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

“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

“who was to think that a trip to El Dorado at government expense constituted a fearful punishment—especially if, as rumor had it, convicts got a conditional pardon as soon as they stepped ashore at Hobart?”
― Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding

“Gold was the mineral that put an end to transportation, because its discovery plucked off the last rags of terror that clung to the name of Australia.”
― Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding

“Gold disturbed the order of Anglo-Australian society—from pastoral “aristocrat” down to convict—with shudders of democracy. Gold wealth was not “democratic,” but it did expand the existing oligarchy. It would diversify both Australian markets and Australian production and help create the Australian bourgeoisie.”
― Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding

“Shanty towns and bark huts proliferated to house the thousands of emigrants, frantic with hope, who poured off the ships from England and Ireland.”
― Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding

“the average weekly shipment on the gold-escorts from Ballarat and Bendigo was more than 20,000 ounces—half a ton a week. The Times declared, in November 1852, that the flood of Australian gold had become “perfectly bewildering”; by then, a single ship (the Dido) was expected with 280,000 ounces, or ten and a half tons, on board. All this was from the Victorian diggings, which in the month of August 1852 alone, despite nearly continuous winter rain and bitterly difficult working conditions for the diggers, had yielded 246,000 ounces of the “yellow stuff.”
― Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding

“small farmers in 1850 remained as vulnerable to drought, fire and flood as they had been along the Hawkesbury in the days of Governor Bligh. The land was not Arcadia; the bush could flare up and incinerate ten years of a forty-acre man’s work in a day; even in good times, it took three acres to sustain one sheep.”
― Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding

“enthusiastically incorporated them into his novels. It was exactly along the lines of emigration proposed by Chisholm and Sidney that the feckless and debt-ridden Wilkins Micawber, at the happy end of David Copperfield (1849–50), took his chances in Australia along with Mr. Peggotty, Em’ly and Gummidge, finding a happy haven at Port Middlebay, Dickens’s name for Melbourne.”
― Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding

“I’ve seen that theer bald head of his, a-perspiring in the sun, Mas’r Davy, till I a’most thowt it would have melted away,” says Peggotty, the Yarmouth fisherman who knows what work is. “And now he’s a Magistrate.”60”
― Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding

“Hence the anxiety of the British in September 1784, when France got from Sweden the right to put a naval depot on the island of Göteborg at the mouth of the Baltic; from there, French ships could harass the British timber-transports.”
― Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding

“Only conifers made good masts, because of their natural straightness and because the pine resin cut down friction between the fibers in their grain. This second characteristic made the great sticks relatively supple, so that they could absorb the punishing stress of heavy-weather sailing.”
― Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding

“In eighteenth-century strategy, pine trees and flax had the naval importance that oil and uranium hold today. All masts and spars were of pine, and flax was the raw stuff of ships’ canvas; neither could be had in quantity in the Far East,”
― 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

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