The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787-1868

Here is history on an epic scale—a riveting, brilliantly written account of the birth of Australia out of the suffering and brutality of England’s infamous convict transportation system. Eighty years lay between the landing at Botany Bay in 1788 of the First Fleet (“this Noah’s Ark of small-time criminality”)—carrying 736 convicts, men and women—and the arrival of the last ship in 1868. During this period the continent served first as an enormous jail, as England rid herself of a whole unwanted class, and then gradually, painfully transformed itself into a flourishing nation. How this happened, and with what anguish, is the story Robert Hughes tells in The Fatal Shore.