A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia (Paperback)
July 26, 2009 by Aussie
Filed under Outback Guide Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Keneally (Schindler’s List) offers a novelistic chronicle of the founding of the colony now known as Australia, focusing on the first five years, 1788 to 1793, when the initial flotillas of boats carrying convicts, their military guard and administrators arrived in New South Wales. At the book’s center is the relationship between Arthur Phillip, the pragmatic first governor, and Woolawarre Bennelong, the Aborigine who eventually served as a liaison between the (more…)
The founding of European Australia has suffered [and survived] a wide variety of accounts. Why should another be necessary? Chiefly, because few of those histories approach the level of human interest given that event in this book. The most famous of the other narratives, Hughes’ “The Fatal Shore”, flogged the inhumanity of the British prison system almost as sternly as colonial commanders did the felons. Keneally’s story is far more balanced, since he understands better the situation of the times. He makes no excuses for the British prison system at a time when its major colonial effort was breaking away. For him, it is the human stories he wishes to relate, and with his writing background to help, he succeeds admirably.
Keneally has touched on the early years of the Port Jackson [Sydney] convict colony before, most notably in his novel “The Playmaker”. Here, shedding fiction for fact, he describes the voyage of the First Fleet, the landing at Botany Bay and the discovery that Cook’s description was inadequate and the relocation further along the coast to the “best harbour in the world”. In doing so, he brings to life a man not often enough recognized, Arthur Phillip, commander of the Fleet and first Governor of the colony. Phillip’s initial success, bringing the crews and convicts nearly intact across vast stretches of ocean, stands in stark contrast to later transports. The Second Fleet proved a scandal of bad planning, mismanagement and inefficiency. Far worse for the potential of the colony’s success was the inadequate supply mechanisms. Instead of immediately returning to a supply port, the prison ships went to Asia for tea to return to England. The prisoners and their keepers were left to shift for themselves. Only Phillip’s firm, even-handed management of resources kept Port Jackson’s population alive – even if at mere survival levels.
Unlike the British “Pilgrims” in Massachussetts almost three centuries before, the indigenous peoples around Port Jackson did not step forward to aid the invaders. Keneally describes the various groups of the area, who had been there for millennia, as suspicious and hostile to the Europeans. The invasion had upset a finely balanced network of land occupation and resource allocation. When the Europeans fished or hunted in Aborigine lands, they upset that balance, reducing the Aborigine’s resource base. Coupled with the incursion into supplies, the Europeans brought that dreaded scourge, smallpox, into the Australian East Coast. The Aborigines had no idea what smallpox was, nor comprehended why it had been imposed on them, but they knew well its source. Their fear and resentment was well-founded and expressed. Phillip, whose mandate was to establish “friendly and amicable relations” was challenged by forces he, too, had poor knowledge of. However, he persevered, even surviving a spearing without launching a war of retribution. Keneally’s balanced approach, in which he shows Aborigines as perplexed and confused over the complexities of European life, is neither overdramatised nor “romantic” and stylised. Two groups of peoples, with little in common but their humaness, interacted in various ways. Clashes and confrontations were inevitable, but Aborigines also moved within the white world as equals. Throughout, Phillip is the key player.
As the prison colony passed through times of great deprivation and sickness, Phillip continued to strive for a self-sustaining community. Farms were attempted from the outset, but Eastern Australia’s conditions weren’t amenable to European methods. Few successful farms were established during Phillip’s tenure, but he never ceased to encourage experiment. He was often thwarted by poor soil, Sydney’s vagaries of weather and an indifferent population. Most of the prisoners were the scrubs of English cities; farming was as great a mystery to them as was Australia itself.
Farming implies permanence, another issue Phillip was forced to cope with. Many of the prisoners, “transported” for seven years to Australia, had already served time in British prisons or the infamous “hulk” ships moored in various harbours. When the time had expired, even though few had the records to prove their sentence expiries, they must be dealt with as free citizens. The number with resources available to return to the British Isles was next to nil and permanent establishments for them had to be devised. Phillip encouraged farming and struggled to arrange for “land grants” for which he had little authority. The making of urban criminals into rural pastoralists was indifferently successful at best. Yet, those people did find ways of making a living. The new settlers also entered into marriages or less formal arrangements, which Phillip turned a blind eye to in order to secure community stability. The “Currency” children, as the ensuing generation was known, established the foundation of the ongoing European Experiment which became today’s Australia. Keneally recounts all these developments with consummate skill. This book should be a “first choice” for anyone wishing to learn how a European colony might be established, even if its first citizens laboured under the stigma of “convict” as their origin. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
“A Commonwealth of Thieves – The Improbable Birth of Australia” covers the establishment of the first English settlement in New South Wales (i.e. Australia), and the stories of the convicts, free men, and military personnel who played a role. He also has some stories of the unfortunate aboriginal population who were the first to encounter the European settlers.
The book is divided into two sections. The first section covers the decision to send the convicts, the preparation for the first fleet, the voyage of the first fleet, the evaluation of where to build the colony, and the establishment of the colony by the members of the first fleet. The second section covers additional shipments of convicts to the area, the continued growth of the colony and the interactions with the native population, and concludes with the departure of the colony’s first governor, Arthur Phillip.
This is one of the balanced historical accounts on any period of history that I have ever read. Thomas Keneally does an exceptional job of relating the stories of the people and events without choosing sides. There is, of course, ample opportunity to criticize the Europeans, or to defend their actions, but Keneally stays away from that discussion, and simply relates what happened. He does offer the historical perspective of the time on the events as gathered from numerous resources. For the rest, he leaves the reader to make their own conclusions.
The research that Thomas Keneally did for this book is also superb. He draws from official historical records, as well as numerous personal journals from a fairly large number of the people involved. From these sources he builds a history which not only covers the settlement, but then blends that with biographical sketches. He provides an excellent bibliography as well.
This is an excellent book which covers the subject incredibly well. The writing is clear and concise. The only minor negative would be that the narrative can be a little dry at times. This is not a big problem though, and the book is definitely worth reading if you are interested in the early history of Australia.
In the late 1700s, it was decided that Britian was overflowing with criminals, that all the good penal colony locations were dryed up, and that the best solution was to ship offenders to an unsettled wilderness on the other side of the world. Those that survived the long and often unsanitary conditions found themselves in an untamed but beautiful wilderness with little hope of ever returning home.
This book tells the story of the tough early years of the colonies in Australia, mostly through the veiwpoint of the first governer of the colony. It tells how they barely survived, the constant struggle to feed the colony, the odd relationships with the natives, and the horrible experience of being transported, often on slave ships, through a vast and difficult sea. The writer’s love of the land and respect for the administrators, convicts, and Royal Marines who found themselves there. The colony seems to have just barely held together, one gets the sense that one waylaid supply ship would have been the end of it. It’s a good story, and well told, although a few more maps and illustrations would have made it more cohesive, it is also difficult, at times, to keep all of the players straight at times. The overall feeling is one of desperation, but also a vision of a future that evolved into the vibrant place that Australia is today.
A great book about how those fringes of an empire nonetheless end up perpetuating it.
5.0 out of 5 stars
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…
4.0 out of 5 stars
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…
4.0 out of 5 stars
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.
5.0 out of 5 stars
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…
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Not So Holy Beginning
Robert Hughes,’Fatal Shore’ redressed? Not quite. Hughes’s well-honed invective sits uneasily besides Keneally’s pragmatic prose.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Most interesting “history lesson”
The author of Schindler’s List brings us his 37th book, a history of the four years during which white Australia was born.
4.0 out of 5 stars
An Appealing Summary for Those Who Know Little About Australian History
Like a lot of myths, the founding of Australia by ‘convicts’ is altogether a misleading statement. Though the majority of people in the “First Fleet” had been consigned to…
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Amazing Adventure Story
This account of the founding of the first English penal colony in Australia is also a view into other things, not least the state of English society in the late eighteenth…
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not well done
CoT is a rather disjointed attempt at a historical narrative that I strongly suspect was culled from a dozen or so different journals from settlers.
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Commonwealth of Thieves
Take a motley assortment of thugs, thieves, pickpockets, and prostitutes guarded by a company of red-coated marines and supervised by a handful of bickering officers, set them…