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A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia

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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.

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 early history of the Botany Bay settlement. My sole complaint is that it essentially ends in 1793 with the return of Captain Phillip, the colony's first governor, to Britain, the colony having after much difficulty and doubt finally become a viable settlement. Keneally's style is so engaging and the events so intriguing that it leaves you wanting more, beyond the epilogue in which he relates what became of some of the key individuals (and their descendants) who survived the difficult times of the early years.

But while Keneally's history is limited in its breadth, it compensates for that in its depth. His thorough research brings to life the conditions of Britain's legal and penal system that led to the idea of the Botany Bay project, the difficulties that the transportees faced in the ships where so many died before even setting foot in the utterly alien land they were sent to, the hardships faced in the early years where the colony was repeatedly faced with the prospect of starvation, and of particular interest, the difficulties between the British intruders and the native Eora (the aborigines).

I learned quite a few things from this book, one of which was how it was the American Revolution that indirectly led to the Botany Bay experiment. Prior to the Revolution, Britain had for decades used its American colonies as a method of reducing its prison population by transportation, and when the Revolution put an end to that outlet, it became necessary to find another. The dates tell it all: the American Revolution ended in 1783, and the first convict fleet departed for Australia in 1787.

Keneally goes into great detail showing how the harshness of both the British legal system (any crime involving property of over 40 shillings - about US$250 today - carried a mandatory death penalty) and the severe over-crowding of the prison system (in one documented case "a cell, 17 feet by 6, crowded with more than two-dozen inmates and receiving light and air only through a few holes in the door") created a need for transportation. Drawing on the historical records, he shows how most of the crimes involved were crimes of property, i.e. petty theft and such, for which the invariable penalty was transportation or death:

"The offences for which a prisoner could be transported... made up an exotic catalogue. Quakers could be tranpsorted for denying any oath to be lawful or for assembling in religious worship... Notorious thieves and takers of spoil... persons found guilty of stealing cloth from the rack... persons found quilty of larceny and other offences... persons convicted of exporting wool and not paying the excise on it... vagrants and vagabonds... persons convicted of stealing fish..."

"Besides the penalty of transportation, between 1660 and 1819, 187 statues providing for mandatory capital punishment were passed on the same principles to add to the nearly 50 already in existence.... the Georgian version of a day in court was a quarter of an hour. Major cases all ended with acquittal, transportation or the death penalty... About one in eight of those committed for trial was sentenced to death..."

That is the choice many of the prisoners faced: taking their chances in a far-off unknown land or death. It is easy to see why most (though surprisingly not all) opted for transportation when given the choice.

It is also interesting to see how many of the individual transportees (and their military overseers) fared. Many, far too many, died. But many not only survived, they ultimately prospered, sometimes beyond their wildest dreams, perhaps none more so than Mary Haydock:

"Mary Haydock, thirteen when put aboard the transport... had been convicted of stealing a horse, but her crime seems to have been the Georgian equivalent of joy-riding. She had already been courted on Royal Admiral by a young agent of the East India Company, an Irishman, Thomas Reibey, who was making his way to India via Port Jackson. He would ultimately return and marry her... in 1794. The Reibeys became involved in farming... and in the cargo business, coming to specialise in transporting coal from the nascent colonial mines, as well as cedar, furs and skins. By 1809 the Reibey's ships were trading to the Pacific islands, China and India. Thomas Reibey's death in 1811 left canny Mary in sole control of the business and of their seven children. She acquired ships in her own name and enlarged her warehousing and shipping enterprises. In 1820 she was able to travel back to Lancashire in her own ship, the Admiral Cockburn, visiting the scene of her childhood mistake with her daughters Celia and Eliza. She did not retire from business until nearly 1830 and lived off her extensive property holdings in what was by then the city of Sydney, a city many of whose more elegant commercial sites she had herself built. She would die in her house at Newtown in 1855."

Another thing Keneally did extremely well was to show the Eora point of view of this period, both in how the Eora saw these strange pale-skinned intruders and how the British and the Eora cultures were so different that misunderstanding was not only inevitable, it was insurmountable. The worst incidents between the British settlers and the Eora resulted from both sides thinking that they were being understood clearly when in fact they were not being understood at all.

All in all, this book is a very enjoyable and very educational read. I only wish that there had been more. Highly recommended.

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 century, one of the consequences of the Enclosure Act, and human triumph over fantastic adversity. It is very difficult for us to even imagine the hardships these people endured, from what seemed an arbitrary legal system, the overcrowded jails and prison hulks, the voyage to the end of the world, and finally survival in a very alien land. It must have been no less difficult for the Aborigines, but their story is only peripheral to the focus of the book. There is a very good follow-up on what became of some of the first arrivals, those who not only survived but also succeeded beyond whatever they could have dreamed of in the Mother Country, becoming in time and in spite of their origins the pioneers and founders of a modern, vibrant country.

Very few countries can trace their origins back to transported convicts, and even fewer would boast about it! Australia is a different sort of place, and this extremely well-written book gives us the first few years of the convict transport system, and how the country was initially settled by English and Irish convicts. This book compares favorably with "The Fatal Shore", which I read several years ago. The style is brisk, as could be expected from an author who is famed as a novelist, and the history just moves along. Unfortunately, there isn't much input from the native point of view, but that's not a shock given the European views of them as almost sub-human. This is a wonderful portrait of a country that points with pride to its beginning, and is quite an enjoyable read for everyone.

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. The narrative style he uses makes this a very enjoyable history as well as a thorough one.

Not knowing much about aboriginal life and culture before the colonial period, I appreciated the information the author unobtrusively presented about the belief systems and values of the native people and how they shaped early interactions with the Europeans.

At the same time, Kennealy's detailed research makes clear that the mindset of the British at the time was nearly as foreign to our modern ways of thinking as any native culture could be, at least as relates to crime and punishment. Burned at the stake for forgery? Death sentences for prostitution or for stealing a few items of clothing? Hard to believe those were the 'civilized' values of the day.

The years of hardship faced by both the transported convicts and their government-appointed keepers are brought to life in this gripping history. I highly recommend it.

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. It is difficult to imagine how anybody survived those early days and the hardships they had to put up with.

Robert Hughes,'Fatal Shore' redressed? Not quite. Hughes's well-honed invective sits uneasily besides Keneally's pragmatic prose. Keneally extolls the virtuous outcome of Australia's first governor, Arthur Phillip's benevolent authority, and his establishment, against all odds of Australia's criminal society. Whereas Hughes feels troubled by these origins, Keneally, the ongoing grief of the indigenous inhabitants apart, senses triumph. The writing does not wear its research excessively, and the setting of the settlers amidst an alien environment and culture is as balanced as any recent history I have encountered. We get thumbnail portraits of a large cast of people that bring the story closer to us and a graphic sense of the hardships endured, which few present day residents around the harbour city would easily imagine. Most of the bods on the book's positive side of the ledger have their names embedded in the city, a minor intetrest to local readers. And Glebe? the name of the vegetable patch attached to a church; never knew that either!

The author of Schindler's List brings us his 37th book, a history of the four years during which white Australia was born. Thomas Keneally competes with Robert Hughes' epic history of Australia's origin that covers a span of 80 years, chronicling the white settlers as oppressive. But Keneally's fresh, novelistic history has found its own place in Australian historiography; it scrutinizes a short time period, providing a multifaceted and profound study of the historical characters that birthed Australia.

Midwife to this birth was Great Britain, who sent a captain of her royal navy, Arthur Phillip, to oversee as governor a penal-colony experiment with 759 thieves, prostitutes, and criminal children. The poorly planned experiment could have easily become a disaster, had Phillip not been both authoritative and compassionate. Ultimately, Keneally admits bewilderment as to the true nature of Phillip, the narrative's potential hero, given his "nature so complex and hidden behind official formality."

Keneally illuminates the white settlement against the backdrop of the then virtually unknown Aborigines, whose contact with the criminal settlers kept tension high. The useful historiographical theme of dichotomy between two cultures takes shape here, with Keneally's description of the Aboriginal worldview, and his admission of its impossible incongruence with the intent of the Empire to colonize and cultivate.

Keneally tactfully narrates the clashes between the two discordant populations without romanticizing either, portraying with equal emphasis the contrasting barbarity and decency both groups exhibited. For example, Phillip's would-be-hero counterpart, Woolaware Bennelong, captured as an Aboriginal translator, assisted the white settlers after his escape, to the point that he was finally disowned by his own people.

Keneally's tactful tone has its own purpose. Where Hughes' history did not hesitate to weigh in against the colonial invaders, Keneally sustains his narrative along the middle ground, allowing Australians to realize their heritage as less melodramatic, and oppressive.

With Phillip's return to England after his term, Australians were left without a founding father-figure. Keneally's history fills in that gap, with assurances from Keneally that he can make out a positive resemblance between the first governor's pragmatism and thoroughness, and that of the country today.

Armchair Interviews says: Very well-done history.