John Clay
Prisoners of Oz
The Commonwealth of Thieves: The Story of the Founding of Australia
By Thomas Keneally
Chatto & Windus 509pp £20 order from our bookshop
Bound for Botany Bay: British Convict Voyages to Australia
By Alan Brooke and David Brandon
The National Archives 272pp £19.99 order from our bookshop
The Fever of Discovery: The Story of Matthew Flinders
By Marion Body
New European Publications 250pp £15 order from our bookshop
The First Fleet’s arrival in Australia with 750 convicts, men, women and children, has been related many times, notably by Robert Hughes in The Fatal Shore and more recently by Inga Clendinnen in Dancing with Strangers. Thomas Keneally has now given us his version.
The book starts with a grand and sweeping opening sentence:
If, in the new year of 1788, the eye of God had strayed from the main games of Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa, and idled over the huge vacancy of sea to the south-east of Africa, it would have been surprised in this empty zone to see not one, but all of eleven ships being driven east on the screaming band of westerlies.
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