Transported

摘要

For years I had vaguely intended to read The Fatal Shore', the history of transportation of convicts to Australia, by Robert Hughes. However, I have never visited Australia and I have few personal connections there, so the wish remained in the antipodes of my mind rather as the continent did: a desirable but remote destination to be saved up for some indeterminate future time. But the book recently came up as a choice in a book club I belong to, and this coincided with two tentative conversations with colleagues about trips to Sydney and Melbourne. The moment had clearly come to set out on my literary voyage, so I ordered it. When it came, I devoured it in a single weekend, probably my lifetime record for a book of this size and density; it is 640 pages long, with an 'apparatus criticus' that includes 47 pages of endnotes containing some of the most fascinating information in the book, and a vast four-part bibliography listing the manuscripts, correspondence, memoirs and secondary sources that Hughes consulted.