Hard Looks at Hidden History (July/August 1987 | Volume: 38, Issue: 5)

Hard Looks at Hidden History

AH article image

Authors: Geoffrey C. Ward

Historic Era:

Historic Theme:

Subject:

July/August 1987 | Volume 38, Issue 5

One of the more unlikely results of the American Revolution was Australia. Most American colonists came here voluntarily, of course, but until 1776 we meekly accepted boatloads of His Majesty’s convicts as indentured servants. Then, after our unexpected victory over the world’s most powerful nation (and with thousands of fresh African slaves conveniently arriving on the Atlantic Coast each year), we righteously barred our gates to those unfortunates whom Jeremy Bentham would call an “excrementitious mass.” Forced to seek a new dumping ground for what it firmly believed was an incurably criminal class, the Crown chose a new spot as far from Britain as possible—empty Australia, fourteen thousand miles away, on the other side of the world.

Robert Hughes’s big new book, The Fatal Shore, memorably chronicles the first eight decades of Australian history and in the process shows what a gifted writer can do to bring vivid life to the sort of patchy documentary evidence too many academic writers would be content merely to reproduce. Hughes is best known to Americans as the art critic of Time magazine and as the tousled host of the excellent PBS series of several seasons past, The Shock of the New. He is that rare thing, a writer about art who makes sense; his criticism is shrewd, concrete, knowledgeable, openminded but unmoved by trendiness. He has now proved himself a fine popular historian as well, worthy of comparison to his mentor and fellow-countryman, the late Alan Moorehead, to whose memory The Fatal Shore in part is dedicated.

Hughes is consistently crisp and unsparing. Nothing escapes his cool, appraising eye, not even the koalas that greeted the first arrivals: “These were not the winsome, cuddly teddy bears of the Quantas commercial, but slow, irritable, aldermanic creatures with furry ears and a boot-heel nose, which ate two pounds of fresh gum leaves a day and, when captured, scratched furiously and drenched the offending hand with eucalyptus-scented piss.”

 

His portrait of the miserable, ginsoaked Georgian world that his forebears and ours escaped by such different means makes Hogarth seem a romantic. Nor does he sentimentalize the transported convicts, who were, for the most part, repeat offenders, not the hapless innocents their descendants fondly wish they’d been. But nothing they’d done in the Old World could justify the brutality with which they were routinely treated by the officers sent to supervise them in the New. Sadism was officially sanctioned down under, and the meticulousness with which records of all this cruelty were kept would not be matched again until the Germans began keeping their careful tallies during World War II; precisely 304,327 lashes were laid on in New South Wales in 1863, for example; a single prisoner received 1,000 lashes in two years on Norfolk Island for such offenses as “Smiling while on the Chain,” “Getting a light to smoke,” “Singing a Song,” and “Asking Gaoler for a Chew of Tobacco.”