The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding by Robert Hughes Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding
Book Review: Full of mistakes and eaten up with bitterness
Summary: 1 Stars
This is a warped and nihilistic view of Australia - which is probably the happiest and most successful society in the world, and with an unbroken record of peaceful democracy and many great achievements. Hughes comes across as a miserable character. He lives in US now and good riddance. If he writes another book at least let him get his facts right.Book Review: Devil's Island On A Continental Scale
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one monumental and fascinating work, equivalent to a university course in the history of Australia's founding. It is at once easy to read and hard to get through. It took me two full weeks of reading 2 hours a day to finish it, due to the wealth of detail in each chapter. I found myself going over some paragraphs twice to pull it all in. Hughes also has a vocabulary that is of the highest order, so he kept me busy looking up quite a few unfamiliar words. I definitely increased my word power (ha). A good thing, always. It is also not laid out in a strict chronological order; rather, the chapters run over one another in their time periods because of the weaving of the overarching story of the transportation system and its genesis and oversight from England into the narrative. There were also distinct differences between Australia and Van Diemen's Land, and further subsets involving those prisons where repeat offenders were sent -- most notably, Norfolk Island. I had only a vague idea of Botany Bay and the convict history of Australia before I read this book. Apparently, so did many Australians until quite recently as they sought to bury their hellish past and the stigma they associated with it by simply blotting it out of existence. Hughes cuts right to the core of this by exposing it all for what it really was -- brutal, savage, unjust and sad in the extreme. He does not look upon this with anything but a keen eye and evenhanded, masterful grasp of all of the factors that were in play. While certainly most of the convicts could hardly be judged guilty of anything more than the pettiest offense in our modern eyes - if any offense at all - there were indeed those who were hardened criminals. None, however, particularly the women and children, were worthy of the sadistic brutality heaped upon them by those in charge, some of who were clearly evil to the core.
For anyone who wants to really understand the truth of the convict history of the land down under, this book is absolutely essential reading. For anyone who wants to be immersed in the depths of human misery and suffering, and ultimately be inspired by what these poor souls endured to build the nation of Australia, this book is required reading.
Book Review: founding OZ was not pretty
Summary: 4 Stars
When you think about fiction you naturally look at various levels of interpretation. From the plot downwards to author's subconscious and upwards towards historical-social-critical analysis. But this type of understanding doesn't fit non-fiction, at least until i read _fatal shore_. The author himself is conscious and deliberate in several levels---where the false ideal of the past is part of current Australian consciousness for example. Or where he praises a commandant for his humanity being 100 years ahead of his time. He is on one basic level retelling the story of the convict founding of OZ, and yet showing constantly the larger issues of it's place in English intellectual and cultural history to the big picture of man's inhumanity to man.This placing of the pieces of the puzzle in several larger contexts is excellent and makes the book far more than just the recounting of a sad tale indeed. It redeems the book from the world of facts and figures so common to historical writing and raises it to analysis and good commentary.
The only critical thing i have towards the book is a somewhat disjointed structure, the chapters are not quite chronological, more organized around a single character, usually a commander of facilities. Thus often backtracking between chapters, which leaves the newcomer to this country's history without good memory pegs to hang the facts onto.
I'm glad i invested the several hours it took to get through the book with it's gore and extraordinary sadness permeating the story. It's a good book and desires the wide circulation it is getting on the online bookclubs, which is how i found it.
Book Review: Definitive
Summary: 5 Stars
Hughes has written the definitive work on the founding of the British colony in Australia. He spends just enough time discussing the social woes of the United Kingdom that lead to the founding, and provides an excellent counter to attempts to glorify Australia's past. There is no sensationalism in this book. The nature and behavior of the prisoner-colonists is depcited without shame or apology. Rich language, historical integrity, and some excellent maps make this book a great read.Book Review: Bits of Flying Flesh. Everywhere.
Summary: 3 Stars
Spurred on by Down Under (by Bill Bryson), I found this book already on my shelves and decided to give Australian history a fighting chance. Of course, my interest is more along the lines of the original founding of Australia by the Aborigines some sixty thousand years ago - an emigration that is still a relative anthropological mystery. At no time in human history was Australia ever connected by a land bridge to Asia or any of the other long-ago inhabited islands of Micronesia, and yet people still came - some forty thousand years before the recorded development of man-made watercraft. So either Australia's Aboriginals at one time possessed a knowledge of ship-building far advanced from that of any other culture (then subsequently lost it), or by some miracle a successful breeding population of humans somehow drifted to the virgin continent on logs or ocean debris. I lean towards the former explanation, but either way, what a story! But of course, I digress. The Fatal Shore is not about the original founders of Australia, but rather about the original white founders of Australia, post Captain Cook. Australia was claimed by Britain in the late 18th century, but the Britons weren't quite sure what to do with their new-found continent. They thought it might prove to be a strategically-valuable location in the South Pacific - particularly in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars - but the problem was, no one seemed willing to populate this beautiful, but rather inhospitable, country. Leave it to the British to come up with a rather ingenious plan - turn the whole shebang into a convict colony, and allow those who have served their terms (called "Emancipists") acquire land and populate the countryside. It was a win-win situation - the new continent would be settled by British citizens, disagreeable as they may be, and England would be rid of its festering convict population. As an added bonus, the British court system scored a big political gain, often choosing transportation as a more humane alternative to the increasingly unpopular death penalty.
And so the grand experiment began in the late 1700s. Hughes covers the history of Australian convictry exhaustively - and at times, exhaustingly. I enjoyed the book overall, though the author seemed to have an unhealthy fascination with the practice of flogging - which he described in excruciating, nauseating detail. The phrases "bits of flying flesh", "pools of blood", "exposed collar bone" and "maggot-infested wounds" reappear throughout the text...
Hughes weaves a complex tale of political and penological-theory that I'm sure impressed several academics but at times made my eyes roll into the back of my head. I was really more in the mood for a more casual history, and would have enjoyed the book thrice as much at half the length. But that's just me. All told, a good read - a bit too long, and a few too many airborne bits of flesh for my tastes, but altogether strong.