About this title: This nationwide bestselling account of the founding of Australia is "a brilliant and enduring achievement . . . history of the highest order combining thorough research with vivid narrative and thoughtful assessment".--Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Two 16-page black-and-white photo inserts.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
"I read this along with books by Alan Moorehead in order to better understand the peoples and history of the SW Pacific region which my father had served in during WWII.
This particular book is very well written and serves as a painless introduction to the history of modern Australia."
"Robert Hughes's masterful and definitive history of the European settlement of Austalia. The continet became Britain's largest prison labor destination and its unique contemporary culture springs largely from national myths that turn embarrased eyes from the most degrading and revolting phases of the early national experience.
For example, the treatment of the Australian prisoners, and their response to the ghastly treatment they received, is a central theme of Austrialian political life. Freed prisoners, or "Ticket of Leave Men (or Women)" were never referred to as freed prisoners or ex-offenders because of a national aversion to admitting that those individuals had committed crimes in Blighty. The Antipodiean society adjusted itself quicly to a division between prisoners, trusties and non-prisoners.
One of the more amusing Australian national myths is that the women who arrived in Austrialia in convict ships had been convicted, for the most part, of crimes related to the oldest profession (actually, second-oldest after flint-knapping, if the archeologists are to be believed). This national myth that the land was originally populated by a cheerful band of big-hearted ex-harlots is just so much balderdash and wishful thinking. Prostitution was never a transportable offense under British law.
The book does accurately depict the astounding cruelties of the Australian prisons-within-prisons, which in their efforts to create a subculture that would be even more dehumanizing, painful, devoid of amusement and riddled with arbitrary and savage physical tortures, some resulting in deformation and death, exceeded in their cruelties the first-hand records of American chattel slavery.
Robert Hughes does miss one wrinkle of the British experience with transportation, i.e., that the current stae of Georgia was also used as a destination for England's human effluvia. That fact explains a lot about Georgia today.
Hughes' book does accuratel depict the role of the successive waves of Fenian insurrectionists in the progressive peopling of Australia. The antipodeon version of the Irish race appears to have retained all of the affinitiy for alcohol abuse and Papist idolatry of itis native and North American variants, without the offsetting advantages of devotion to education and aspirations to rise from the status of obdurate, ill-tempered malcontents focused alternately on their goals of inebriation;, fanatical devotion to an overseas religious autocracy of comp;ulsive pederasts with an array of other flagrantly degenerate habits; and an obsession with procreation which in its unremitting and undescriminating frenzy has spawned countless millions of bawling, incorrigible Celtic demon-brats worldwide,"
"I decided to add this book to my list because I've recommended it so many times to friends visiting OZ. I know it is not liked by some Aussies because of the dark portrayal of the 'convict stain'.
But it helps me put so much of Australian culture in a historic context on my travels. It also aroused my curiosity about Tasmania to the point that I have now been there twice."
"History like it is supposed to be written. Another example of real life written well making all fiction seem, well, trite. Don't get me wrong; I like a good novel as much as the next person, but the stories can never measure up to what history has to offer, and when written by someone like Mr. Hughes (or Mr. Schama or Mr. Foote or Ms. Tuchman or Mr. DeVoto or Mr. Parkman, to name a few) you're at an altitude where fiction can never go. After reading this book - a history of the settling of Australia, by the way - I will never again look at Australians as fun loving and benign or those animals as cute and cuddly."
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