QJM Advance Access published online on December 17, 2006
QJM, doi:10.1093/qjmed/hcl136
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Transported
For years I had vaguely intended to read ‘The Fatal Shore’, the history of transportation of convicts to Australia, by Robert Hughes.1 However, I have never visited Australia and I have few personal connections there, so the wish remained in the antipodes of my mind rather as the continent did: a desirable but remote destination to be saved up for some indeterminate future time. But the book recently came up as a choice in a book club I belong to, and this coincided with two tentative conversations with colleagues about trips to Sydney and Melbourne. The moment had clearly come to set out on my literary voyage, so I ordered it. When it came, I devoured it in a single weekend, probably my lifetime record for a book of this size and density; it is 640 pages long, with an ‘apparatus criticus’ that includes 47 pages of endnotes containing some of the most fascinating information in the book, and a vast four-part bibliography listing the manuscripts, correspondence, memoirs and secondary sources that Hughes consulted.
‘The Fatal Shore’ is more than a history of transportation, or indeed just of Australia. It offers, among other things, an account of the social and political conditions in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a survey of penal policy during that period, and a report on one of the first systematic genocides carried out by a European nation. As Hughes points out, many features of the concentration camp and the gulag were prefigured or perfected on the shores around Botany Bay and Tasmania, and in the ‘ne plus ultra’ of state-sponsored degradation and terror, Norfolk Island in the south Pacific.
Hughes has an eye for the big picture. He spells out some of the important contexts that a more selective history might have assumed or evaded. For example, the convicts were taken south rather than west as a direct consequence of the American revolution: independent Americans did not want ‘to be polluted with the Crown's offal’ (although as Hughes points out, their objection was specious, since ‘the trade in black slaves had turned white convict labour into an economic irrelevance’). As a result, the first convict fleet in 1787 conveyed its cargo of 736 wretched souls—mostly petty thieves—away from England, first to south America, then around the Cape ... and into a vast nothingness. Only Captain Cook had visited Botany Bay, sixteen years earlier on a journey from New Zealand, and neither he nor anyone else knew what, if anything, the eastern coastline of Australia might be attached to. Years after the settlements were established, escaping prisoners were still making their way into the outback in the belief that they could walk to China.
If transportation to Australia began for such circumstantial reasons, it ended with a balancing irony: the discovery of gold in 1851. This made the continent so attractive to voluntary migrants that it was no longer a deterrent to involuntary ones. However, the ending came for other reasons too, including endemic violent sodomy on the settlements, the thought of which unsettled the well-meaning committees in Westminster in a way that the spiked iron collars, the thirty pound chains and the floggings down to the bare bone had never done.
What makes an account of these horrors not just readable but riveting is that Hughes is a master of English prose. Here, for example, is Hughes's description of the entrance to Port Arthur, the penal settlement at the southern tip of Tasmania: ‘Both capes are of towering basalt pipes, flutes and rods, bound like fasces into the living rock. Their crests are spired and crenellated. Sea birds wheel, thinly crying, across the black walls and the blacker shadows. The breaking swells throw up their veils. When the clouds march in from the Tasman Sea and the rain squalls lash the prismatic stone, the cliffs can look like the adamantine gates of Hell itself. Geology had conspired with Lieutenant-Governor Arthur to give the prisoners of the Crown a moral fright as their ships hauled in.’
Hughes is a master not just of geographical description but of personal portraits too. Among dozens of these, one of the most memorable is Trucanini, a bright Tasmanian girl of eighteen who had seen her mother stabbed to death by sealers, and her own fiancé thrown into the sea with his hands chopped off, before she herself was abducted and repeatedly raped. After ‘becoming a sealers’ moll, sterile from gonorrhoea, hanging around the camps and selling herself for a handful of tea and sugar’, she ended up as an interpreter, collaborating in the expulsion of her own Aboriginal people to remote islands. Another tragic figure is Laurence Frayne, a defiant Irishman who left a memoir of his unspeakably gruelling experiences on Norfolk Island. ‘Do you wish to expire under the lash?’ the attending surgeon asked him before one of his many arbitrary and sadistic floggings. ‘I want to get it over with and have done with it’, he replied, and afterwards lay down in his prison cell in a puddle of his own urine to soothe his back, which was ‘literally alive with maggots and vermin.’ Among the officers and bureaucrats who presided over these atrocities was Lieutenant Governor Arthur himself. ‘Arthur seemed distant, cold and aloof ... In conversation he would fix you with his wide, glaucous, interrogatory grey eyes, and he did not seem to blink as much as other people. He radiated an impression, not of wolfish severity, but of unshakeable and vigilant moral calm.’ When others described Norfolk Island as an ‘earthly hell’, he replied that ‘a penal settlement is, and ought to be, an abode of misery ...’
Not every character in ‘The Fatal Shore’ is a nightmarish perpetrator, or a victim of extreme brutality. Among those who emerge with honour are one reforming camp commandant, Alexander Maconochie, and one convict doctor, William Redfern, who on his release became the founding father of Australian medicine. And if Hughes is coruscating in his exposure of ‘the System’, he is also measured in recognizing that increasing numbers of its victims over the years worked not in conditions of near-death or slavery, but assigned to free Australians as servants or farm workers, laying the foundations for the successful—if uniformly white—society that eventually emerged.
When I finished ‘The Fatal Shore’ I wanted to know more about Robert Hughes, and thus discovered something that makes his achievement, to my mind, even more astonishing. He left university without a degree, and has never been a professional historian. He now lives in New York, where he has been art critic for ‘Time’ magazine for over thirty years. Like so many expatriate Australians (Germaine Greer and Clive James were his contemporaries) he maintains an intense but ambivalent relationship with his compatriots. They have nevertheless bestowed honours on him for providing their nation with such an unflinching chronicle of its painful origins.
References
1. Hughes R. (1986) The Fatal Shore. A history of the transportation of convicts to Australia 1787–1868New York Harper Collins.
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