A Not So Holy Beginning | A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia

Excellent review of the start of Australia | A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia | Thomas Keneally

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	• A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia Thomas Keneally Anchor, 2007 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 16 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Excellent introduction

Keneally has produced a fascinating introduction to the foundation of Australia, a fantastic mix of the high politics and the fascinating lives of the first settlers and their complex relationship with the Aboriginal peoples.

A Not So Holy Beginning

Robert Hughes,'Fatal Shore' redressed? Not quite. Hughes's well-honed invective sits uneasily besides Keneally's pragmatic prose. Keneally extolls the virtuous outcome of Australia's first governor, Arthur Phillip's benevolent authority, and his establishment, against all odds of Australia's criminal society. Whereas Hughes feels troubled by these origins, Keneally, the ongoing grief of the indigenous inhabitants apart, senses triumph. The writing does not wear its research excessively, and the setting of the settlers amidst an alien environment and culture is as balanced as any recent history I have encountered. We get thumbnail portraits of a large cast of people that bring the story closer to us and a graphic sense of the hardships endured, which few present day residents around the harbour city would easily imagine. Most of the bods on the book's positive side of the ledger have their names embedded in the city, a minor intetrest to local readers. And Glebe? the name of the vegetable patch attached to a church; never knew that either!

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Excellent review of the start of Australia

This book provides an excellent and detailed feel for what life must have ben like for the early settlers of Australia and the environment from which they came. It is difficult to imagine how anybody survived those early days and the hardships they had to put up with.

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An excellent introduction to a fascinating bit of history

Tom Keneally's The Commonwealth of Thieves is an excellent read, well researched and written in a smooth and economical style that gives the reader a thorough introduction to the early history of the Botany Bay settlement. My sole complaint is that it essentially ends in 1793 with the return of Captain Phillip, the colony's first governor, to Britain, the colony having after much difficulty and doubt finally become a viable settlement. Keneally's style is so engaging and the events so intriguing that it leaves you wanting more, beyond the epilogue in which he relates what became of some of the key individuals (and their descendants) who survived the difficult times of the early years.

But while Keneally's history is limited in its breadth, it compensates for that in its depth. His thorough research brings to life the conditions of Britain's legal and penal system that led to the idea of the Botany Bay project, the difficulties that the transportees faced in the ships where so many died before even setting foot in the utterly alien land they were sent to, the hardships faced in the early years where the colony was repeatedly faced with the prospect of starvation, and of particular interest, the difficulties between the British intruders and the native Eora (the aborigines).

I learned quite a few things from this book, one of which was how it was the American Revolution that indirectly led to the Botany Bay experiment. Prior to the Revolution, Britain had for decades used its American colonies as a method of reducing its prison population by transportation, and when the Revolution put an end to that outlet, it became necessary to find another. The dates tell it all: the American Revolution ended in 1783, and the first convict fleet departed for Australia in 1787.

Keneally goes into great detail showing how the harshness of both the British legal system (any crime involving property of over 40 shillings - about US$250 today - carried a mandatory death penalty) and the severe over-crowding of the prison system (in one documented case "a cell, 17 feet by 6, crowded with more than two-dozen inmates and receiving light and air only through a few holes in the door") created a need for transportation. Drawing on the historical records, he shows how most of the crimes involved were crimes of property, i.e. petty theft and such, for which the invariable penalty was transportation or death:

"The offences for which a prisoner could be transported... made up an exotic catalogue. Quakers could be tranpsorted for denying any oath to be lawful or for assembling in religious worship... Notorious thieves and takers of spoil... persons found guilty of stealing cloth from the rack... persons found quilty of larceny and other offences... persons convicted of exporting wool and not paying the excise on it... vagrants and vagabonds... persons convicted of stealing fish..."

"Besides the penalty of transportation, between 1660 and 1819, 187 statues providing for mandatory capital punishment were passed on the same principles to add to the nearly 50 already in existence.... the Georgian version of a day in court was a quarter of an hour. Major cases all ended with acquittal, transportation or the death penalty... About one in eight of those committed for trial was sentenced to death..."

That is the choice many of the prisoners faced: taking their chances in a far-off unknown land or death. It is easy to see why most (though surprisingly not all) opted for transportation when given the choice.

It is also interesting to see how many of the individual transportees (and their military overseers) fared. Many, far too many, died. But many not only survived, they ultimately prospered, sometimes beyond their wildest dreams, perhaps none more so than Mary Haydock:

"Mary Haydock, thirteen when put aboard the transport... had been convicted of stealing a horse, but her crime seems to have been the Georgian equivalent of joy-riding. She had already been courted on Royal Admiral by a young agent of the East India Company, an Irishman, Thomas Reibey, who was making his way to India via Port Jackson. He would ultimately return and marry her... in 1794. The Reibeys became involved in farming... and in the cargo business, coming to specialise in transporting coal from the nascent colonial mines, as well as cedar, furs and skins. By 1809 the Reibey's ships were trading to the Pacific islands, China and India. Thomas Reibey's death in 1811 left canny Mary in sole control of the business and of their seven children. She acquired ships in her own name and enlarged her warehousing and shipping enterprises. In 1820 she was able to travel back to Lancashire in her own ship, the Admiral Cockburn, visiting the scene of her childhood mistake with her daughters Celia and Eliza. She did not retire from business until nearly 1830 and lived off her extensive property holdings in what was by then the city of Sydney, a city many of whose more elegant commercial sites she had herself built. She would die in her house at Newtown in 1855."

Another thing Keneally did extremely well was to show the Eora point of view of this period, both in how the Eora saw these strange pale-skinned intruders and how the British and the Eora cultures were so different that misunderstanding was not only inevitable, it was insurmountable. The worst incidents between the British settlers and the Eora resulted from both sides thinking that they were being understood clearly when in fact they were not being understood at all.

All in all, this book is a very enjoyable and very educational read. I only wish that there had been more. Highly recommended.

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The Kind of History I Love to Read

The limited scope of Kennealy's story, focusing on the first few years of the Australian experiment, allows for a really nice degree of detail in his telling about those years. The narrative style he uses makes this a very enjoyable history as well as a thorough one.

Not knowing much about aboriginal life and culture before the colonial period, I appreciated the information the author unobtrusively presented about the belief systems and values of the native people and how they shaped early interactions with the Europeans.

At the same time, Kennealy's detailed research makes clear that the mindset of the British at the time was nearly as foreign to our modern ways of thinking as any native culture could be, at least as relates to crime and punishment. Burned at the stake for forgery? Death sentences for prostitution or for stealing a few items of clothing? Hard to believe those were the 'civilized' values of the day.

The years of hardship faced by both the transported convicts and their government-appointed keepers are brought to life in this gripping history. I highly recommend it.

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In this spirited history of the remarkable first four years of the convict settlement of Australia, Thomas Keneally offers us a human view of a fascinating piece of history.

Combining the authority of a renowned historian with a brilliant narrative flair, Keneally gives us an inside view of this unprecedented experiment from the perspective of the new colony?s governor, Arthur Phillips. Using personal journals and documents, Keneally re-creates the hellish overseas voyage and the challenges Phillips faced upon arrival: unruly convicts, disgruntled officers, bewildered and hostile natives, food shortages, and disease. He also offers captivating portrayals of Aborigines and of convict settlers who were determined to begin their lives anew. A Commonwealth of Thieves immerses us in the fledgling penal colony and conjures up the thrills and hardships of those first four improbable years.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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