Rent A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia

Synopsis

Thomas Keneally has written about Australia in THE GREAT SHAME, his history of the Irish diaspora. This time, in A COMMONWEALTH OF THIEVES, Keneally examines the earliest chapter of modern Australian history in his account of the arrival of boatloads of prisoners to New South Wales as it was called, and their struggles to survive in a stark landscape, which was peopled with an indigenous group, the Aborigines, who had been there for thousands of years and whom they could never understand. Keneally conveys a sense of the teeming London of the 1780s, explains the genesis of the plan to depopulate England's overflowing prisons by establishing offshore penal colonies, and chronicles the efforts of Arthur Phillip to govern the colony of New South Wales. Over time, the prisoners eventually became farmers and citizens who later became Australians; New South Wales merged into the Commonwealth of Australia. And the Aborigines remained Aborigines.

View descriptions at Amazon.com