Before Australia was Australia it was the antipodes, the opposite pole to civilization, an obscure and unimaginable place that was, literally, the end of the world. And before it became a nation, this orphan continent on which European history had left no mark at all became the site of a bizarre and dreadful social experiment. For almost a hundred years, beginning in 1788, it served as a human trash heap where England exiled some 160,000 members of its criminal class.
Although the legacy of the transportation system is strong, Australians have been eager to obliterate what came to be known as the "hated stain." They succeeded so well that there was no comprehensive popular history of the country's penal-colony origins until Robert Hughes, art critic of TIME and author of The Shock of the New, finished his project, which he began more than a decade ago.
An indefatigable researcher as well as an arresting stylist, Hughes, born and raised in Australia, has brilliantly filled the gap. The Fatal Shore (the title comes from a typically doleful convict ballad) is more than factually comprehensive; it re-creates the emotions of history, allowing the reader to smell the gin and feel the pain, to experience that misery-filled world almost as intensely as those who lived in it.
The idea of transportation started in Georgian England, where the poor were relegated to a sinkhole of poverty and misery. Threatened by what it viewed as an emerging criminal class, the English oligarchy embraced the idea of forced exile as a convenient way to get rid of both prisoners and prisons. "Transportation made sublimation literal," writes Hughes. "It conveyed evil to another world."
Captain James Cook claimed that world for England in 1770. He found it inhospitable and sparsely populated by an aboriginal race, whose first recorded words spoken to the English were "Go away!" Newly arrived whites, after 252 days at sea, found a "land of inversions where it was high summer in January ((and)) trees kept their leaves but shed their bark." The island's first lieutenant governor bitterly concluded, "I do not scruple to pronounce that in the whole world there is not a worse country."
Ransacking thousands of original sources, Hughes punctures many of the myths about the new arrivals and how they fared. Except for Irish political dissidents, for whom Australia was the "official Siberia," the typical transportee was apt to be a small-time thief with at least one previous conviction. Those sent over for more genteel crimes inevitably felt superior to the cruder types, and the colony's earliest bureaucracy had the distinction of being "almost wholly made up of forgers."
Hughes also examines the assignment system, which allowed convicts to work off their sentences in the employ of private settlers. The program guaranteed the prisoners certain rights, got them back into society, gave them a shot at achievement and became, says Hughes, "by far the most successful form of penal rehabilitation that had ever been tried in English, American or European history."