The Book Club

I've been reading, little by little it seems, Robert Hughes' book The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding. I have never laid eyes on a finer work. never been down that way, so I'll be forgiven for not already knowing an awful lot about the region. But I just had no idea.

The first colonists were convicts, guilty of petty thefts. The US was no longer available to the Britsih Crown as its human dumping ground. Throughout the roughly sixty years of the penal era, convict labor was famously ineffective and expensive. There were no plows. Convicts physically pushed a train along its tracks.

There was a colony 1,000 miles across the sea called Norfolk Island that reads so as to freeze the blood except when one commandant, Alexander Maconochie, arrived and turned it the place into a successful experiment in mutual respect, a theater, good hygiene, and vegetable gardens --for three years. Before him and after he left, inmates quite often committed murders so that they would be hanged --preferable to life there.

The Aborigines were systematicly murdered and dispossessed in a genocidal period at least as horrible as anything in the Americas. In some cases, people were forced to eat of their own flesh, then skinned and stuffed as scarecrows.

There was a Gold Rush in Australia, simultaneous with and much larger than in California. Gold revived the economy, and in part did away with the Transportation System.

It's not easy for a history to actually enrage and then haunt me, and this one does. This book is so well done that I feel silly for not having read it decades ago. I knew that convicts were settled there, but that was pretty much all. It's the other side of the world and now seems an unlikely destination for this traveller. I'm simply stunned by this information, though I would not have put anything past the scope of human cruelty. It's just that it's different cruely than what I grew up hearing about.

"Let a man's heart be what it will when he comes here, his Man's heart is taken from him, and he is given the heart of a beast."
--Convict and rebel Robert Douglas, at his trial in 1834

A good book deserves a good cat to help read it. Laura Earle is a very good little cat. She fits nicely into my armpit and never tires of purring loudly.