Author | Robert Hughes |
---|---|
Subject | History of Australia |
Publisher | Alfred A. Knopf |
Publication date | 1986 |
Media type | hardback |
Pages | 688 |
Awards | Duff Cooper Prize 1987 [1] WH Smith Literary Award 1988 [2] |
ISBN | 0-394-50668-5 First Knopf edition |
The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding is a 1986 book by Robert Hughes. It provides a history of the early years of British colonisation of Australia, and especially the history and social effects of Britain's convict transportation system. It also addresses the historical, political and sociological reasons that led to British settlement. It was first published in 1986.
Hughes was an Australian man who became an internationally well-known art critic, living in Europe and then New York, where he became art critic for Time magazine. Hughes's interest in Australia's convict era began in the early 1970s, when he was filming a TV documentary about the history of Australian art that took him to Port Arthur in Tasmania. [3]
The Fatal Shore was originally published in 1986 by Alfred A. Knopf in the United States and by William Collins in the UK, and subsequently published in paperback in the UK by Collins Harvill in 1987. The Folio Society published a slipcased premium edition in 1998, extending to a fourth printing in 2006. [5]
Australian novelist Thomas Keneally, in a review for The New York Times , described the book as "an authoritative and engrossing record," stating that "although the story of the convict system has recently been covered by a number of Australian historians, this account, richly peopled with bizarre and compelling characters, is probably the most full-blooded and monumental treatment the subject has been given." [3]
Brian Smith, writing in the World Socialist Web Site , gave a positive review of the book, declaring that it "provide[s] a vivid portrayal of the human cost of Britain's colonial venture and how these experiences have helped shape modern Australia." [6]
Historian Geoffrey Blainey wrote in A Shorter History of Australia that "Robert Hughes's wonderfully written history of the convicts, The Fatal Shore, was to entice more readers than any other book on Australia's history, but he loaded the dice when he likened the convict system to the Gulag Archipelago in the Soviet Union." [7]
In a 2013 Quadrant article, historian Keith Windschuttle argued that The Fatal Shore "remains the most widely read representation of the old anti-British historical paradigm created from the 1940s to the 1970s by Marxists and other leftists in university history departments." Windschuttle wrote that "Hughes’s gift for the dramatic phrase led him to go further than his sources and argue that nineteenth-century New South Wales was actually a precursor to Stalin’s Gulag Archipelago." [8]
The Duff Cooper Prize is a literary prize awarded annually for the best work of history, biography, political science or occasionally poetry, published in English or French. The prize was established in honour of Duff Cooper, a British diplomat, Cabinet member and author. The prize was first awarded in 1956 to Alan Moorehead for his Gallipoli. At present, the winner receives a first edition copy of Duff Cooper's autobiography Old Men Forget and a cheque for £5,000.
Keith Windschuttle is an Australian historian. He was appointed to the board of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2006. He was editor of Quadrant from 2007 to 2015 when he became chair of the board and editor-in-chief. He was the publisher of Macleay Press, which operated from 1994 to 2010.
Robert Studley Forrest Hughes AO was an Australian-born art critic, writer, and producer of television documentaries. He was described in 1997 by Robert Boynton of The New York Times as "the most famous art critic in the world."
Australian literature is the written or literary work produced in the area or by the people of the Commonwealth of Australia and its preceding colonies. During its early Western history, Australia was a collection of British colonies; as such, its recognised literary tradition begins with and is linked to the broader tradition of English literature. However, the narrative art of Australian writers has, since 1788, introduced the character of a new continent into literature—exploring such themes as Aboriginality, mateship, egalitarianism, democracy, national identity, migration, Australia's unique location and geography, the complexities of urban living, and "the beauty and the terror" of life in the Australian bush.
The WH Smith Literary Award was an award founded in 1959 by British high street retailer W H Smith to "encourage and bring international esteem to authors of the British Commonwealth". Originally open to all residents of the UK, the Commonwealth and Ireland, it later admitted foreign works in translation and works by US authors. The final three winners were Americans, and 2005 was the award's final year.
Hal Gibson Pateshall Colebatch was a West Australian author, historian, poet, lecturer, journalist, editor, and lawyer.
Geoffrey Norman Blainey, is an Australian historian, academic, best selling author and commentator.
Henry Reynolds is an Australian historian whose primary work has focused on the frontier conflict between European settlers in Australia and Indigenous Australians. He was the first academic historian to advocate for Indigenous land rights, becoming known with his first major work, The Other Side of the Frontier (1981).
The history wars is a term used in Australia to describe the public debate about the interpretation of the history of the European colonisation of Australia and the development of contemporary Australian society, particularly with regard to their impact on Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The term "history wars" emerged in the late 1990s during the term of the Howard government, and despite efforts by some of Howard's successors, the debate is ongoing, notably reignited in 2016 and 2020.
Stuart Forbes Macintyre was an Australian historian, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne from 1999 to 2008. He was voted one of Australia's most influential historians.
Quadrant is a conservative Australian literary, cultural, and political journal, which publishes both online and printed editions. As of 2019, Quadrant mainly publishes commentary, essays and opinion pieces on cultural, political and historical issues, although it also reviews literature and publishes poetry and fiction in the print edition. Its editorial line is self-described "bias towards cultural freedom, anti-totalitarianism and classical liberalism".
Dr Ruth Scurr FRSL, aka Lady Stothard, is a British writer, historian and literary critic. She is a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
Gulag: A History, also published as Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, is a nonfiction book covering the history of the Soviet Gulag system. It was written by American author Anne Applebaum and published in 2003 by Doubleday. Gulag won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the 2004 Duff Cooper Prize. It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle prize and for the National Book Award.
Mark Girouard was a British architectural historian. He was an authority on the country house, and Elizabethan and Victorian architecture.
The Other Side of the Frontier is a history book published in 1981 by Australian historian Henry Reynolds. It is a study of Aboriginal Australian resistance to the British settlement, or invasion, of Australia from 1788 onwards.
The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia's History is a history book by Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey.
Lucy Angela Hughes-Hallett is a British cultural historian, biographer and novelist. In November 2013, she won the Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction for her biography of the Italian writer Gabriele D'Annunzio, The Pike. The book also won the 2013 Costa Book Award (Biography) and the Duff Cooper Prize.
The Pike: Gabriele d'Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War is a 2013 book by the writer Lucy Hughes-Hallett first published in London by Fourth Estate. The American edition, published by Knopf in 2013, is titled Gabriele d'Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War. The book is a biography of Gabriele d'Annunzio, although it is written in a style more commonly seen in fiction, which echoes that of d'Annunzio's autobiography. Finding mere chronology insufficient for telling the story of her "extraordinary, unstoppable and in many ways quite ridiculous" subject, Hughes-Hallett "tries out a variety of cross-sections and settings, mosaics and micro-narratives," as Robert Gordon wrote in Literary Review.