'd paid more attention when I was at school over there. So it's interesting to see just how deeply rooted Transportation, or the 'System' as it was known, was in Australia's early history. It wouldn't be far wrong to say that Australia as a colony would not have existed at all, or if it had, it is unlikely any free settlement could have survived, let alone prospered, were it not for convict labour.

It was the absolutely bedrock of society, the sine qua non, and yet at the same time a source of deep shame to the 'Exclusives', the upper-crust of free society, who tried to white-wash it out of knowledge and history.

Indeed, as Hughes argues, it is only really in the last 20 years that early Australian history has been taught in schools - prior to that, there was a national blinkeredness, a desire to pretend that Australia society was not built on 'the Stain' or 'the Taint'. This book is both a history of Australia and an insightful look into whether the penal experiment of Transportation succeeded. The main aims of Transportation were to eradicate England of the criminal element, in the misguided belief that criminality was hereditary and ingrained, rather than something caused by poverty, inequality and lack of opportunity; and to serve both as a horrifying deterrent to potential criminals and as a source of reformation and redemption for those criminals exiled from their homeland.

In both respects, Hughes argued, it can be considered a failure, not always, not exclusively, but fairly comprehensively. There was a chance for redemption for some; some ex-convicts certainly found life in Australia an opportunity to better themselves and gain wealth and position, but they could rarely escape their convict past - 'one a convict, always a convict' - and there was a definite social gulf between the 'Exclusives' and the 'Emancipists'.

This is the first book by Hughes I've read and I'm definitely keen to read more. His 'Rome' is on my Christmas list! Aug 31, Pam rated it it was amazing. Though written almost 35 years ago, The Fatal Shore is a remarkably fresh book about poor planning and abuse of power.

Partly this is because the book is so well written. Like other things Australian the author grew up in Australia it offers a panoramic, big view. Hughes has style and thoroughness. Epic thoroughness. This is not to say the book is repetitive. Well, expect lots of flogging throughout. I found it almost an ordeal to read and digest it all. Out of sight, out of mind. Murderers and the most serious of felons were hung not transported.

The remaining convicts were transported to a basically unknown and misunderstood land to accept term punishments of 7, 14 and full life. The result of transportation was barbarically cruel in most cases and women yes there were woman and children had it particularly rough.

Women often became virtual sex slaves to the managers and ruling class or sold themselves to get by. Crimes against property were always considered heinous. Hughes says it was so. Later Irish political prisoners and difficult religious dissenters joined the mix as well as more serious criminal types.

No one seems to have thought of dealing with the poverty and displacement caused by the early Industrial Age that pushed people from their time honored work in rural areas.

The poor, the starving and the unsightly were considered criminal and sent away. Their punishment in Australia was ghastly and cruel and drew sadistic behavior from their supposed guardians and masters.

The nomadic aboriginal people were abused and treated in the worst way. Hughes follows the 80 some years of the system through almost pages. Not exactly cheery reading but eye opening. View 2 comments. The Fatal Shore chronicles the year period beginning in during which the British government colonized Australia by transporting convicted criminals from the British Isles.

One of the changes was the institution of the convict transportation system. The convict transportation system brought , white men, women, and children to Australia in bondage. He certainly succeeds in that. The book is massive and exceptionally detailed. Hughes paints colorful portraits not only of the governors and other leaders, but also of many convicts.

He spares no detail of the horrific punishments that were inflicted on them, including the inhumane treatment of the worst offenders in places like Norfolk Island and Port Arthur. This is all very educational. As a reader from North America who has never been to Australia although I would love to go!

I found myself getting somewhat impatient with the narrative, especially in the second half or so of the book, which I think is not as well organized as the earlier portion.

I liked it, but it was much too long and detailed for me to love it. Aug 09, Matt rated it it was amazing Shelves: historyonics-world.

Absolutely a masterpiece. Hughes really tackles every aspect of the founding of Australia, which is more interesting than you might think, if you're not exactly packing for Sydney any time soon. When eminences like Susan Sontag, Arthur Schlesinger and Gore Vidal plug your book with comparisons to some of the greatest social chroniclers of all time, you know or hope, at least you're into something great.

I wasn't disappointed. Hughes brings up nearly everything which contributed to Australia's f Absolutely a masterpiece. Hughes brings up nearly everything which contributed to Australia's founding- colonialism, racism, prison systems, London's throbbing street life and criminal underclass, the elements of reform and resistance, the terrain, the flora and fauna of rural Aussie geography I'm definitely going to re-read this someday, some of the incidental tales he tells of some of the brave, hunted souls who tried to get away are just too juicy not to retell Absolutely recommended, if you like your history eloquent, novelistic and thorough.

Jul 10, Graeme Rodaughan rated it really liked it Recommends it for: Anyone with an interest in European colonisation. Shelves: history. A brilliantly written and researched history of the founding of Australia and this young country's many trials and tribulations.

Jun 19, notgettingenough rated it liked it Shelves: haven-t-read-but. Here's another thing about Australia. It has its priorities right.