THE FATAL SHORE
Robert Hughes
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987
688 pp., $24.95
The recent American fad for things antipodean - urged on by the cinematic boom down under, and the rivalry for the America's Cup - has frequently been expressed in terms of the perceived similarities between two liberal democracies with a common language and roots in Britain. As Robert Hughes, author of the splendid new history of Australia's colonization, The Fatal Shore, has aptly put it, "America sees Australia as something like Texas." And he's pretty much right when he says, "that's pretty much wrong." With these differences in mind, Hughes' project takes shape as an attempt to address that most imposing of national questions, as he puts it, "why we Australians might be the way we are."
He seeks to discover the Australian character by looking at the founding of Australia as a penal colony of Great Britain in 1788, and the subsequent history of the "System" of convict incarceration and labor which largely defined her first century. Throughout a history of terror, sternness, want, and pity, Hughes maintains an admirable balance which never becomes detachment, and he tells a story wonderfully well.
The World Turned Upside Down
The Georgian England that sent its convicts to the end of the world is not solely the one of Adam mantelpieces and silver tankards to which, Hughes charges, the educated mind is wont to look with nostalgia. Instead it is Blake's "London," where the "youthful Harlot's cry...blights with plagues the marriage Hearse." It is not the England of nut-brown ale but Hogarth's "Gin Lane," where a stupefied mother drops her infant on the cobbles.
In the late eighteenth century, with the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution and the recurrent difficulties in the agricultural economy, English cities grew at an astounding rate.
The squalid neighborhoods in London's East End were so crowded, noisy, and filthy that they were called "rookeries" after the nesting places of crows. Work was hard, when you could get it, and distinctions of rank were guarded jealously. Hughes reminds us, for example, that we get our expression "top-notch" from the status of the "topnotcher," the sawyer at the top of the sawpit, whose colleague pulling the saw below was likely to go blind young from the showers of sawdust that fell into his eyes. Children as young as four were sent to labor in the new factories for hours on end, becoming little automata who continued the motions of their work in their sleep. And with a phenomenal growth in population - London's doubled in the twenty years between 1750 and 1770 - even such employment was hard to get. The crime rate, as was typical in a society with a large number of unemployed young men, rose exponentially.
Without a centralized police force, and with the parish watches manned by old-age pensioners, it was everyone for himself against the chaos of the day. As Hughes notes, the more well-to-do began around this time, not entirely unreasonably, to perceive the lower class as an undifferentiated mass, "a sort of magma that would burst through any crack in law and
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