The Fatal Shore
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G'day! Happy (belated) Australia Day! (January 26)
That's right, just like Canada Day, our antipodean Commonwealth pals call their national day something blandly innocuous. In Canada we originally had "Dominion Day", honouring the day of Confederation and the creation of the Dominion of Canada. But Dominion Day sounded old-fashioned by 1982 and a private member's bill was successful in renaming it Canada Day. Australia's day was originally Anniversary Day or Foundation Day, and it honoured the day, January 26, 1788, when the "First Fleet" of British ships, with convicts on board, entered Sydney Cove and Oz was born. But over the years some folks have pointed out that the date is, ahem, less of a celebratory one for the Aboriginal Australians, the original inhabitants of the land. Recently protesters have even taken to referring to the holiday as Invasion Day.
Australian writer Kate Grenville has written about British colonialism and its role in Australian history in her novels. She was nominated for the Booker and she won the Commonwealth Book Prize in 2006 for her novel, The Secret River (2006). In that chilling tale Grenville reached into her family’s Australian past and told the story of colonization through the experience of one convict family in New South Wales, focusing on the tragic and savage clash between British and Native Australian cultures.
Grenville’s new novel is more optimistic on colonization. In The Lieutenant (2009) she explores colonization, by fictionalizing the life of William Dawes, a soldier-scholar who sailed in 1788 with the first fleet transporting prisoners to New South Wales.
For a non-fiction view of the same story you must (must) pick up Robert Hughes revisionist history The Fatal Shore. The very outspoken Hughes knocks over many cherished myths about Australia’s early days and paints a vivid picture of the horrors of the British system of “Transportation” which populated early Australia. This may be the best book of popular history I have read.
