Australia's first white settlers came ashore from a British prison fleet in Botany Bay in 1788. Before them lay an almost unknown land; unexplored, unexploited, and yet to be the scene of the most extraordinary social experiment then imagined - the creation of a prison camp in the South Pacific for an entire criminal class. It was, as this account of the convict transportation system argues, the sketch for the 20th century Gulag. The Fatal Shore follows convict transportation from the squalor of Georgian Britain and its obsessive fear of mob violence to the grim prison hulks - Noah's Arks of small-time criminality - that disgorged their human cargoes into the most elaborate penal system the world had ever seen. Many of those who survived the first fleets were condemned to starvation, disease and horrifying brutality, and yet within eighty years Australia became a promised land to which people have flocked ever since. In describing Australia's painful transition from prison camp to open society, Hughes draws on a wealth of documents, private and official, never before consulted. They give vivid testimony to the most complete account yet written of how 160,000 men, women and children, some innocent, some not, but all united by their helplessness and criminality, were shipped off the face of the known world to suffer, to die, to succeed and to on to found a new nation. This is history on an epic scale, told with immense energy and panache.