The Fatal Shore

This history recounts the British convict transportation system to Australia from the late eighteenth century through the mid-nineteenth. Hughes describes the First Fleet, the penal settlements at Sydney, Norfolk Island, Van Diemen's Land, and Moreton Bay, and the regimes of assignment, secondary punishment, and eventual abolition. He treats the convicts' origins, the officers and governors who ran the colonies, conflict with Aboriginal peoples, and the making of a settler society from forced labour. The book is a narrative of the penal colony as a social and political system, not a biography of a single transportee.

Bound in orange/brown buckram, blocked with a black and gold design by David Eccles. Black slipcase.