Robert Hughes - The Fatal Shore (1986)

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Would Australians have done anything differently if their country had not been settled as the jail of infinite space? Certainly they would. They would have remembered more of their own history.

Robert Hughes

What the convict system bequeathed to later Australian generations was not the sturdy, skeptical independence…but an intense concern with social and political respectability. The idea of the 'convict stain', a moral blot soaked into our fabric, dominated all argument about Australian selfhood by the 1840s.

Robert Hughes

Transportation made sublimation literal. It conveyed evil to another world.

Robert Hughes