The Fatal Shore Quotes

“But cruelty is an appetite that grows with feeding,”
― Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding

“He had been always escaping, always rebelling, always fighting against authority, and always being flogged. There had been a whole lifetime of torment such as this; forty-two years of it; and there he stood, speaking softly, arguing his case well, and pleading while the tears ran down his face for some kindness, for some mercy in his old age. 'I have tried to escape; always to escape,' he said, 'as a bird does out of a cage. Is that unnatural; is that a great crime?”
― Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding

“To deprive the Aborigines of their territory, therefore, was to condemn them to spiritual death—a destruction of their past, their future and their opportunities of transcendence.”
― Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding

“And, despite the number of bigots in our grandfathers’ day deriding Australians as the children of criminals, remarkably few Australians pointed out the obvious contrary fact that, whatever other conclusions one might draw from our weird national origins, the post-colonial history of Australia utterly exploded the theory of genetic criminal inheritance. Here was a community of people, handpicked over decades for their “criminal propensities” and for no other reason, whose offspring turned out to form one of the most law-abiding societies in the world. At a time when neo-conservative social idealogues are trying to revive the old bogey of hereditary disposition to crime, this may still be worth pondering.”
― Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding

“Wherever they went they were plagued by mosquitoes, against which they employed the deterrent of fish oil: “It is by no means uncommon to see the entrails of fish frying upon their heads in the sun, till the oil runs over their face and body. This unguent is deemed by them of so much importance, that children even of two years old are taught the use of it.”21 Since the Iora never washed, they spent their lives coated with a mixture of rancid fish oil, animal grease, ocher, beach sand, dust and sweat. They were filthy and funky in the extreme. But their stamina and muscular development were superb, and, because there was no sugar (except for the rare treat of wild honey) and little starch in their diet, they had excellent teeth—unlike the white invaders.”
― Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding

“The failure of language—the tyranny of moral generalization over social inspection—fed the ruling class’s belief that it was endangered from below.”
― Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding

“However, it was Dr. Johnson who most pithily set forth the vision of Georgian jails as anti-monasteries: The misery of gaols is not half their evil . . . In a prison the awe of publick eye is lost, and the power of the law is spent; there are few fears, there are no blushes. The lewd inflame the lewd, the audacious harden the audacious. Everyone fortifies himself as he can against his own sensibility, endeavours to practice on others the arts which are practised on himself, and gains the kindness of his associates by similitude of manners. Thus some sink amidst their misery, and others survive only to propagate villainy.38”
― Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding

“They live in Tranquillity which is not disturb’d by the Inequality of Condition.”
― Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding

“A young country does not serve as the pad on which England drew its sketches for the immense Gulags of the twentieth century without acquiring a few marks and scars.”
― Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding

“As the eighteenth century went on, fewer people were actually hanged for capital crimes that they had been convicted of.”
― Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding

“Such flat and distant voices confirm the rhetoric of William Blake: “Grace” is underwritten by constant, speechless suffering, and “culture” begins in the callused hands of exhausted children, weaving robotically in sleep, “going through the motions … when they were really doing nothing.”
― Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding

“transports (and lost only three of the”
― Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding

“If Australia had not been settled as a prison and built by convict labor, it would have been colonized by other means; that was foreordained from the moment of Cook’s landing at Botany Bay in 1770. But it would have taken half a century longer, for Georgian Britain would have found it exceptionally difficult to find settlers crazy or needy enough to go there of their own free will.”
― Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding

“vaste réceptacle Cette Botany-Bay, sentine d’ALBION,”
― Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding