Hughes's Australian childhood, when Australians desiring respectability denied that the convict system had in any ultimate way marked the complicated nation Australia eventually became. There was a time, partly encompassing Mr. Their crimes were written on their faces, Adam and Eve arrived involuntarily and in chains. In the Australian case, however, the choice of landfall had been made by the Home Secretary of Britain. They were redeemed by their arrivalĪnd their tread sanctified the earth. The largest difference between both nations, as conveyed by Robert Hughes in ''The Fatal Shore,'' an authoritative and engrossing record, is that in America the European Adam and Eve arrived by choice. The Australians themselves know that the kinship and theĭifference are more subtle than that, but generally keep their counsel. IT is common for Americans to say of Australians - if they say anything about them at all -that they are people of a frontier experience similar to their own and therefore, at the least, cousins. Lead: LEAD: THE FATAL SHORE By Robert Hughes. Section 7, Column 2 Book Review Deskīy Thomas Keneally: Thomas Keneally is an Australian whose novels include ''A Family Madness'' and ''The Playmaker,'' which will be published in the fall. January 25, 1987, Sunday, Late City Final Edition
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