Book Review: The Fatal Shore

It feels a little odd to be reviewing a book older than I am, but Robert Hughes' 1986 history of the founding of Australia, The Fatal Shore, is one that well retains its relevance to this very day, especially given the current incarceration crisis in the United States.

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For those who don't know, Australia was first intended for use as a penal colony by Great Britain. Despite being an Australian history, a great deal of the book is dedicated towards understanding British poverty, laborer displacement, income inequality, and severe social stratification. These conditions led to a truly enormous crime wave in the British isles. Unfortunately, both for the sake of law and order in the isles and for the sake of the poor forced to resort to crime, there was a massive lack of recognition of the causes of said crime by the upper classes. The upper and middle classes of England actually believed that there was a specific 'criminal class', and that by deporting their criminals, they could reduce crime in England. (They were also extremely fond of shipping rebellious Irish as well.) Transportation actually brought quite a few convicts to America over the years, which in a small sense contributed to the Revolution. America rejected further transported convicts afterwards, forcing Britain to ship them somewhere else- in this case, to Botany Bay, Australia.

It should be noted that the idea of reformation was not in any way part of prison philosophy in the late 1700s and early 1800s- it was purely a matter of punishment in the eyes of the public and government. Despite that, the Australian transportation scheme actually had a significantly higher criminal reformation rate than the vast majority of penal schemes before or since. This wasn't an intentional feature, but a result of the fact that most transported convicts chose to remain in Australia after their sentences ended. There was little to nothing in the way of opportunity for them back in cramped, dismal London, and cheap land was available to every free man or woman. On top of that, most of the convicts didn't serve in prisons or labor gangs in Australia- they were instead assigned to various farmers and other freemen as laborers, keeping them from being imprisoned among large groups of other convicts.

This pseudo-slave labor was largely responsible for Australia's early success. Australia was by no means a friendly place to colonize. It's dry, has largely poor soil, and is badly prone to both flooding and fire. It's one of the less friendly areas settled during colonial times. Easy access to free labor radically boosted the fledgling colony's survival.

There were, of course, many evils of the system. The prisons that convicts in Australia were shipped to when they repeatedly offended after transportation, like Norfolk Island and Port Arthur, were living nightmares. 100 flogs from a cat of nine tails, a punishment that would bare muscle and bone on the back, was a fairly normal punishment for crimes like "possessing a crawfish without authorization." Institutionalized sexual exploitation of both male and female transportees was common. The transportation system grossly exacerbated the displacement and destruction of Aboriginal Australian culture, as well as the complete genocide of the native Tasmanians.

The Fatal Shore never quite achieved the fame of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago or Foucault's Discipline and Punish, but it certainly deserves its place as one of the great books written on incarceration. It's surprisingly enjoyable of a read for such a heavy subject matter. I would have been quite happy if the book had been even longer, despite already clocking in at 600 pages. Hughes was actually an art critic, not a historian, so it's a happy surprise seeing such an excellent history coming from him. If you're interested in the history of prison systems, Australia, or penal philosophy, I highly recommend checking out The Fatal Shore.