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S'està carregant… The Fatal Shore (1986)de Robert Hughes
  
Top Five Books of 2013 (772) » 8 més No hi ha cap discussió a Converses sobre aquesta obra.  FEBeyer | Oct 25, 2021 |  When I selected this book to read, I thought it was a more popular treatment of Australia's founding than it turned out to be. Although the book is well-researched, it tends to be slightly to the academic side. Hughes does not spare ugliness from his readers as he describes punishments sometimes received by transported convicts. The convicts were mostly thieves the British legal system thought needed reform. In places the author gets bogged down in uninteresting detail. This book reminds readers of how far Australia has come from its founding to its current respected nation status. (  ) thornton37814 | Sep 14, 2021 | This is a very good book, well written, exceptionally researched. If you want to learn about the early history of Australia, and you want a readable book, this is the one for youo. (  ) ArtRodrigues | Jun 9, 2021 | Part narrative, part documented history. Full on brutal. There were parts that were hard to read - the treatment of many of the convicts was horrific. This was definitely a rough punishment for a 12 year old pick pocket let alone the adult man or woman. At least there is a lot of documentation concerning the men. Unfortunately, women being merely chatal (spelling). there is virtually no record of their lives. I enjoyed the read, though, as I knew little to nothing about the beginning of Australia. It says a lot of what the "civilized" world thought of the lower classes/criminals and what was needed to "reform" them. On Australia, the great experiment of a penal colony, it was proven that the harsher the punishment ... well, it didn't create the results that were thought to have happened. I appreciated that there was little comparative discussion between what we know today about convict treatment as compared to the time this was occurring. It is a factual accounting of what happened. (  ) PallanDavid | Mar 20, 2021 | In which Mr Hughes destroys most of the myths Australians tell ourselves, whether conservative ("we're not really descended from convicts") or, more usually, progressive ("the convicts were mostly political refugees"... nope. "The convicts and the indigenous peoples worked together to..." nope.) And does it in a highly entertaining narrative. It really isn't over-rated, though it is, perhaps, overlong. ( ) stillatim | Oct 23, 2020 |
 Hughes' descriptions of sadism and suffering, desperate escape attempts, rape, murder, cannibalism, and forays into the bush to exterminate the aboriginal and other indigenous peoples, become, in their accumulation, wearying, mind-numbing. Yet it is the story of the founding of a modern nation whose development was coetaneous with the last century of America's slave period, if even more savage and barbaric. "The Fatal Shore" is an unexpected, original and important work of history.  Hughes might have attempted this book in his youth, and got the story out of proportion, even if he had not skimped it. Fortunately, he has made The Fatal Shore the magnum opus of his maturity. By now his sense of historical scale is sound, as for this task it needed to be. It would have been easy to call the Australian system of penal settlements a Gulag Archipelago before the fact. The term ‘concentration camp’, in its full modern sense, would not have been out of place: at least one of the system’s satellites, Norfolk Island, was, if not an out-and-out extermination camp, certainly designed to make its victims long for death, like Dachau in those awful years before the war when the idea was not so much to kill people as to see how much they could suffer and still want to stay alive. And, indeed, Hughes draws these parallels. The analogies are inescapable. But he doesn’t let them do his thinking for him. He is able to bring out the full dimensions of the tragedy while keeping it in perspective. The penal colony surely prefigured the modern totalitarian catastrophe... When there was no one else left to absorb, the real Hughes might have emerged, as happened in his prose. In those years, you could always tell what he had been reading the day before. Even today, he is a magpie for vocables: no shimmering word he spots in any of the languages he understands, and in several more that he doesn’t, is safe from being plucked loose and flown back to his nest. Omnivorous rather than eclectic, that type of curiosity is the slowest to find coherence. But his fluency was always his own, and by persistence he has arrived at a solidity to match it: a disciplined style that controls without crippling all that early virtuosity, and blessedly also contains his keen glance, getting the whole picture into a phrase the way he once got his fellow-students’ faces into a single racing line. It is exactly right, as well as funny, to call a merino sheep ‘a pompous ambling peruke’. Scores of such felicities could be picked out, but only on the understanding that they are not the book’s decoration. They are its architecture.  In the early 1970's, while filming a television program on Australian art in Port Arthur, Tasmania, the Australian-born art critic Robert Hughes became curious about the city's prisons, which date from the period (1788-1868) when criminals were shipped from the British Isles to Australia. The prisons are ''the monuments of Australia - the Paestums,'' he said recently in his New York apartment, and the period ''was an extraordinary time - an effort to exile en masse a whole class. The English felt that just as shoemakers make shoes, this class produced crime.'' Pertany a aquestes col·leccions editorials
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 Google Books — S'està carregant…GèneresClassificació Decimal de Dewey (DDC)994 — History and Geography Oceania and elsewhere AustraliaLCC (Clas. Bibl. Congrés EUA)ValoracióMitjana: (3.99)
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The scene is set with descriptions of the landscape and the Aboriginal people. Then, after investigation of life in Georgian England, we follow the path of the first fleet of convicts that arrived in Botany Bay in 1788. The structure of the book isn’t chronological, different places are mentioned and then returned to in more detail. This causes some information to be repeated and I was sometimes a bit confused as to what year and place was being described. However, this is an exhaustive and often gripping history of convict Australia.
I'd always wondered about Macquarie as there are many places named after him. He was a somewhat liberal governor of New South Wales, the other governors sound pretty awful. It’s amusing that the trendy Darling Harbour is named after a bit of a tyrant. Slowly, New South Wales improved and many, convict or not, started to enjoy a life better than they could have expected in England. But if you fell foul of the authorities there were always the new penal colonies: Van Diemen’s land, Norfolk Island, Brisbane and then finally Western Australia. These places ensured that hell on Earth existed. This expansion was disastrous for the Aborigines.
The most shocking story is of a group of convicts that escaped in Van Diemen’s land (Tasmania) and ended up eating each other. That some convicts on the mainland thought they could escape overland to China, it seems that they had no clue where they were and felt completely disoriented in this new land. This book was written in the eighties, but the attitudes and views of the author don’t seem outdated. Maybe this is because this book, while it does judge those involved, concentrates more on chronicling what happened - as good history books should.
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