The Fatal Shore
by Robert Hughes
Australia was built by convicts. This is what that actually meant.
For you if
you want to understand what Australia actually was before it became a tourist destination and a national mythology
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The founding of Australia as a British penal colony from 1788 to 1868 — the transportation of 160,000 convicts, the brutal conditions of the convict system, the establishment of a society built on forced labor and systematic violence. Hughes — Australian art critic, writing from New York — spent years in the archives reconstructing the full horror of what the transportation system actually was. The most comprehensive visitor dispatch from inside Australian colonial history. The book that made Australians confront what their country was built on before it became the sunburned barbecue democracy it prefers to remember.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Australia
- Voice
- An outside perspective on Australia
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