A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia [Hardcover]

Thomas Keneally (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 3, 2006

It was 1786 when Arthur Phillip, an ambitious captain in the Royal Navy, was assigned the formidable task of organizing an expedition to Australia in order to establish a penal colony. The squalid and turbulent prisons of London were overflowing, and crime was on the rise. Even the hulks sifting at anchor in the Thames were packed with malcontent criminals and petty thieves. So the English government decided to undertake the unprecedented move of shipping off its convicts to a largely unexplored landmass at the other end of the world.

Using the personal journals and documents that were kept during this expedition, historian/novelist Thomas Keneally re-creates the grueling overseas voyage, a hellish, suffocating journey that claimed the lives of many convicts. Miraculously, the fleet reached the shores of what was then called New South Wales in 1788, and after much trial and error, the crew managed to set up a rudimentary yet vibrant settlement. As governor of the colony, Phillip took on the challenges of dealing with unruly convicts, disgruntled officers, a bewildered, sometimes hostile native population, as well as such serious matters as food shortages and disease. Moving beyond Phillip, Keneally offers captivating portrayals of Aborigines, who both aided and opposed Phillip, and of the settlers, including convicts who were determined to overcome their pasts and begin anew.

With the authority of a renowned historian and the narrative grace of a brilliant novelist, Thomas Keneally offers an insider’s perspective into the dramatic saga of the birth of a vibrant society in an unfamiliar land. A Commonwealth of Thieves immerses us in the fledgling penal colony and conjures up colorful scenes of the joy and heartbreak, the thrills and hardships that characterized those first four improbable years. The result is a lively and engrossing work of history, as well as a tale of redemption for the thousands of convicts who started new lives thousands of miles from their homes.

Editorial 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 settlers and natives. Keneally describes their first meeting "as fateful and defining as that between Cortés and Montezuma, or Pizarro and Atahualpa." Using their relationship as a prism, Keneally depicts the instances of tense commingling between the two communities. His historical narrative is so detailed as to at times feel dutiful. He's most successful serving up some of the dozens of pithy mini-portraits of the lowborn settlers. Like Robert Hughes in his seminal The Fatal Shore, Keneally seeks to correct some of the clichés that have arisen. He's careful to point out that the few thousand convicts sent to the colony were hardly the worst of the worst. Keneally's new consideration won't replace Hughes's definitive work, but with its colorful and eloquent prose, it makes for a compelling companion piece, one that credits Phillip for most of the colony's success. Maps. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

The versatile Keneally commands a loyal readership no matter what topic he addresses. And here it's Australia's origin story of British settlement, which succeeds Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore (1986). Using the techniques of fiction, accomplished novelist Keneally strives to vivify scenes based on the historical record. From the several thousand convicts and officers who arrived in Australia in 1788-92, the period covered by the narrative, the author brings to the foreground the most interesting individuals. Prime among them, the colony's enigmatic first governor, naval officer Arthur Phillip. More exuberant characters, such as subordinate officer Watkin Tench, provide Keneally with the means to explore the adjustments of newcomers and natives to their extraordinary situations. Meanwhile, the convicts, many of whose hardships Keneally summarizes, ranged from the incorrigible to the adaptable. Vibrant and fluent, Keneally's latest will be in high demand. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Nan A. Talese; First Edition. 1 in number line edition (October 3, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 038551459X
• ISBN-13: 978-0385514590
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.4 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #886,895 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A "European experiment", November 4, 2006

By 

Stephen A. Haines (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia (Hardcover)

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]

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Balanced And Expertly Researched, March 23, 2007

By 

Dave_42 "Dave_42" (Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia (Hardcover)

"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.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A practical solution, a social experiment, and a trip to the end of the world, November 9, 2006

By 

Sean Freeley "Boston Sean" (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia (Hardcover)

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.