A MERCILESS PLACE
The lost story of Britain's convict disaster in Africa and how it led to the settlement of Australia
Emma Christopher
Allen & Unwin, $39.99, pbk
UNESCO added a cluster of Tasmanian convict settlements to its World Heritage list late last month, causing the dismay of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre for listing "white Australian" sites while "Aboriginal history is being neglected and destroyed".
They have a point; it must be galling to have possibly 40,000 years of habitation dismissed as not being "history".
History has always been about those with power being awful to all the rest, and there is plenty of history in this book.
Emma Christopher chronicles the African interlude in the British convict-transportation industry.
This was the chief colonial gripe that had sparked the American Revolution, which in turn made North America unavailable for the purpose of convict settlement.
The idea to use existing slavery infrastructure on the African coast for convicts turned into an absurd notion that the convicts should become the slave ports' soldiery: a concept that doesn't escape a moment's scrutiny.
The slave-traders and military pleaded with the Government to abandon the idea; all involved were vindicated by the scheme's abject failure in every measure.
The conditions on the west African slave coast were so inhumane, even for the military, that exile there was simply worse than a death sentence.
The African experiment ended when the will to persist collapsed on all sides.
Slavery was lucrative enough to compensate for the coast's discomforts, but the job of keeping convict soldiers in check in that environment was so undesirable, it fell to the most despicable military captains.
The saga ends in the relative Elysium of Sydney Cove, where convicts founded a new colony only a few years after Captain Cook's visit.
Pre-revolution America and then Australia absorbed the vast bulk of England's transported convicts, and became two of the world's most prosperous economies.
Sydney, and later Tasmania, would have been no picnic, but the English were at last able to feel that they, and their silk pocket handkerchiefs, were safe from the convicts and able to congratulate themselves on the improved environmental conditions for the transportees.
The book's detail of the slave industry, Old Bailey criminal justice and transportation becomes a denunciation of all that it is to be British.
Christopher is a great storyteller: her researched history is as gripping as the researched fiction of James Clavell's Asian saga or Neal Stephenson's many airport novels.
The reader will be transported.
Peter Dowden is a Dunedin reviewer.
