Rating: 
Summary: Full of mistakes and eaten up with bitterness
Review: This is a warped and nihilistic view of Australia - which is probably the happiest and most successful society in the world, and with an unbroken record of peaceful democracy and many great achievements. Hughes comes across as a miserable character. He lives in US now and good riddance. If he writes another book at least let him get his facts right.
Rating: 
Summary: Incredibly compelling. With extra flogging.
Review: This is an extremely interesting book of historical non-fiction, and it's very well researched and written. I learned an enormous amount about early Australian history. It has two major recurring motifs: flogging, and starvation. If you don't like flogging or starvation, this book is not for you. Even the chapters that aren't about flogging and starvation have some flogging and starvation thrown in just for laughs. I learned almost as much about flogging and starvation as I did about Australian history, which is saying a lot. I am now eager to go on to read more about the non-flogging era of Australian history. Buy this book, it's great!
Rating:
Summary: Devil's Island On A Continental Scale
Review: This is one monumental and fascinating work, equivalent to a university course in the history of Australia's founding. It is at once easy to read and hard to get through. It took me two full weeks of reading 2 hours a day to finish it, due to the wealth of detail in each chapter. I found myself going over some paragraphs twice to pull it all in. Hughes also has a vocabulary that is of the highest order, so he kept me busy looking up quite a few unfamiliar words. I definitely increased my word power (ha). A good thing, always. It is also not laid out in a strict chronological order; rather, the chapters run over one another in their time periods because of the weaving of the overarching story of the transportation system and its genesis and oversight from England into the narrative. There were also distinct differences between Australia and Van Diemen's Land, and further subsets involving those prisons where repeat offenders were sent -- most notably, Norfolk Island. I had only a vague idea of Botany Bay and the convict history of Australia before I read this book. Apparently, so did many Australians until quite recently as they sought to bury their hellish past and the stigma they associated with it by simply blotting it out of existence. Hughes cuts right to the core of this by exposing it all for what it really was -- brutal, savage, unjust and sad in the extreme. He does not look upon this with anything but a keen eye and evenhanded, masterful grasp of all of the factors that were in play. While certainly most of the convicts could hardly be judged guilty of anything more than the pettiest offense in our modern eyes - if any offense at all - there were indeed those who were hardened criminals. None, however, particularly the women and children, were worthy of the sadistic brutality heaped upon them by those in charge, some of who were clearly evil to the core. For anyone who wants to really understand the truth of the convict history of the land down under, this book is absolutely essential reading. For anyone who wants to be immersed in the depths of human misery and suffering, and ultimately be inspired by what these poor souls endured to build the nation of Australia, this book is required reading.
Rating: 
Summary: founding OZ was not pretty
Review: When you think about fiction you naturally look at various levels of interpretation. From the plot downwards to author's subconscious and upwards towards historical-social-critical analysis. But this type of understanding doesn't fit non-fiction, at least until i read _fatal shore_. The author himself is conscious and deliberate in several levels---where the false ideal of the past is part of current Australian consciousness for example. Or where he praises a commandant for his humanity being 100 years ahead of his time. He is on one basic level retelling the story of the convict founding of OZ, and yet showing constantly the larger issues of it's place in English intellectual and cultural history to the big picture of man's inhumanity to man.
This placing of the pieces of the puzzle in several larger contexts is excellent and makes the book far more than just the recounting of a sad tale indeed. It redeems the book from the world of facts and figures so common to historical writing and raises it to analysis and good commentary.
The only critical thing i have towards the book is a somewhat disjointed structure, the chapters are not quite chronological, more organized around a single character, usually a commander of facilities. Thus often backtracking between chapters, which leaves the newcomer to this country's history without good memory pegs to hang the facts onto.
I'm glad i invested the several hours it took to get through the book with it's gore and extraordinary sadness permeating the story. It's a good book and desires the wide circulation it is getting on the online bookclubs, which is how i found it.
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