Volume 34, Number 4 · March 12, 1987
House of the Dead
By David Malouf
The Fatal Shore
by Robert Hughes
Knopf, 688 pp., $24.95
The most enduring fact about Australian settlement appears at the end of a chapter of The Fatal Shore, in a phrase that deserves to be quoted at once. It concerns the land. At first deeply alien, itself a confining factor, part of a nature that was 'destined to punish,' the land, Robert Hughes says in writing of the bushrangers, was 're-named with the sign of freedom. On its blankness the absconder could inscribe what could not be read in spaces already colonized and subject to the laws and penal imagery of England.'
Review, 4796 words
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