The Fatal Shore, Hughes

The Fatal Shore, Hughes

In this spellbinding recounting of Australia's birth as a penal colony on the underside of the globe, and the growing pains of the new colony trying to shed its convict past, Hughes masterfully intigrates documentary with the stories of life and death, the emotions and actions that make up our short lives and make history, both our own and others, worth remembering. With a focus on the convicts point of view, the reader feels the pain of the condemned exiles as they prepare themselves to leave the only life they know, the wives, children, parents, for an unknown world full of unknown dangers, and unfortunately, unknown pain and torment for the criminal.

What impressed me was the harsh contradictions of the "prison colony". After the initial years of starvation and struggling to harness and convert the seemingly fertile soil into productive farm land and pastures, there was a harsh difference in the fate of "government men", Britian's unwanted and transported citizens. The government envisioned the colony in Australasia as a hell with which to scare the criminally inclined from their habits of evil. The "emancipists" in the colony, prisoners who completed their 14 years sentence and were now free, or "ticket of leave" men, envisioned a future brighter than anything they could have hoped for in England.

In the new colony, class didn't matter (although though the "new aristocracy" tried hard to make it matter), only hard work and motiviation seperated a man from success. This sense of the convicts lot being better than a pauper in England caused some problems; being convicted to exile no longer held any fear to the lower classes of England (think of the prisoners financial success in Great Expectations). In one case two soldiers, feeling that life as a prisoner in Australia was better than their own, robbed a store and waited around to be arrested and convicted. The governor reacted harshly to this abuse, and had the soldiers so heavily chained and beaten that one soon died from ill treatment.

This is where the good life ends, and the hard life begins. Those prisoners who were "twice", or "colonially", convicted (as serious a second crime as murder, or light a matter as forging a currency note) were sent to the outer settlements, places of torture defined as "a constant purgatory, and a sometimes hell". This was governments attempt to put the fear of crime back into the hearts of the criminally minded. The lash was lavished upon the backs of prisoners, and tyrants ruled ruthlessly, torture was rampant. The stories of survival amidst such brutality were as impressive as the stories of how brutal and animalistic man can be to man.

There was a positive twist to such stories, however. On the worst torture settlement, an island isolated on all side by 700 miles of sea, an idealistic young Englishman named Maconachie decided not to rule through punishment and kangaroo courts, but through compassion and justice. The change in the prisoners was impressive. Its amazing how one act of kindness, how fairness in dealing with others, how authority which is responsive can change the heart of men from excessive disobedience to willing conformaty. Amazing. These prisoners were the toughest of the convict population, unflinching amid sentances of 100 lashes or more (admiringly called "pebbles" or "stone men", as opposed to "sandstones" for those who shrieked or collapsed during punishment), who could accept unjust punishment without complaint, yet they were responsive to a man who would treat them fairly and humanely.

But Maconachie was the exception to the rule. On one settlement, men were forced to where 20lb chains around their ankles, sleep on an unprotected island outcropping in the cold, and break rock under waste deep sea water in the "wet quarry". Some men, out of desperation would bash in the head of the prisoner in front just to get a release from this treatment. "I had no malice against this man, I just want this to end", one prisoner replied to a chaplains inquiries. "Would you have killed me?" "Just as soon as any other man", came the cold reply. These settlements truly were a place to be feared, but that fear seemed not to affect crime rates in England, to which the government insisted more pain be administered to make the fear of more productive effect in quelling the crime spree in England. A nasty cycle of pain and punishment.

Finally, public opinion in England ensured the end of "the system", and criminals were no longer sent to Australia. Hughes argued that Australian's should not forget their convict past, though. Without the free labor supplied by convicts under sentence, the wealth and success of free settlers would have been impossible, or at least severely limited. "Transportation" had ended its usefullness, though, as shown by the backward nature of Van Dieman's Land and Western Australia, the last two places to have convicts imported as free labor.

The Fatal Shore, indeed. For some, a life of punishment for crimes past, and a new lease on life with boundless hope for the future. For others, punishment and injustice on an increasingly painful scale. For the Australian people, a both proud and shameful past, which despite its political embarrassment has shaped and molded the Australian character. For the reader, an insight into the best and worst of human nature, the most that can be asked of a book with a story worth telling.