The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes

I’m actually ecstatic I managed to finish this ahead of Australia Day next week. Robert Hughes’ unbelievably good tour de force on the convict origins of Australia is extremely well written, passionately and exhaustively researched and truly entertaining for a tome of such weight and size. Not only that, but for a newcomer, it fills some serious gaps in the historical literature on trying to get a handle on the origins and differences of what makes Australia fundamentally Australia and different from the other children of Empire sown by the British. Hughes’ overarching view of The System amply provides context for seeing patterns in how things came about.

It is difficult to imagine the world back when it was so much larger and New South Wales was not just a state of Australia, but the entire known southern extent of empire and before one sailed over the edges of the world and dropped off the face of the Earth. Hughes does a tremendous job of doing this though, and making one realize what a terrifying prospect it must’ve been being transported, ostensibly reprieved from the gallows in London, to be shipped across the face of the world to its farthest extent to be slave to an assigned landowner. How the idea of Van Diemen’s Land, and the myths around its horrors could strike terror into the heart of even the most hardened criminal. Transportation fundamentally skewed the character of the development of Australia up until the gold rush in in the 1950s removed any terror of being sent Down Under.

Interestingly though, what comes out of the portrayal is that while some hardened offenders were removed from England’s shores, by far the vast majority of people who came here were transported for minor offences which, due to the unbelievably harsh Victorian laws of the time which made a capital hanging crime out of almost anything, were out of all proportion to their severity. Still, though the leg iron and the lash and corvée labour set the tone for the country from the First Fleet till the gold fields. Not to mention the terrors of the severest of penal colonies at Port Arthur and Norfolk Island. Frightening gulags beyond all humanity whose job was to grind souls rather than reform.

Also, even more fascinating to me are the things which I just didn’t know about Australia’s origins in general. How Transportation came about, the fact that criminal labour was essentially slave labour, the complete genocide of the Aborigines in Van Diemen’s Land (in fact, the horrifying and terrible history of how the indigenous population was treated throughout transportation), the fascinating stories of the sometimes bizarre personalities, now venerated in the names of roads, towns, streets and buildings, who laid the foundations of the original colony and how things such as whaling and sealing were fundamentally more important than sheep raising to the initial colony, as well as just the general picture drawn of England as a colonial possessor and the distinction between nation building and a penal colony for the people living here. I tell you, it is a fascinating read (and I do wonder how many Australians even know these things about their own country).

Interestingly, for England, the System was supposed to do four things: sublimate, deter, reform and colonize. While it did reduce the criminal population in England, it could not remove the socio-economic conditions which made Britain so horrible (even today ) and so there was a steady stream of convicts to transport. Deterrence became less and less of an issue as the colony became more independent and a ticket of leave became a better chance than it was in England (hell, my own parents left England for much the same reasons) and up until the gold fields made Oz a a shiny beacon of hope for many. Reformation it could argued was perhaps making Australia the most successful penal experiment in the history of the world as people taught new trades and working off their debt to society made good on their ticket of leave and bent themselves to their own lives and in the low incidence of recidivism once people were expiated. And colonize it did, as the land filled out the the “jail of infinite space” slowly filled to become a dazzling land and the nation it is today.