The Fatal Shore

The Fatal Shore reveals the full extent of Australia's role as the concentration camp of Georgian England, and in doing so has set new standards in the writing of narrative history

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The Fatal Shore

An award-winning epic on the birth of Australia In 1787, the twenty-eighth year of the reign of King George III, the British Government sent a fleet to colonise Australia. Documenting 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 definitive, masterfully written narrative that has given its true history to Australia. 'A unique phantasmagoria of crime and punishment, which combines the shadowy terrors of Goya with the tumescent life of Dickens' Times

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Freedom on the Fatal Shore

Freedom on the Fatal Shore brings together John Hirst's two books on the early history of New South Wales. Both are classic accounts which have had a profound effect on the understanding of our history. They also have long been unavailable, either new or second-hand. This combined edition includes a new foreword by Hirst. These are works that bring to vivid life the early days of convict Australia. They change our sense of how a colony that was also intended to be a prison actually worked, and how Australian democracy came into being, despite the opposition of the most powerful. Hirst overturns the standard picture, arguing: "This was not a society that had to become free; its freedoms were well established from the earliest times." "Colonial Australia was a more 'normal' place than one might imagine from the folkloric picture of society governed by the lash and the triangle, composed of groaning white slaves tyrannised by ruthless masters. The book that best conveys this and has rightly become a landmark in recent studies of the System is J. B. Hirst's Convict Society and its Enemies." - Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore "Anyone with an interest in Australian political culture will find The Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy invaluable." - Professor Colin Hughes, former Chief Electoral Commissioner for the Commonwealth.

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Uncorrected Proof

How Australia was born out of the suffering and brutality of England's infamous convict transportation system - the epic story of a jail that became a flourishing nation, from the landing of the first fleet in 1788 to the last, 80 turbulent years later.

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Gallipoli

It was an adventure to die for. A daring attempt to force the Dardanelles and capture the Turkish capital Constantinople. For the Allies it was the Trojan War and crusade combined. The Gallipoli Campaing was to become one of the most savagely contested of the First World War.On 25 April 1915, Allied troops stormed the cliffs of Gallipoli. Twenty-eight thousand Australians were killed and wounded in the bloody, eight-month campaign. The raging battles of the Landing, the desperate assault on Lone Pine, the gallant but futile charge at the Nek, are all engraved on the national psyche. Gallipoli is now regarded as a defining episode in Australian history. It is an extraordinary story of determination and courage, as the intrepid and resourceful Anzacs displayed the spirit that was to distinguish them on the Western Front as the Empire's most formidable offensive troops.This book by Harvey Broadbent, a leading authority on the campaign and producer of the acclaimed ABC documentary Gallipoli: The Fatal Shore, seeks to convey the story of Gallipoli to Australians of all ages. It features a foreword by General Peter Cosgrove, Chief of the Australian Defence Force.

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The Fatal Shore

In this bestselling account of the colonization of Australia, Robert Hughes explores how the convict transportation system created the country we know today. Digging deep into the dark history of England's infamous efforts to move 160,000 men and women thousands of miles to the other side of the world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Hughes has crafted a groundbreaking, definitive account of the settling of Australia. Tracing the European presence in Australia from early explorations through the rise and fall of the penal colonies, and featuring 16 pages of illustrations and 3 maps, The Fatal Shore brings to life the incredible true history of a country we thought we knew.

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Females on the Fatal Shore

These are true stories of 12 brave women who sailed to the colonies in Australia's founding years. These tales of women triumphing over adversity document the early decades of a nation and are told with great panache by Susanna de Vries who has inherited the Irish gift for storytelling. Letters and portraits help bring these women to life and describe the dangers and deprivations of pioneering. Every Australian should know these women's stories and be proud of them.

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The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes

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Mrs Fraser on the Fatal Shore

In 1836,the barque Stirling Castle was wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef and the crew and the captain's wife, Mrs Fraser, were cast ashore on the coast of what is now Queensland.Captured by aborigines with cannibalistic tendencies, Captain Fraser and his wife were stripped naked and driven into the bush. Fraser was then murdered and his wife, a lady of genteel upbringing, was tortured and made to perform humiliating tasks as the slave of the tribe. Having given birth in an open boat, her baby was immediately drowned and she was forced instead to mother an aboriginal child 'one of the most deformed and ugly looking brats my eyes ever beheld'.A remarkable rescue by an Irish convict, posing as a 'ghost' of a dead warrior, saved Mrs Fraser whose subsequent misadventures in England provide an intriguing finale to this extraordinary story.

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Saltwater People of the Fatal Shore

Saltwater People of the Fatal Shore was awarded the 2013 Biennial Frank Broeze Maritime History Book Prize sponsored jointly by the Australian Association for Maritime History (AAMH) and the Australian National Maritime Museum (ANMM). Saltwater People of the Fatal Shore - Sydney's Southern Beaches is a detailed history of that beautiful stretch of Sydney's coastline between South Head and Royal National Park. This coastline features world renown beaches such as Bondi, Maroubra and Cronulla, as well as places of great historical interest. Botany Bay was where James Cook first made landfall on the east coast of Australia and made claim to the continent. It was also were the First Fleet arrived with its human cargo. Before these events it was home to the Aboriginal people of the Eora, Dharug and Dharawal nations for tens of thousands of years. The focus of Saltwater People of the Fatal Shore is on the shoreline... that high energy intersection between sea and land where waves, whipped-up by wind and storms, sometimes thousands of kilometers out to sea, announce their arrival in a final dramatic explosion... or caress it with a gentle cascade. This constant, hypnotic dance with the shore can be calming, and it can be confronting. When the swell appears excitement grows and the coastline becomes energized. The surfzone both attracts and influences us... and in turn our presence affects this playground on the edge of the vast Pacific. The foreword for the book was written by the Hon. Linda Burney MP. Upon her election she became the first Aboriginal person to serve in the New South Wales Parliament. Burney, a Wiradjuri woman, is currently Deputy Leader of the Opposition, and is the shadow minister in several key portfolios. The Saltwater People books have been shortlisted for the 2013 biennial Frank Broeze History Prize through the Australian National Maritime Museum. In 2012 Cyclops Press was recognized with a Pauline McLeod Reconciliation Award for its work promoting meaningful reconciliation.

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Gallipoli

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Culture of Complaint

In this witty and belligerent polemic Robert Hughes inspects and dismantles the core elements of the contemporary American ethos. To the left, he skewers political correctness, Afro-centrism and academic obsession with theory. To the right, he fires broadsides at free-market capitalist demagogy. Hughes is superbly scathing about politically correct shibboleths which are idle gestures rather than real solutions to the problems of racism and sexism; he identifies the confusion between thinking and feeling which bedevils much debate and which leads people to equate intellectual disagreement with personal attack; he uses his own experiences as an art critic and historian to launch a blistering attack on many of the trends in contemporary art. Hughes identifies a hollowness at the cultural core of America and, in this lucid and invigorating diagnosis of a great nation at odds with itself, he has written a masterpiece of robust polemic.

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The Fatal Shore

In describing Australia's transition from prison camp to open society, the author draws on documents, private and official, never before consulted. This in-depth account of how 160,000 men, women and children, some innocent, some not, were shipped off the face of the known world to suffer, to die, to succeed and to go on to found a new nation.

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The Spectacle of Skill

“I am completely an elitist, in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it’s an expert gardener at work, or a good carpenter chopping dovetails . . . I don’t think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be with as wise and fully literate ones. I would rather watch a great tennis player than a mediocre one . . . Consequently, most of the human race doesn’t matter much to me, outside the normal and necessary frame of courtesy and the obligation to respect human rights. I see no reason to squirm around apologizing for this. I am, after all, a cultural critic, and my main job is to distinguish the good from the second-rate.” Robert Hughes wrote with brutal honesty about art, architecture, culture, religion, and himself. He translated his passions—of which there were many, both positive and negative—brilliantly, convincingly, and with vitality and immediacy, always holding himself to the same rigorous standards of skill, authenticity, and significance that he did his subjects. There never was, and never will be again, a voice like this. In this volume, that voice rings clear through a gathering of some of his most unforgettable writings, culled from nine of his most widely read and important books. This selection shows his enormous range and gives us a uniquely cohesive view of both the critic and the man. Most revealing, and most thrilling for Hughes’s legions of fans, are the never-before-published pages from his unfinished second volume of memoirs. These last writings show Robert Hughes at the height of his powers and can be read only with pleasure and a tinge of sadness that his extraordinary voice is no longer here to educate us as well as to clarify and define our world.

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Australia

Companion website to the television program written and hosted by author and art critic Robert Hughes. The series is a six-part exploration of the land, people, history, and national character of Australia.

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Our Exiles to the Fatal Shore

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Review of Mrs Fraser on the Fatal Shore

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Mrs Fraser on the Fatal Shore

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Bull s Eye

In this book, we have hand-picked the most sophisticated, unanticipated, absorbing (if not at times crackpot!), original and musing book reviews of "The Fatal Shore." Don't say we didn't warn you: these reviews are known to shock with their unconventionality or intimacy. Some may be startled by their biting sincerity; others may be spellbound by their unbridled flights of fantasy. Don't buy this book if: 1. You don't have nerves of steel. 2. You expect to get pregnant in the next five minutes. 3. You've heard it all.

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Our Exiles to the Fatal Shore

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