A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia

A Commonwealth of Thieves was the story of the first settlement of Australia, a British penal colony. Thomas Keneally makes the novel historically accurate, and A Common Wealth of Thieves gives us a frontline view of the suffering founding colonists faced.

One thing that surprised me about the novel were the risks that were taken. The soldiers on the first voyage were willing to leave everyone they knew behind and travel to an uncharted land with hundreds of criminals. The soldiers incentives were good pay and promotion, miniscule in comparison to all the bad that occurred. Even more surprising to me was the risk the British government was willing to take. They outfitted 11 ships and sent good naval officers on the First Fleet to Australia. They spent numerous amounts of dollars on these ships to send them to a place that nobody knew anything about and told them to form a colony in a foreign land. Many British expected never to hear from the fist fleet ever again, yet many were willing to supply massive amounts of funding for these voyages.

I also was surprised at how easy it was for a criminal to become a convict. Petty crimes could send you to Australia. One man stole a handkerchief worth one shilling and he was sent to Australia. Bread, chickens and other common things constituted deportation to Australia as well. Because convicts were forced to Australia for such minor offenses, it is not surprising to see that the convicts were reluctant to do labor and work once they arrived. The soldiers and sailors chose to go to Australia on their own free will, so they had motivation to work hard. The convicts were being controlled and this was why they refused to work hard.

It was a little ridiculous how cruel the captains of the second fleet were. Since their fleet was a private fleet used to obtain profit, they were even more cruel to their convicts than the captains of the first fleet. On the second fleet, it was good if some convicts died because then there was leftover food that they would of had to feed the convicts with. As a matter of fact, the captains were thinking along the lines of the sooner prisoners die, the more leftover food they would have from the dead prisoners. When the second fleet arrived, the convicts were so sick that instead of providing more labor to help the colony, they were too sick to work and bogged down the colony. Even some British thought the second fleet had crossed the line with their cruel conditions, but they were never convicted of anything.

I was a little annoyed by the fact that Arthur Phillip never received criticism. He just did not seem to do anything wrong. Also, the novel did not base a lot of the story about the interactions between the British and the Natives. When the Spanish colonized the Americas, contact with natives was a major theme. However, here they just don't seem to play a major role. You can tell Keneally is an Australian when he describes how beautiful the Australian landscape is.

It is also interesting that the British Colonization of Australia was different from other colonization's because the British were not eager to explore the rest of Australia and claim the land for Great Britain. Instead Britain spent their energy on maintaining their settlement. This could perhaps be because the British were not worried about other Empires colonizing Australia. Britain had a major advantage with Australia because they explored the coastline first, complements of the explorer James Cook who found the ports and documented some of the land marks.

Overall the novel was boring at times with lots of details, but it did provided interesting information about the colonization of Australia.