I first read Robert Hughes’ Fatal Shore a few years ago. I read it on Kindle. I saw an old copy of this in an op-shop a couple of months ago, so I picked it up and started reading a few weeks ago.
It’s a hard read. Page after page of how badly the convicts were treated in NSW and Tassie, show how evil man can be.
Read and dig a bit more into Australian history and you’d find racism accounts for only a part of the horrific past of Australia.
The bigger factor is the innate evil of human – the treatment of convicts speaks with bellows of wincing cries on every page of Hughes’ book that show how evil man can be.
2 names to remember for the ending of convict transportation and all the evil that entailed:
1. Alex Maconochie; and
2. William Molesworth (of the Molesworth Committee)
Ante 