Book review - The Fatal Shore

 

The history book The Fatal Shore: A history of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia 1787-1868 by Robert Hughes was published in 1986 to widespread acclaim.

The title ‘Fatal Shore’ was used in convict ballads. Certainly, transportation proved fatal for many convicts (p368).

In Chapter 2 Hughes provides a fascinating history lesson of the times. In the cities and towns of Georgian England lives of the mass of the populace were short, and gin helped ameliorate conditions. By 1751 it was said there was ‘one gin-shop for every 120 citizens’ (p24). Crime was rife; death penalties were often commuted to transportation. ‘By 1837, hanging was mainly restricted to cases of murder, while forgery, cattle-theft, house-breaking was relegated to the less terrible... “transportable” offence’ (p160).

Until the American War of Independence, many criminals were transported to the American continent. Afterwards, however, that prospect was closed. Captain Cook discovered what he termed New South Wales in 1770 but it was only much later, in 1779 that the House of Commons considered an alternative penal colony – in the antipodes. The existing Aborigine population was not considered an issue though lip-service was devoted to protecting them.

‘Australia was marked for glory... for its people had been chosen by the finest judges in England’ (p354).

Before the colonisation of Australia, the Aborigine code enabled them to survive ‘for millennia without extending their technology or depleting their resources. It still worked as of January 1788, although it had not the slightest chance of surviving white invasion’ (p17). They displayed a marked sense of territory while having no apparent cult of private property. ‘Take away this territory and they were deprived, not of “property”... but of their embodied history, their locus of myth, their “dreaming” (p17).

Conflict was inevitable, perhaps. ‘... the tribesmen could throw four spears in the time it took to reload a flintlock’ (p94). The troops sent with the penal ships ‘... hated the place, hated the convicts for bringing them there and despised the Aborigines into the bargain. “I do not scruple to pronounce that in the whole world there is not a worse country”,’ (p95) stated the lieutenant-governor, Robert Ross.

The entire enterprise was poorly planned, with no draught animals or ploughs. Before long rum became the common currency. Penal colonies were set up not only in Botany Bay and Sydney, but also on the islands of Van Diemen’s Land and Norfolk

Concurrent with the arrival of transported felons, civilians from Britain also came, early pioneers. Some of the civilians were targeted by bushrangers, often freed and escaped convicts and also criminal immigrants.

Convicts were tasked with working the length of their sentence; towards the end, they’d earn a ‘ticket-of-leave’, and eventually freedom. Some worked on government building projects, including roads, while others were assigned to civilians to work on farms. The Bushranging Act of 1830 meant any man who could not produce his ticket-of-leave and travel pass on demand could be jailed until he could prove he was not an escaped convict. This was naturally prone to abuse.

Between 1788 and 1852 24,000 women were transported to Australia. Many of them ended up at the Female Factory at Parramatta. ‘They travelled by barge, along the long crinkling silver arm of Sydney Harbour, up the Parramatta River, a stately progress through that wild and exquisite landscape between banks lined with ancient eucalyptus, where sudden green clouds of budgerigars whirled over the water and the white cockatoos flapped, shrieking like colonies of lost souls, from tree to tree’ (p255).

Recalcitrant convicts suffered assorted punishments, from working in chains to being flogged with the cat. Hughes reveals a plethora of blood-soaked cases that makes harrowing reading. And some punishments were arbitrary or merely inflicted out of spite by sadists.  ‘The psychological damage inflicted by the lash was worse than the physical’ (p428). And there were hangings – for murder or riot. ‘The hoods went over their heads. “Their lives were brief,” wrote their priest, “and as agitated and restless as the waves which now break at their feet, and whose dying sound is their only requiem”.’ (p479).

Hughes calls upon his considerable knowledge of art and architecture with an eloquent text. He reveals a great many individuals, good and bad, some evincing empathy for the plight of the abused convicts, some relishing the pain they inflicted. There were several reasons why the transportation System could not be sustained, from vociferous political objections by the civilians and abolitionists, to the changes in Britain regarding crime and punishment and the construction of prisons such as Dartmoor.

This remarkable endeavour took Hughes several years to complete with its 45 pages of notes, masses of references and resources, many helpful maps, and two sections of monochrome illustrations – both paintings and photographs.