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Summary: A great work of Australian Classic Literature
Review: Robert Hughes has captured the essence of what it is to be Australian - by showing us from whence we came. Reading this book has reopened my Aussie patriotism, fading from years living overseas. I only hope that this is the required text for all Australian students irrespective of their heritage and or ethnicity.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, savage and intimate
Review: Robert Hughs manages to combine numerous historical excerpts of early convict history into a moving, horrifying and truly personal account of how transportation, the lash and isolation so far from home must have confronted a british prisoner. This is also one of the few books that puts transportation and the practices surrounding it in the context of 18th and 19th century Europe, rather than in terms of contemporary Australia. All of this is backlit with the jolting impact of convict settlement on the Aborigines and the slow emergence of a sense of identity of a Australia as a nation.
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Summary: A response to the idea of "Culture Cringe."
Review: Sham history is still history. I've read reviews of this fine piece of scholarship, including some presented on this very page, which attempt to undermine its validity by claiming that much of its content is anecdotal; based on folk tales and hearsay. I can only respond by noting that this fact adds to the color and elegance of the text. Few historical theses can claim to be both scholarly and entertaining. This one is. It reads like a novel. It instructs like a textbook. Its arguments are convincing and substantive. Its stories are humorous and horrifying. My only disappointment, which is actually only indirectly related to the book, came from the text of Mr. Hughes' statement to the faculty of the University of Melbourne upon his receiving an honorary Doctor of Letters. He apologized for his lack of formal education. No apologies are necessary.
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Summary: Bits of Flying Flesh. Everywhere.
Review: Spurred on by Down Under (by Bill Bryson), I found this book already on my shelves and decided to give Australian history a fighting chance. Of course, my interest is more along the lines of the original founding of Australia by the Aborigines some sixty thousand years ago - an emigration that is still a relative anthropological mystery. At no time in human history was Australia ever connected by a land bridge to Asia or any of the other long-ago inhabited islands of Micronesia, and yet people still came - some forty thousand years before the recorded development of man-made watercraft. So either Australia's Aboriginals at one time possessed a knowledge of ship-building far advanced from that of any other culture (then subsequently lost it), or by some miracle a successful breeding population of humans somehow drifted to the virgin continent on logs or ocean debris. I lean towards the former explanation, but either way, what a story! But of course, I digress. The Fatal Shore is not about the original founders of Australia, but rather about the original white founders of Australia, post Captain Cook. Australia was claimed by Britain in the late 18th century, but the Britons weren't quite sure what to do with their new-found continent. They thought it might prove to be a strategically-valuable location in the South Pacific - particularly in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars - but the problem was, no one seemed willing to populate this beautiful, but rather inhospitable, country. Leave it to the British to come up with a rather ingenious plan - turn the whole shebang into a convict colony, and allow those who have served their terms (called "Emancipists") acquire land and populate the countryside. It was a win-win situation - the new continent would be settled by British citizens, disagreeable as they may be, and England would be rid of its festering convict population. As an added bonus, the British court system scored a big political gain, often choosing transportation as a more humane alternative to the increasingly unpopular death penalty. And so the grand experiment began in the late 1700s. Hughes covers the history of Australian convictry exhaustively - and at times, exhaustingly. I enjoyed the book overall, though the author seemed to have an unhealthy fascination with the practice of flogging - which he described in excruciating, nauseating detail. The phrases "bits of flying flesh", "pools of blood", "exposed collar bone" and "maggot-infested wounds" reappear throughout the text... Hughes weaves a complex tale of political and penological-theory that I'm sure impressed several academics but at times made my eyes roll into the back of my head. I was really more in the mood for a more casual history, and would have enjoyed the book thrice as much at half the length. But that's just me. All told, a good read - a bit too long, and a few too many airborne bits of flesh for my tastes, but altogether strong.
Rating: 
Summary: Early Oz
Review: This book is the gruelling story of the transportation of convicts from Britain to Australia, told at great length and in great detail. It's also the story of the birth of what might be termed modern Australian history - that is, from the start of the European presence in Australia. Hughes also examines the social history of Britain from the late eighteenth century to mid-nineteenth century - in particular, its criminology. And it's right that British social history should be assessed in this book, because I thought that transportation could not be understood in full without that context. The book was all the better for that. Were I to be churlish, I should point out that the Irish experience is slightly underplayed (but not overlooked) - one could view the Irish angle as more political than social - but as I said, that would be over-critical. Among the tales of shocking brutality, there are great escape stories, assessments of the British officials who were brave and humane enough to attempt reform, and an assessment of the effect of the transportation system upon both the Australian psyche and upon the Aborigines. Fascinating though all this is, I thought that Hughes had a tendency to depart from strict chronology. By that I mean that as one particular aspect of the story engaged his interest, he told it to completion. Frequently at the beginning of the next chapter I had to "leap backwards in time" as Hughes looked at another part of the history. This can be disorientating, but I tried to approach the book as a series of extended essays on transportation and Australian history. This worked for me. Perhaps Hughes's method was as good as the conceivable alternatives given the structure of the history he was dealing with.
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Summary: Better than fiction!
Review: This book was a great read. Hughes did an excellent job of creating the picture of Australian history. One of the best books I have read. The stories stay with you. I read this book just before a trip to Melbourne and Sydney and the places were just as he described them. Now I know why there are so many red-headed men name Sean.
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Summary: A must read for non-fiction lovers
Review: This colorful and splendidly researched history of Australia's founding is breathtaking in its scope. The book is not only a story of Australia's beginnings, but an impressively researched history on the political pressures in England that led to the founding of Australia as a penal colony and of the struggles over penal reform. Perhaps most fascinating, and Hughes never fails to communicate his own sense of fascination, is the microcosm Australia offers as a society founded from wholecloth and how it evolved into a complex society. I read this book right after reading Son of the Morning Star (another superb book) and was very much struck between the parallels between how Americans who settled the West viewed and treated Native Americans and the Australian settlers' views of the aborigines whom they slowly but surely displaced. The wonderful stories would stand on their own even if ineptly told, but they really come alive with Hughes' writing style, which would be the pride of any novelist...Bravo!
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Summary: History at its best
Review: This is a great book, one of the finest history books I have read covering Australia. I found the book easy to read, the narrative flowed along full of facts but never dull. Its not stuffy and boring like a lot of history books but a very good yarn. I have sent copies to friends around the world and they have all enjoyed the book as well. Its history at its best, some very interesting stories about Norfolk Island and Port Arthur and cannibal convicts, a very enjoyable tale. Maybe some Australians are too happy with this side of our history but never the less its still our history and this book makes it enjoyable to read about.
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!
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