IT’S NOT SURPRISING that Australia’s master yarn spinner, Tom Keneally, should turn his attention to one of the greatest European imperial adventures of the eighteenth century, the settlement of Botany Bay and the appropriation for the British crown of the great southern continent Terra Australis, today Australia. The title of the book is a misnomer — for Keneally, Sydney is Australia, in the lazy way the word England is so often used for Britain. (In fact, Australia is a federation of states, each with a different history.) That said, Sydney’s story is always spellbinding; no Patrick O’Brian novel can match it.

The Whig Lord Sydney was Home Secretary (in this connection, consider cities in Iraq named Straw, or Reid), on a May day, nearly 220 years ago, when 11 ships sailed out of Portsmouth harbour to found a new convict colony at the other end of the world.

Imprisoned in them were the flotsam and jetsam of the England of Charles Dickens — nearly 800 petty thieves, male and female. In charge of them, supported by a small band of marines, were stalwart minor functionaries of the Royal Navy, the kind of men Jane Austen chose as heroes in Persuasion and Mansfield Park. Some 160,000 convicts followed, and in time, the nation of Australia evolved with, in Keneally’s view, national characteristics derived from the experience of these felons — their idioms and accent, an ironic fatalism, a disputatious egalitarianism, a battling spirit.

The convicts to be disposed of came from prisons and hulks, “sick and clothed in rags . . . often secured by chains . . . shackled thus in lots of four, or even six . . .” Sometimes they were efficient criminals, mostly they were sent for stealing a mug, a potato or piece of fish, a strip of muslin.

Each felon on the ships was given a space 18 inches wide, and thus lined up, accompanied by stores and bibles, kittens and dogs, pigs, geese and much more, the First Fleet landed in Botany Bay eight months later, minus all those who had died during the prodigious journey.

The story of what then took place has been often told, notably in Robert Hughes’ irreplaceable, The Fatal Shore, written 20 years ago. What can Keneally add? A great deal, for he writes as though he is moving among the convicts, Aborigines and Britishers of the first years of settlement, picking up a story here, there making easy reading of the complexities of aboriginal tribes, watching the hangings and floggings, opining on the frenzied copulation, sharing the starvation and disease that marked the early days of so many desperate men and women. Using contemporary documents, he makes us feel the lash on the back of convict and soldier alike, but it is in his placement of the Aborigines as equally at the centre of the story that gives his tale much of its interest. His knowledge of British and American history is thorough and he gives the foundation of Australia its place within the framework of events in those Anglo-Saxon empires.

On the shores, as the ships came in, were the Aborigines who had lived in Australia for at least 60,000 years. What they felt as they watched the ships disgorging white bodies like ghastly blobs from a nether world, is made fatally clear in Keneally’s narrative.

Despite the fact that Aborigines from different tribes appeared immediately, every day, and on every occasion, to view — and to meet — the strange white beasts, he attributes no blame. The imperial assumption that Australia was empty is taken on board as a given of the time. Keneally allots what credit is due to a British government, which did indeed combine some idea of a redemptive social experiment with a pragmatic desire to protect the property of the British haves from the predations of its swarm of British have-nots.

That said, and that vividly described, Keneally acknowledges that, like Palestine, the white settlement of Australia was, and is still, a catastrophe for its indigenous people. More, he spares us the “we’ve-thrown-money-at-them-but-look-what-they-do-with-it” attitude so omnipresent in white Australia today, brilliantly allowing us to see for ourselves how much this contemporary Australian attitude echoes the views of the British government of two centuries ago, which, as is amply documented, described their white convict trash destined for despatch to the colony in almost identical words.

Keneally has always had a grand talent for the telling of a tale. His rattling account of the genesis of his native city is one of his very best.

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