Australia Turns 200: A special review of Robert Hughes's The Fatal Shore and Ross Terrill's The Australians
McGurn, William
BOOK REVIEWS It is therefore ordered and adjudged by this Court, that you be transported upon the seas beyond the seas, to such place as His Majesty, by the advice of his Privy Council, shall think...
...William Bligh, former captain of the infamous Bounty (and, it appears by the book's dedication, a relation of Hughes's godson), and so on...
...sibility—not, as Terrill appears to believe, a whorish indifference to standards...
...I just don't let any situation get accepted...
...Hughes early on talks about "the first white cock" on Australian soil, while Terrill employs the first of the four-letter words as frequently as possible...
...His purpose is clear, even if he's a tad confused about exactly which metaphor will get the most attention...
...Not that this is bad...
...And the Government does . . . part of the country or the next issue...
...In Sydney harbor, just a stone's throw from the city's world-famous opera house, their landing site has been turned into an American-style tourist attraction called "The Rocks" (an allusion to the rocky outcrops of sandstone that greeted the first settlers...
...These are the virtues that Britain transported alongwith its convicts (even if the mother country did not always live up to them), and they are the same virtues that will serve Australia in good stead in the future...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1988 37 Congress, the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, all of which were conscious expressions of aspects of the American identity...
...n the eve of its bicentennial, therefore, the land that author Donald Home dubbed "the Lucky Country" displays a hesitancy and unease about its past that could well jeopardize its future...
...To compare such people with Jews arbitrarily rounded up for the gas chambers or Russians exiled to Siberia betrays a preoccupation with form over substance, a disposition that might fly on the arts pages of Time but ill serves a volume of history...
...Terrill at least acknowledges the problem—Australia is "a customer in the supermarket of World Culture," he says—and notes that the flip side to the laid-back Paul Hogan Aussie ("put another shrimp on the barbie") is a tragic unwillingness to take charge of one's own destiny: When I was at college, some feared that Southeast Asian countries might fail to resist the Communist threat and turn Australia into the "last domino...
...Poverty-as-the-main-cause-ofcrime, you name it, Hughes has transported it to the pages of The Fatal Shore...
...The only thing that saves this mountain of passion from degenerating into mini-series melodrama is that the author often manages to rise above himself to recognize a stubborn truth...
...Convict history was ignored in schools and little taught in universities," he says, and The Fatal Shore is an attempt to fill in the holes and is written, insofar as possible, from the convicts' perspective...
...S o far so good...
...What the country awaits is an author with enough confidence and vision to write of its promise...
...For just as British observations on the American experiment have always been marred by a habit of viewing America as rather an imperfect Britain (and not as a system in itself), so too there is a tendency today to view Australia as a bastard America...
...If it does nothing else, the chronicle of Australia's first eight decades ought to dispel facile comparisons with America...
...Was it worse than non-British practices of incarceration or punishment...
...Not that he ever lets this get in the way, mind you...
...Part of the dilemma is that the ebb and flow of events since the last world war has pulled the country from its traditional moorings...
...There is Alexander Pearce, for example, a prisoner who cannibalized his comrades during two escape attempts...
...It was, and it did...
...In many ways this move can be and has been a boon...
...Despite this, or because of it, the two men also opt for a studied coarseness of tongue...
...But these cheap comparisons break down under the weight of the author's own testimony: those transported to Australia, with the exception of a number of Irish rebels and a few British firebrands, were by and large ordinary if petty criminals, most of them, he further concedes, repeat offenders...
...Unfortunately, the best parts of the book, like these, are teases, with nothing during the moment of truth...
...The freneticism that afflicted America and Britain during the sixties and seventies still lingers in Australia...
...Every day I do something to them...
...The reason for this is Britain...
...Here, for example, one of the more obstinate convicts, Laurence Frayne, describes the aftermath of one such flogging: I was literally alive with Maggots and Vermin, nor could I keep them down...
...She now asks the Government to "compensate" for these twin "handicaps...
...The difference was biggest of all for unskilled workers, whose chances in England had been nil...
...This potential will remain untapped, however, until its people decide what kind of country they want their Australia to be...
...The trifle of soap allowed me to wash our persons & shirts was stopped from me, as I thought to spur me to abuse the Gaol authorities and thereby again subject myself to more cruelty . . . knowing as they all did my hasty temper...
...As an immigrant cabbie grumbled to a Newsweek reporter earlier this year, "These are the luckiest people alive, and they don't even know it...
...Mary Bryant—!`the girl from Botany Bay"—who with her husband and two children became a celebrity when she piloted a stolen boat 3,250 miles to Timor...
...So doing, their writing reveals many of its strengths, some of its confusions, and, unconsciously, its weaknesses...
...All is done in the self-conscious bravado of a randy undergrad who's got hold of the university literary magazine...
...The reason could be many things: real wages may be too high, imposing structural unemployment, or as a person the single mother may be a pain in the neck...
...It occurred to him he knew little of Australia's beginnings...
...Unlike in the U.S., where the thirteen colonies were not only independent from one another but enjoyed considerable autonomy from the Crown, Australia was, despite the best efforts of some of its settlers (and especially their freeborn children) and administrators, ruled first and foremost with the severity a penal colony was thought to demand...
...Unlike The Fatal Shore, however, The Australians is more a personal snapshot than a work of history...
...Hughes stumbles badly, however, when he turns from relating history to sentimentalizing it...
...At the same time the prime minister, Labor's Bob Hawke, is under pressure to declare Australia a republic and thus remove the British Union Jack from the national flag...
...This tendency also influences Australian writing, much as Britain's shadow fell heavily on America's cultural consciousness until this century...
...later he refers to Australian apartheid...
...As Captain Phillip bitterly complained, "It is obvious that the settlement, instead of being a colony which will support itself, will, if this practice is continued, remain for years a burthen to the mother country...
...Early on the Fleet ran short of cash and was stranded in Rio until sufficient private funds were raised to cover the rest of the trip...
...Terrill's fifteen years in America also give him a broader perspective on Australian assumptions about the state's responsibilities: Here is a single mother, who has a graduate diploma in outdoor studies, and experience in "non-sexist teaching," sending in a complaint to a government unit about "discrimination" because she can't get a job...
...still later, not quite finished, he refers to one of the more brutal prison camps as Australia's Dachau...
...Largely Hughes is successful, and his 688 pages are jammed full of hundreds of firsthand observations by the British officials, soldiers, governors, and, of course, prisoners who made Australia what it was...
...By contrast, Australia has been free of most such conflict, and the country's most memorable battle is the defeat suffered in World War I by the Turks at Gallipoli...
...The author also notes that only the Irish manage to take positive pride in tracing their ancestry back to the odd horse thief or rebel...
...He pauses to move his empty teacup away from the clutter of papers...
...Phillip, for example, cries out for fuller treatment as an average man who met rather well the extraordinary task assigned him...
...Hughes notes that Australia was a frontier society that rewarded hard work at any level, to a degree undreamed-of by the English or Irish poor...
...Unlike Captain Phillip, too, the skipper of this fleet faces a planned demonstration by thousands of Australia's native Aborigines...
...Little of the American traditions of self-rule, entrepreneurship, and ordered liberty took root in early Australia, and there is a decided vagueness about its national identity...
...Class consciousness...
...So doing, both men unconsciously demonstrate the streak of immaturity that runs through Australian intellectual life today...
...Elizabeth II arrived...
...Although the moves away from the state have been slow and begrudging, for example, they have come...
...By far the more scholarly of the two is The Fatal Shore, subtitled "A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787-1868...
...Today, however, writing about his first impressions after his return, he spots a pretty co-ed and notes that Australians "can be remarkably grim-looking for the faces of a hedonistic people...
...Hughes mentions that many of the guilty weretransported instead of being hanged...
...Thus although he concedes that "to speak of an eighteenth-century `working class' as though it were a homogeneous entity" is absurd, he rather envies the way the mean-spirited middle and upper classes always acted as one to keep the downtrodden down...
...In the past she had existed for me as an oil painting and a high-pitched voice on the radio with her Christmas Message...
...The style is easygoing, and Terrill does not appear to suffer from the distemper that afflicts the Time art critic...
...Maybe so...
...The outof-work blacksmith, reduced to petty theft by lack of opportunity, could soon become a flourishing tradesman in Sydney once his sentence was completed...
...Possibly because Britain didn't really know any better, it hampered the development of a yeoman ethos in Australia by its political lock on the economy and its continued export of convict labor...
...the peaceful settlement of more than three million immigrants in the postwar era, for example, leans more to the American than British model...
...W ith these words many a bewildered subject of the Crown found himself packed off to what was then His Majesty's most remote possession, an uncharted island continent on the outskirts of Asia...
...Like Hughes his primary target is the American and not the Australian reader...
...And I laugh in front of my TV...
...A good part of this mischief arises from Hughes's obeisance to the icons of the day...
...Feminism...
...Hughes and Terrill have attempted to come to terms with Australia's past and present...
...But the danger is that Australia will be suffocated by the imposition of a false American identity on its own landscape...
...As befits a morality play there is even a stick villain here, Society...
...Frayne's case does not appear to be unusual in many settlements, and he is joined by a variety of characters whose exploits could easily have made The Fatal Shore a novel...
...citizenship in the process...
...In attempting to do too much he leaves the reader with too little, and the dust-jacket boast about the "twenty visits" and "some 22,000 miles" he logged for this book suggest a depth that the contents do not support...
...Why do so many expat Australian males want to parade as an Alan Alda clone...
...According to its author, the New York-based art critic for Time magazine, the idea for the book came in 1974 while walking amid the ruins of a penitentiary in Tasmania (formerly the notorious Van Diemen's Land), on location for a TV documentary about Australian art...
...Although prisoners were also transported to America, there was never anything like the number (some 160,000) that ultimately made their way to this sunburnt land...
...As early as the second page Hughes argues that in Australia Britain drew the sketch for the coming Soviet Gulag...
...Others are simply William McGurn is deputy editorial page editor of the Asian Wall Street Journal...
...Although the re-enactment voyage faces few of the difficulties that bedeviled the original fleet—scurvy and mutiny, to name but two—the trip has not been without its own problems...
...Later this month a replica of the First Fleet will sail into the harbor to commemorate Australia's bicentennial...
...The former deals with the country's founding as a penal colony, while the latter tries to capture Australia today...
...There is, for example, the adolescent's excitement of seeing the Queen up close: We Wesley boys had the dazzling privilege of lining the royal route between Essendon airport and Melbourne city...
...The shoddiest manifestations of this approach are the parallels he draws with the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany...
...When the First Fleet pulls into Circular Quay on January 26, Australia needs most of all to celebrate the undeniable virtues that turned such a dismal beginning into what has after all been a happy ending...
...But the truths are there nonetheless, hardy warning signs not to take everything else he says at face value...
...An island that is also a continent, a Western nation that happens to lie in the Orient, a land the size of the continental U.S...
...Hope, effort and luck enabled thousands of Emancipists to make a second start in life, better than anything they had known in their British lives...
...Our masters taught us to wave and summarized for us the history of the British monarchy...
...Like Hughes, too, Terrill is best when he lets his subjects speak for themselves, and speak they certainly do: former prime ministers, old cronies, local literary celebs, and innumerable barflys...
...For half a day we waited...
...Far from it...
...Was it worse than prisons today...
...This is because at its core neither has a clear idea of what it wants Australia to be...
...But Hughes lavishes attention only on those whose hearts are purer than gold or blacker than pitch...
...The 736 convicts and 294 crew who left England on this First Fleet were Australia's Founding Fathers...
...And, at the end of the book, he declares that "for all its flaws (and one cannot imagine a prison system without defects) the assignment system in Australia was by far the most successful form of penal rehabilitation that had ever been tried in English, or American or European history...
...Hughes, for his part, marshals an impressive body of scholarship to explode many of the nation's comfortable folk myths, but his passion never rises above a Latin American whine about past imperialism...
...The crucial factor seems to be a surfeitof Dickens: the men and women of The Fatal Shore are either victims or villains, with little room for ordinary folk...
...In this its bicentennial year, for example, the two most heralded books on the nation, Robert Hughes's The Fatal Shore and Ross Terrill's The Australians, have been written by Australians who have abandoned their native land for America...
...Together they provide a good overview of Australia's national character, such as it is...
...With Hughes Terrill bows to the Zeitgeist, especially in his preference for airing the complaints of Australia's feminists...
...to such a wretched and truly miserable state was I reduced, that I even hated the look & appearance of myself...
...BOOK REVIEWS It is therefore ordered and adjudged by this Court, that you be transported upon the seas beyond the seas, to such place as His Majesty, by the advice of his Privy Council, shall think fit to direct and appoint, for the term of your natural life...
...The author of several works on China, Terrill today is ensconced at Harvard's East Asian Research Center, having also taken out U.S...
...On immigration, too, perhaps the most crucial aspect, a country that not long ago had a "White Australia" program is today an antipodal melting pot, unleashing creative forces that no one can predict...
...An old Labor hand, Terrill has easy 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1988 access to most of the party's leaders as he traverses the countryside, including Prime Minister Hawke...
...Much of the rest of The Fatal Shore is given over to descriptions of convict life in this new colony, along with allusions to the varying degrees of harshness between particular commanders and settlements...
...In the end they get confused...
...Nothing remains of the original settlement, but the area's handsome nineteenth-century buildings there are enjoying a second life as souvenir shops, pubs, and "genuine Australian" boutique shops, where visitors can pick up everything from the country's famed blue opals to cuddly koala bears and kangaroos...
...W hile Robert Hughes was busying himself with Australia's past Ross Terrill was trying to come to terms with its present...
...But there is a good chance that Australia might be saved less by a conscious act of will than by her better instincts...
...now she was on Australian soil, dropping by, as it were, for a cuppa tea...
...They jump up and down and shout...
...No sooner do these folks venture forth a sentence that Terrill can frame between quotation marks, however, than he is zipping off to the next How ironic that a vastly underpopulated land, with a free and generous citizenry, situated on the most dynamic spot on the globe, could be so apathetic at the moment when history, geography, and economics are conspiring to hold out a role of badly needed leadership...
...Yet he is, ironically, much better when interviewing those on the other side of the fence, especially the premier of Queensland, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, sort of a downunder hybrid of Huey Long and Jerry Falwell...
...Not many survivors of Dachau or the Gulag would say the same...
...Was there no chance of redemption...
...Indeed, for all the ground covered by The Australians and The Fatal Shore, there's a hollow ring to them...
...The first of them left in eleven ships from Portsmouth in May 1787 under the care of Captain Arthur Phillip, R.N., whose purpose was clear: to establish a British colony that would provide "a remedy for the evils likely to result from the late alarming and numerous increase of felons in this country...
...Today some fear that the capitalist economies of Singapore, Korea, and Taiwan might succeed so well that Australia will be left behind as a white backwater amid a dynamic "yellow sea...
...Today there are few physical reminders of the earliest days...
...As awful as the penal colony was, moreover, The Fatal Shore does not demonstrate that it was more awful than the alternatives...
...Was it worse than punishment in Britain...
...The most obvious difference, of course, is the fact of the convicts...
...These people were thieves, murderers, and whores only because Society said they were, not because of anything they might have done...
...Joh gives Terrill his philosophy on dealing with his enemies, particularly the labor unions: "As with a cement mixer, you don't let it consolidate...
...It surprises him...
...Nor are there Australian parallels to the Mayflower Compact, the Second Continental AUSTRALIA TURNS 200 THE FATAL SHORE Robert Hughes/Alfred A. Knopf/$24.95 THE AUSTRALIANS Ross Terrill/Simon and Schuster/$19.95 William McGurn ambivalent about celebrating the arrival of a cargo of British criminals...
...The problems caused by South Pacific nations such as Fiji, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and New Zealand are teaching Australia its responsibilities as a regional power...
...By far the best part of the book is the early chapter where he reminisces about his childhood in a Methodist school and the upbringing he received...
...that has only the population of Texas, Australia today remains as full of potential as that January day Captain Phillip dropped anchor here 200 years ago...
...To reap the benefits of this, however, it's crucial that Australia remain fundamentally Western: pluralism, after all, is a Western ideal, based on long-developed attitudes toward civil rights, individual liberty, and personal responTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1988 39...
...But she is certain that she is unemployed because she's a woman, and one who "took the trouble to be a mother...
...Despite its long history as a British colony and its continued membership in the Commonwealth, Australia has steadily moved away from Britain and toward America, with whom it shares a certain historical disdain for Mother England (down under they tend to refer to the British as "whinging poms...
...Messrs...
...Hughes relates the nasty and brutish with particular relish,and hardly a page goes by without some poor devil getting 200 strokes for a trifling offense...
Vol. 21 • January 1988 • No. 1
