The unlikely rise of Down Under

A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia
By Thomas Keneally
Doubleday, 385 pp., $26.95

Anyone who attempts a general history of Australia's founding writes in the shadow of Robert Hughes, but it's no surprise that Aussie writer Thomas Keneally would turn to the brutal rise of his country from an 18th -century penal colony and the convicts who were forced to the play the part of reluctant settlers. (The subtitle is apt -- the birth of Australia was about as improbable as it gets .) Keneally is fascinated by lives lived in extremis: the persecuted Jews of `` Schindler's List, " say, or the gritty determination of the Irish diaspora, which he chronicled in ``The Great Shame."

Wisely, Keneally has not sought to duplicate the scope of Hughes's sweeping -- and exceptional -- 1986 work on Australia's beginnings, ``The Fatal Shore." Keneally's version is smaller in scale. He covers, in novelistic detail, just the first four years of the settlement, staying close to the personalities, whether convict, officer, or the native Aborigines, whose way of life was drastically altered by the encounter with the colonial intruders. Nor does the gentle Keneally write with the bruising swagger or analytic brio of Hughes. Still, ``A Commonwealth of Thieves" is a nicely readable, anecdote -packed account of a tragic colonial experiment.

Australia's roots lie in the fetid prisons of Georgian London, and the draconian laws on the books that made life hell even for petty thieves. Stealing a loaf of bread was a serious offense, and prisons were filled . Excess convicts had to endure ``transportation ," a euphemism at once banal and sinister: It meant being crammed into a ship and sent to the American Colonies, which were no longer an option after the Revolution. Africa was briefly mooted as a replacement, but after deliberation, the British settled in 1786 on New South Wales, ``the preposterously distant coast" that Captain James Cook had surveyed a decade earlier.

There was only one problem: Nobody knew anything much about this strange land half a world away. The British, Keneally says, might well have been sending their prisoners to another planet. There was little tenderness for criminals in the 18th century; prisoners had no rights and had to contend with a penal regime that strikes modern sensibilities as outrageously merciless. (Hughes memorably wrote that the ``intellectual patrons of Australia, in its first colonial years, were Hobbes and Sade .") In many cases, the punishment did not fit the crime.

For all that, Keneally writes with a remarkable degree of sympathy about Arthur Phillip, a 49 -year- old Royal Navy officer charged with transporting the first group of prisoners in 1788 and keeping them in order once they settled.

Phillip was a somewhat inscrutable man . Keneally writes that ``it is hard to find the quivering human within" -- but he possessed the right stuff to guide some 759 convicts (191 of whom were women), numerous crew , and 11 ships to their destination.

The voyage itself was a trying experience: Scurvy and dysentery were constant shipboard threats, and crammed quarters didn't make things easier. Keneally's narration of the voyage is suitably harrowing, but what awaited them would prove even more trying.

Once they settled in what is now Sydney, convict and guard alike were immediately confronted with an alien landscape that proved difficult to tame. Rats devoured imported lime, lemon , and fig trees. Food was in short supply. The vast, open terrain was itself a prison: ``The First Fleet convicts were in the ultimate panopticon ," Keneally writes , ``where strangeness hemmed them in, and the sky aimed its huge blank blue eye at them ." (Keneally's prose can be a touch overwrought at times .)

Yet despite such terrors, some prisoners attained a measure of freedom as farmers, superintendents, and overseers. Their labor would prove indispensable. Two successive convict flotillas would swell the colonies ' ranks, and Keneally has benefited from new research into the once-obscure biographies of the convicts themselves, livening his story with their plight. We see the founding from a kaleidoscope of perspectives that give a rather short book a sprawling quality.

Keneally also writes sensitively about the fate of the native Eora people, who were decimated by a mysterious smallpox endemic that broke out after the settlers arrived. Keneally is a reluctant moralist -- he does not write history from a soapbox -- but the fate of the Aborigines is a still-contentious arena of debate in Australia.

There were inevitable clashes between the Eora and the settlers, who disrupted the complex folkways of the Aborigines by desecrating sacred sites and taking game and fish. Phillip captured several Eora men to use as liaisons, and began a strange relationship with Woolawarre Bennelong, an eccentric tribal figure who acted as a broker between the English and his people. Theirs was an odd partnership, if it can be called that. They fell out and came back together, with Bennelong going back to London with Phillip in 1792.

``A Commonwealth of Thieves" offers a very close-grained look at an exceptional moment in modern history, though you sometimes wish Keneally would pull back and provide more analysis. The stories of Phillip, Bennelong, and the battered convicts are fascinating, but we sometimes grope for meaning. Keneally wants the interactions to speak for themselves, but his generalizations are more than reasonable: ``Authority and equality were the two trees which Phillip planted in Sydney Cove," he concludes, ``and perhaps too the tree of grudging cooperative endeavour, into which the convicts were forced by circumstance."

Matthew Price is a regular contributor to the Globe.