Assisted Exile
Dec. 14th, 2020 06:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatsiBook Review: The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes
I picked this up in the Libreria book sale in January. At the time I seem to recall being a bit indecisive about it, and I will admit it ended up being a more dutiful than pleasant read. Ironically, given that was January 2020, I had thought from the title it would have more about disease inflicted on the Aboriginal population, but in fact that is quite a minor theme - the title is taken from one of many convict-era ballads. On those people, as on everything else, Hughes is quite unsentimental, making a case that this was no Arcadia, sparsely inhabited by small groups who stank of fish oil, treated women badly, and had no concept of property; as such, they did not defend their lands initially, and never effectively, such that colonisation was inevitable. It's a disturbing attitude that may have dated badly (the book was written in the years leading up to the 1988 bicentenary of British settlement) but may nonetheless hold some truth.
As for the settlers themselves, who are the main focus of the book, they form a mixed bag. Hughes gives quite a favourable description of the First Fleet, who had to build everything from scratch and suffered great privations, with Cape Town several months away. But over time, the atmosphere of each colony would depend on its governor, from the more liberal Lachlan Macquarie in New South Wales in the 1810s to corruption, nepotism and sadism of despotic leaders in Van Diemen's Land and Norfolk Island.
As much of interest as the development of the settlements is the state of things in the UK at the time, from which I learned quite a lot. I had not known that England was in the habit of dispatching criminals to the American colonies, partly for forced labour and partly to rid the motherland of its felonry. Obviously, this practice ceased after 1776, which was a factor in establishing the colonisation of Australia. The range of crimes that were punished by transportation was also much wider than I had realised - not just murderers and violent criminals, but thieves, fraudsters, and particularly Irish political dissidents. As the nineteenth century progressed, the campaign against transportation grew; stuttering in the 1840s, the practice was renamed "assisted exile" before finally coming to an end as the Australian Gold Rush began in the 1850s.
Overall, this feels like a well-written and thorough book, but it's too brutal to be an easy read.
I picked this up in the Libreria book sale in January. At the time I seem to recall being a bit indecisive about it, and I will admit it ended up being a more dutiful than pleasant read. Ironically, given that was January 2020, I had thought from the title it would have more about disease inflicted on the Aboriginal population, but in fact that is quite a minor theme - the title is taken from one of many convict-era ballads. On those people, as on everything else, Hughes is quite unsentimental, making a case that this was no Arcadia, sparsely inhabited by small groups who stank of fish oil, treated women badly, and had no concept of property; as such, they did not defend their lands initially, and never effectively, such that colonisation was inevitable. It's a disturbing attitude that may have dated badly (the book was written in the years leading up to the 1988 bicentenary of British settlement) but may nonetheless hold some truth.
As for the settlers themselves, who are the main focus of the book, they form a mixed bag. Hughes gives quite a favourable description of the First Fleet, who had to build everything from scratch and suffered great privations, with Cape Town several months away. But over time, the atmosphere of each colony would depend on its governor, from the more liberal Lachlan Macquarie in New South Wales in the 1810s to corruption, nepotism and sadism of despotic leaders in Van Diemen's Land and Norfolk Island.
As much of interest as the development of the settlements is the state of things in the UK at the time, from which I learned quite a lot. I had not known that England was in the habit of dispatching criminals to the American colonies, partly for forced labour and partly to rid the motherland of its felonry. Obviously, this practice ceased after 1776, which was a factor in establishing the colonisation of Australia. The range of crimes that were punished by transportation was also much wider than I had realised - not just murderers and violent criminals, but thieves, fraudsters, and particularly Irish political dissidents. As the nineteenth century progressed, the campaign against transportation grew; stuttering in the 1840s, the practice was renamed "assisted exile" before finally coming to an end as the Australian Gold Rush began in the 1850s.
Overall, this feels like a well-written and thorough book, but it's too brutal to be an easy read.