A Commonwealth of Thieves Quotes

“Phillip was not simply a jailer, but an unlikely visionary, believing he could create order out of the detritus of British society.”
― Thomas Keneally, A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia

“No nation had ever before sent a fleet halfway around the world to dump its convicts in a place so little known.”
― Thomas Keneally, A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia

“Among the convicts were artisans, labourers, prostitutes, footpads, and mothers with infants — the unwanted, all jumbled together.”
― Thomas Keneally, A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia

“Britain was not driven by idealism when it colonised Australia, but by the brute problem of what to do with its criminals.”
― Thomas Keneally, A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia

“They were not pioneers in the usual sense, but men and women who had been propelled by force into a cruel new world.”
― Thomas Keneally, A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia

“The ships of the First Fleet were a drifting society — layered with rank, rife with resentment, but bound together by the sheer impossibility of turning back.”
― Thomas Keneally, A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia

“John Hudson, a boy of nine, was condemned to seven years in a land he could not imagine, for stealing a few items of clothing.”
― Thomas Keneally, A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia

“Harriet had followed her convict husband down from Staffordshire to London where she lived with her three small children in acute squalor in Whitechapel. It seems the church wardens .. took an interest in her case and were anxious to get Harriet aboard, as she had no other prospects at all. That made her suitable for New South Wales. Her revenge was to live until 1850 and give birth to nine colonial children.”
― Thomas Keneally, A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia

“Phillip was … pragmatic yet thorough, caught between sparks of both authority and compassion: a bleak white icon who conducted the Sydney experiment and made it a success for the likes of convict Henry Kable and a catastrophe for Bennelong and his kind.”
― Thomas Keneally, A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia