The Fatal Shore

"An extraordinary vivid yet authentic account of the birthpangs of a nation. A work of real Distinction" Philip Ziegler

In 1787, the twenty-eighth year of the reign of King George III, the British Government sent a fleet to colonize Australia... An epic description of the brutal transportation of men, women and children out of Georgian Britain into a horrific penal system which was to be the precursor to the Gulag and was the origin of Australia. The Fatal Shore is the prize-winning, scholarly, brilliantly entertaining narrative that has given its true history to Australia.

Reviews

‘Popular history in the best sense... its attention to human detail and its commanding prose call to mind the best work of Barbara Tuchman’ WASHINGTON POST

‘With its mood and stature... THE FATAL SHORE is well on its way to becaming prose the standard opus on the convict years’ SYDNEY SUNDAY HERALD

About the Author

Robert Hughes, art critic of Time magazine and twice winner of the American College Art Association's F.J. Mather Award for distinguished criticism, is author of The Shock of the New, and of Heaven and Hell in Western Art, both written before the present work. He is also author of the acclaimed Nothing if Not Critical, "criticism at its most intelligent and impressive, trenchant, lucid, elegantly written..."in the words of William Boyd; a work on Frank Auerbach; Barcelona, and Culture of Complaint, essays on the fraying of America, described in the Observer as "the most bracing of critical broadsides against new anti-intellectual tyrannies".