One of the more unlikely results of the American Revolution was Australia. Most American colonists came here voluntarily, of course, but until 1776 we meekly accepted boatloads of His Majesty’s convicts as indentured servants. Then, after our unexpected victory over the world’s most powerful nation (and with thousands of fresh African slaves conveniently arriving on the Atlantic Coast each year), we righteously barred our gates to those unfortunates whom Jeremy Bentham would call an “excrementitious mass.” Forced to seek a new dumping ground for what it firmly believed was an incurably criminal class, the Crown chose a new spot as far from Britain as possible—empty Australia, fourteen thousand miles away, on the other side of the world.

Robert Hughes’s big new book, The Fatal Shore, memorably chronicles the first eight decades of Australian history and in the process shows what a gifted writer can do to bring vivid life to the sort of patchy documentary evidence too many academic writers would be content merely to reproduce. Hughes is best known to Americans as the art critic of Time magazine and as the tousled host of the excellent PBS series of several seasons past, The Shock of the New. He is that rare thing, a writer about art who makes sense; his criticism is shrewd, concrete, knowledgeable, openminded but unmoved by trendiness. He has now proved himself a fine popular historian as well, worthy of comparison to his mentor and fellow-countryman, the late Alan Moorehead, to whose memory The Fatal Shore in part is dedicated.

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