Book Review: The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding by Robert Hughes – Part One
This is a massive, complex history about how the transportation of convicts from England to Australia gave birth to a new nation. It is also a devastatingly horrific story, so much so that I almost gave up reading it after about a hundred pages. The overwhelming human misery is hard to take. I persisted probably for reasons similar to why people continue to watch well-made horror movies even after the bad stuff starts. On one hand your sensibilities can’t take it, but on the other hand it’s hard to look away. I found that after a couple of hundred pages the mood became nuanced, but still, it’s a tough read.
One reason it’s slow going at first is that Hughes is so thorough. For instance, before he gets into describing the first voyage that brought convicts to New South Wales, he provides background information such as the state of the penal system in England in the late eighteenth century, the plight of the poor, the overcrowded and horrendous conditions of the jails, the early exploration of the Pacific leading to the discovery of Australia, and the history and situation of the indigenous population.
He then offers a comprehensive look at the early transportation voyages. That’s when the horror stories truly begin. On the first ship out, all of the prisoners had been convicted as felons, but none had committed violent crimes. In fact, many of the misdeeds for which they were condemned to transportation were petty thefts: the taking of a few articles of clothing, or a packet of snuff, or a handful of potatoes. The condemned convicts ranged in age from a ten-year-old child to a woman eighty-two years old. They wore heavy chains and rags for clothes; they remained in dark, vermin-infested ship’s holds for most of the journeys, which lasted for many months; they were fed starvation rations and were flogged for miniscule offenses. At sea the ship captains were often cruel and sadistic, and on shore in Australia and on notorious Norfolk Island, their overseers were often no less sadistic, meting out harsh physical punishments for any hint of insubordination and sometimes for no reason at all. Convicts would often be flogged until blood and flesh flew and bones were laid bare.
The stories of the early transports to Australia reminded me of some of Solzhenitsyn’s descriptions of the Soviet Gulag. I became convinced as I read that the real criminals were the British authorities who set up this gruesome system. Before Australia, the British used North America for the transportation of their convicts. If the Americans were treated anywhere near as badly as those sent to Australia, no wonder the colonists rebelled! In fact, the American Revolution is one of the main reasons the British had to turn their attention to Australia as a dumping ground for convicts. American authorities afterwards committed their own atrocities with the slave trade and the treatment of the indigenous population, but that’s another tale.
In attempting to explain why England continued the dread transportation system for so long, Hughes only succeeds in emphasizing the perversity of the society that allowed it in the first place. The real fault lies in that society, which labeled the poor a “criminal class” and treated them with contempt. The author writes that “transportation did not stop crime in England or even slow it down. The ‘criminal class’ was not eliminated by transportation, and could not be, because transportation did not deal with the causes of crime.” He emphasizes this point: “The worst offense against property was to have none.” In other words, the poor, merely by being poor, were despised, ostracized, and targeted.
It was not only poverty-stricken petty thieves that were relegated to the Australian dumping ground, though. The authorities also banished British political dissidents and rebellious Irish. The usual periods of exile were seven years, fourteen years, or life. Occasionally families were allowed to travel with the convicts, but much more often they were ripped apart. Sometimes when those the convicts had stolen from realized the heavy punishment the thieves received, they pleaded for mercy for the perpetrators, but their pleas did no more good than did the pleas of the convicts’ families. Regardless of the severity of their crimes, the government wanted to make examples of these people. Mercy was seldom, if ever, shown.
(To be continued.)
