A landmark history that confronts Britain's colonisation of Australia.
In The Fatal Shore, historian and critic Robert Hughes offers a vivid, unflinching account of Britain's colonisation of Australia; a history built on the forced transportation of convicts and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Drawing on meticulous research, Hughes recreates the harsh realities of the penal system, the endurance of those sent to the colonies, and the profound human cost of empire.
'An enthralling account... brimming over with rare and pungent characters, and tales of pathos, bravery, and horror' Peter Matthiessen
'A unique phantasmagoria of crime and punishment, which combines the shadowy terrors of Goya with the tumescent life of Dickens' Peter Ackroyd, The Times
Vorwort
'An extraordinarily vivid yet authentic account of the birthpangs of a nation. A work of real distinction' Philip Ziegler
Autorentext
Robert Hughes, art critic of Time magazine and twice winner of the American College Art Association's F. J. Mather Award for distinguished criticism, is author of The Shock of the New, and of Heaven and Hell in Western Art. He is also author of the acclaimed Nothing if Not Critical, a work on Frank Auerbach; Barcelona, and Culture of Complaint, essays on the fraying of America. Robert Hughes died in August 2012.
Zusammenfassung
An award-winning epic on the birth of AustraliaIn 1787, the twenty-eighth year of the reign of King George III, the British Government sent a fleet to colonise Australia.Documenting the brutal transportation of men, women and children out of Georgian Britain into a horrific penal system which was to be the precursor to the Gulag and was the origin of Australia, The Fatal Shore is the definitive, masterfully written narrative that has given its true history to Australia.'A unique phantasmagoria of crime and punishment, which combines the shadowy terrors of Goya with the tumescent life of Dickens' Times