Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
Imagine Plymouth Plantation if you replaced those strait-laced, pious Puritans with embittered, licentious thieves and prostitutes.
Thomas Keneally's excellent new book, A Commonwealth of Thieves, presents the story of how the British government, faced with a swelling prison population, decided to remedy the problem by dispatching convicts to a settlement at the end of the known world: Australia, or New South Wales as it was then called. The first ships landed near Botany Bay in 1788.
Two decades ago, Robert Hughes published his memorable, sprawling The Fatal Shore about the founding of Australia from 1788 to 1868. Commonwealth does not attempt to displace The Fatal Shore as the definitive history, but it is an impressive addition to what the outside world knows of Australia.
Keneally, an Australian, focuses on the first years of the settlement: the naval officers who ran it, the convicts who populated it and the Aboriginal people whom the two groups encountered. Keneally presents an admiring portrait of Arthur Phillip, the serious, determined naval officer who governed the penal colony.
Keneally, author of the novels The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and Schindler's List, excels at conveying the despair and isolation these English and Irish convicts felt at being exiled from their families and homes, no matter how squalid and miserable they might have been. To the convicts, 18th-century Australia was the equivalent of our being sent to a forbidding, unknown planet like Mars.
Keneally weaves together individual stories: the convicts' names, their backgrounds, their crimes -- usually petty theft -- and the way a new society emerged that would give them and, more often, their children, a chance in life.
Keneally is particularly good at presenting the convict women as three-dimensional humans. Our wimpled Puritan matrons seem downright cosseted in contrast to these tough street survivors.
The author also conveys the world of the Aborigines before the arrival of the ships and the convicts. Epidemics would decimate the Aborigines, and their way of life would be destroyed by the newcomers.
Keneally uses his skill as a novelist to put a human face on his country's history. It's very moving.
A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth
of Australia
By Thomas Keneally
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday
385 pp., $26.95
To see more of USAToday.com, or to subscribe, go to http://www.usatoday.com
© Copyright 2006 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
