A commonwealth of thieves : the improbable birth of Australia /

The versatile Keneally commands a loyal readership no matter what topic he addresses. And here it's Australia's origin story of British settlement, which succeeds Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore (1986). Using the techniques of fiction, accomplished novelist Keneally strives to vivify scenes based on the historical record. From the several thousand convicts and officers who arrived in Australia in 1788-92, the period covered by the narrative, the author brings to the foreground the most interesting individuals. Prime among them, the colony's enigmatic first governor, naval officer Arthur Phillip. More exuberant characters, such as subordinate officer Watkin Tench, provide Keneally with the means to explore the adjustments of newcomers and natives to their extraordinary situations. Meanwhile, the convicts, many of whose hardships Keneally summarizes, ranged from the incorrigible to the adaptable. Vibrant and fluent, Keneally's latest will be in high demand. --Gilbert Taylor Copyright 2006 Booklist

Keneally (Schindler's List) offers a novelistic chronicle of the founding of the colony now known as Australia, focusing on the first five years, 1788 to 1793, when the initial flotillas of boats carrying convicts, their military guard and administrators arrived in New South Wales. At the book's center is the relationship between Arthur Phillip, the pragmatic first governor, and Woolawarre Bennelong, the Aborigine who eventually served as a liaison between the settlers and natives. Keneally describes their first meeting "as fateful and defining as that between Cortes and Montezuma, or Pizarro and Atahualpa." Using their relationship as a prism, Keneally depicts the instances of tense commingling between the two communities. His historical narrative is so detailed as to at times feel dutiful. He's most successful serving up some of the dozens of pithy mini-portraits of the lowborn settlers. Like Robert Hughes in his seminal The Fatal Shore, Keneally seeks to correct some of the clich?s that have arisen. He's careful to point out that the few thousand convicts sent to the colony were hardly the worst of the worst. Keneally's new consideration won't replace Hughes's definitive work, but with its colorful and eloquent prose, it makes for a compelling companion piece, one that credits Phillip for most of the colony's success. Maps. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booker Prize winner Keneally (Schindler's List) seeks to illuminate the human side of England's colonization of Australia. In the 18th century, the English penal system was severely overcrowded, and transport became the preferred alternative; when the 13 American Colonies revolted against their British rulers in 1775, convicts were transplanted to Australia. Colonial administrator Arthur Phillips is portrayed as a heroic bureaucrat who pursued the belief that criminals could be rehabilitated, an opinion Keneally credits as a founding principle of the nation. Bypassing the pre-European era, though spending appropriate time documenting the culture clash with the Eora, the aboriginal occupants of the Sydney region where the European colonists arrived, Keneally follows individuals from their beginnings as petty criminals to their new lives in the wild land. At times reading like the work of a diarist, this is a more compelling story than the bare facts customarily offer. Shorter than Robert Hughes's The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding or Frank Welsh's Australia: A New History of the Great Southern Land, Keneally's book has more texture and less scholarly vigor and thoroughness, though the story he so lovingly details is more entertaining. Recommended for public and academic collections.-Robert Moore, Bristol-Myers Squibb Medical Imaging, MA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A celebrated novelist (Schindler's List, 1982, etc.) and historian (American Scoundrel, 2002, etc.) writes the early history of the English settlers--the convicts and their keepers--of his native Australia. Keneally begins with a striking image from 1788: Eleven ships, crammed with criminals, tossing on the Pacific between Antarctica and the continent that will come to be known as Australia. The author tells the stories of those ships and passengers and offers illustrative and often illuminating commentary on subjects including the practice of transporting lawbreakers, life aboard an 18th-century ship, the flora and fauna of New South Wales and the culture of the aboriginal people who would see their way of life--thousands of years old--forever altered by disease and displacement and despair. Keneally excels in his descriptions of affairs on both sides of the world and in his mastery of both minor details and major concepts. He tells us, for example, that the aborigines could not say the letter s and that they practiced the ritual removal of an incisor from the jaws of young men coming of age; he also takes us through the political, sociological and economic forces in England that led authorities there to export their petty criminals. In many ways, this is the story of Arthur Phillip, a sturdy, judicious man who led the First Fleet and who remained in Australia through its very difficult and dangerous first years. (The Second and Third Fleets would arrive during his tenure.) Keneally ends his story with Phillip's departure and then in an epilogue lets us know the fates of most of the principal players. Among the more notable of these were William and Mary Bryant and their two children. Keneally distributes across several chapters the story of their remarkable open-boat escape from Australia to Timor (3,254 nautical miles). Only Mary survived the final leg of the journey to England, where James Bosworth, intrigued by her tale, gave her money and hope. Thoroughly researched, artfully written, engaging and instructive. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.