The Daily Tar Heel Thursday. April 16, 19873
Book gives
pride back
to Aussies
By JAMES SUROWIECKI
Sports Editor
For many Australians, their
national heritage is akin to a mad
relative, hidden away in a musty
corner of the big house, thought of
only unpleasantly. Twenty years ago,
Australian history was limited in
scope and mythic in nature. The story
of the islands origins was not told.
It was as if the river Lethe had
flooded Australia, cleansing its
inhabitants' memories of what had
come before. It was, though, a river
the inhabitants bathed in willlingly,
for there were few who wished to
recall that the first European settlers
of the island were exiled convicts and
their unfortunate wardens.
The need to forget, a need keenly
felt by the Australian upper class, was
balanced by the desire of the lower
classes to remember the indignities
their ancestors had suffered and
overcome. And so a mythology was
created, one which emphasized the
convicts' noble aspect and the injus
tice of their sentences. Those who had
been sent from England were polit
ical prisoners, exiled not for thievery
but for sedition against the Crown.
Or they were innocent poachers,
criminals in name only, victims of
landed wealth and greed.
The myth of the yeoman criminal
provided not just solace. It also
created a historical framework of
oppression into which the conflict
between poor and rich fit rather
neatly. But for all its power, such a
portrait of the past was no more true
than would be a history which simply
glossed over the island's origins.
Something more was needed.
That something is Robert Hughes'
brilliant The Fatal Shore, a devas
tatingly eloquent and crisply orches
trated history of the founding of
Australia as an English penal colony.
It is also the story of a colony which
transcended its rather inauspicious
beginnings to lay the foundation of
a nation.
Hughes is arts editor for Time and
was born and educated in Sydney,
and both of those pieces of informa
tion seem important. The first pre
vents the book from degenerating
into the ponderous style with which
professional historians are too often
gifted. Hughes writes powerfully, his
sentences tinged with a love of
rhetoric and of language. And when
he discusses the work of convict
architect Francis Howard Greenway,
Hughes' genius emerges.
He writes, "(Greenway) had to
concentrate on proportion and mate
rial texture, rather than ornament:
the simple-looking (but closely
accounted) use of Palladian bays,
with plain pilasters r- brick on the
Barracks, tawny sandstone on St.
James' firmly stating the ratios of
the walls. His Doric detalinig.
straightforward and .masculj
line...
suited the hard clarity of
Australian
" J i 7 1
light ... As in early American
The
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The epic of Australia's founding
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churches, the direct speech of Green
way's idiom reinforced the content
of the rituals."
Hughes' smooth prose is balanced
by his splendid research. He has done
a fine job of integrating into his
account the previously unexplored
letters and memoirs of the island's
convicts, including melodramatic
ballads and evocative doggerel verse.
Hughes' immersion in the primary
sources of early Australia make this
a work of grand scholarship, which
will, in the future, undoubtedly be
the seminal tome on the subject'.
Hughes is not just a writer, though.
He is also an Australian, and that
fact fills his work with an air, not
of atonement, but of exorcism. He
makes no apology for the way in
which his nation was birthed, nor
does he shy away from its consequen
ces. But, in some sense, by telling this
story Hughes purges the national
conscience. His efforts should allow
Australians to look at their past not
with revulsion, but, perhaps, with
some sense of pride.
Such pride is possible because of
the courage and dignity which
Hughes is able to derive from the
violent and brutal tale of Australia's
birth. In 1770, Captain Cook claimed
the land for England. Sixteen years
later, William Pitt's cabinet settled on
Botany Bay, on Australia's eastern
coast, as the site of its new penal
colony.
As it was first conceived, Australia
was the perfect place in wh'.ch to
execute that solution. The island was
the antipodes, socially as well as
geographically. Convicts would be
sent there to work off their sentences,
and in so doing would be colonists
of a sort. But creating a new nation
was not what Pitt had in mind. The
antipodes would be at once a deter
jenVjto crime and a safety valve for
the removal of those who were not
deterred.
Book Review
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The need to make Australia a
forbidding place was taken seriously
by most of its governors. One could
not have the poor in England looking
upon the antipodes as a potential
escape from the hopelessness of
London. And so the predominant
symbol of the island's early years was
the lash.
Flogging was taken seriously by
the colony's masters. It was an act
of ultimate humiliation, representing
the complete dominance of guard
over prisoner. Tied to the triangle,
whipped until his blood ran swiftly,
the convict was totally powerless. His
only recourse was silence in the face
of unspeakable pain.
The lash was the symbol of the
guard-prisoner dichotomy which
became translated into a rigid two
class system. Fom the beginning, the
colony was divided between free and
convict. Whether a man was now in
society was irrelevant, though. What
mattered was where he had started.
;And so the gap between the Exclu
sives, the free settlers, and the
; Emancipists, the freed convicts, grew.
Even the Currency, the free children
of convicts, were disdained by the
Exclusives.
This was a persistent division,
perhaps the most potent effect of the
Gulag-like treatment of the convicts.
It is also a system which makes even
more difficult the task of finding
something to hold on to in the pangs
of Australia's birth.
But Hughes reaches beyond the
class stratification, beyond the mar
tinets and sadists who dominated the
colony. He finds the courage of those
who were silent underneath the whip,
the flash of the roguish bushrangers
who lived free (if always just a step
ahead of the law), the stories of those
convicts who used their liberty to
build a new life. And in so doing,
tie dtecuvefst : afoftgwfth the suffering
and evil.lronorarid iriurrrplt:
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