From 1787 to 1868 160,000 men, women, and children were shipped to Australia by the British government, not only in order to cut down on the “criminal class” in the motherland, but also to colonise the continent along the way. Hughes’ approach to his examination of this transportation system is, as he calls it, from below, which means from the convicts’ side.
This, however, doesn’t mean that he doesn’t at least touch upon almost every related topic, be it the social and political environment or the penal system in 18th century England, seafaring in the Pacific in general or the discovery of Australia by Cook specifically, which all contributed to the establishment of the transportation system in their own way. The terrible start of the first colony follows, whose inhabitants were utterly unprepared for the harsh realities of life in such a remote location which may have had the appearance of being suitable for sustaining a settlement during Cook’s short visit but turned out to be a chimaera, that almost led to disaster due to starvation. Nonetheless, the first colonists prevailed and the system was established not only on the mainland, but also on Van Diemen’s Land and Norfolk Island, and the colonisation of Australia through free labour provided by convicts was underway.
Hughes achieves his goal to show the system from below easily. He tells the individual stories of some convicts, as far as they are known, he cites excerpts from their letters, and he shares parts of their memoirs, but he also tells us who they were as a whole, namely a whole lot of poor people that received very harsh sentences for minor offences and were transported to the other side of the world for it. The systems under which they suffered and which changed with each governor and commandant are dissected and examined thoroughly, and these parts of the book are not easy to read, because there is so much sadism, horror, and savagery. The remoteness of the location, the extensive power of the governors, and the insistence from the British government that the penal system must be as severe as possible led to a police state where those deemed as noncomplying landed in penal stations that were hellscapes and cesspools, while rare attempts to focus more on reform than punishment were crushed as fast as possible and the advocates denounced as soft.
The book is incredibly well-researched and covers at least superficially almost everything about the first decades of colonisation, from economic matters to the effect on the environment, the fate of the Aboriginal people, the impact of free settlers and Emancipists, the beginning of the gold rush, and the influence of British politics on it all. The focus on what matters the most to Hughes, the convicts, is nonetheless never lost, and what he achieves with this book is to put up a memorial for those 160,000 people; for those who succeeded in building a life, but especially for those who were chewed up by the system. He does not romanticise anything or anyone, but I felt he brought many of them some belated justice by clearing up misconceptions about them, by giving them a voice through their letters and memoirs, and by showing what they really had to endure. It is a depressing and exhausting read that sometimes made me despair in the face of cruelty, injustice, and incompetence, but it is worth it for the unusual perspective, and also for the immense richness of detail on one hand and the broad scope on the other hand that leave you with a deep understanding of this period in Australian history.