History: Arthur Phillip, the complex, ambitious and secretive man who was the first governor of the convict settlement of Botany Bay, died on September 7th, 1814. He became, Thomas Keneally tells us on the last page of his epic account of the first Australian colony, "a dissatisfied ghost".
Indeed, Phillip's restless spectre moves uneasily over not just Keneally's latest venture, but over other attempts to give dramatic shape to the founding of Australia.
In some ways, this is a book which was waiting to be written by Keneally, the third part of a sequence that began with his Booker-prize winning Schindler's Ark (1982). The Great Shame (1998), which covers the Irish famine and the exodus which followed it, was written in conscious succession to Keneally's account of the Jewish holocaust. For its readers and those who saw Stephen Spielberg's movie of the novel, Schindler's List, Keneally gave a bearably human face to an historical horror story. The Great Shame was an answer to those who asked why he had not given an account of his own antecedents as an Australian of Irish extraction and why his ancestors had left the country of their birth for so distant a land. Now, with Commonwealth of Thieves, we have a new, weighty volume which addresses the story more particularly from the Australian shore. Like the other two books, indeed like the 26 novels and 14 works of non-fiction to his credit (not to mention the plays, children's books, and screenplay), it is well worth reading. Tom Keneally can tell a fine tale.
Nevertheless, like the character of Arthur Phillip, the story of Botany Bay is an intractable one. Australians look to the events of the first European settlement for the drama, moral lessons and clues to the character of their nation that are traditionally demanded of founding narratives. Keneally resists all that. The Commonwealth of Thieves is populated not with heroes or even characters with whom it is easy to identify. Instead the book provides an account of hundreds of fragments of disrupted and interrupted lives. It is the ordinary, domestic tragedy of transportation that is evoked so well by Keneally, along with its physical discomfort and the way that love and lust succeed in overcoming the reality of confinement, banishment and disadvantage.
We do get to know some individuals better than others. Arthur Phillip is one of these, though I felt that Keneally was less successful in sketching his pedantic decency than Inga Clendinnen, whose Dances with Strangers provides a very different reading of the same material. The handsome and likeable couple, Henry Kable and his sweetheart, are two whose lives are enhanced by their sentence of banishment. Henry Kable was 16 years old when he was sentenced to death for burglary together with his father and an accomplice. He saw both of them hanged but was pardoned on the scaffold and his sentence commuted to transportation. While in prison, Henry formed what was to prove a life-long attachment to another burglar, Susannah Holmes. When they were separated from their baby son (Henry jnr) and sentenced to transportation to the new colony, the British public took up their cause. A benefactor donated £20 worth of clothes to the young family and, what was more amazing, when the bequest was appropriated by an officer on the voyage over, a magistrate ordered that the loss be made good. Henry told friends back home that he "never worked one day" once he came to the colony. By the final chapter we know that Susannah and Henry's children were numerous, literate and able, and that their army of descendants are prominent in Australian society. For every Henry and Susannah, there were many more for whom the sentence of transportation was fatal. Only a tiny number of the transported were ever able to return, but there were some.
Phillip himself took two men of the Eora people, Bennelong and Yemerrawanne, back to London when he left the colony and had them presented at court as exotic representatives of the people subjugated by George III. Bennelong eventually returned after three chilly years cooling his heels in England but Yemmerrawanne died of pneumonia in Essex.
It is in his account of the indigenous observers and participants of the Commonwealth of Thieves that Keneally's story-book account of the colony feels inadequate. While it is part of the charm of his style that scholarly debate and annotations are not allowed to intrude, there are some questions which really need pursuing with more intellectual vigour. Ending the story with the departure and death of Phillip has the convenience of avoiding the next, more violent phase of European occupation in Australia. On his visit to Dublin just a couple of weeks ago, the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, vigorously denied that European settlement in Australia constituted an occupation of the country, or that the descendants of Henry and Susannah, described in such endearing detail by Keneally, had any obligation to offer an apology or reparation to the descendants of Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne. Maybe not. But it would have been interesting to hear what the master storyteller had to say about these burning contemporary issues.
Hilary M Carey is Keith Cameron Professor of Australian History at University College Dublin. She is currently writing a history of religious immigration to Australia
The Commonwealth of Thieves: The Story of the Founding of Australia By Thomas Keneally. Chatto & Windus, 509pp. £20