So I finished this and would once more thank Bookpossum for the selection. I'm glad I read it even if I found it depressing and disturbing. At least it was about the history of treatment of Australian aborigines, not Native Americans or African slaves in America.

I also had a few problems with it, many the same as previously mentioned by others. I found the italics instead of quotes annoying, especially since there seemed to be no reason for doing it other than to be different.

I also found the portion covering life in London over long, and other writers (e.g Dickens) have done a better job of covering the economic unfairness and class structure. It was important to have some of that though to explain how the various characters in the book came to be who they were. How William Thornhill could never escape his ideas of where he stood in the class structure, even in Australia, and why he was eager to seize any opportunity to view himself as superior to someone of yet lower class.

I also thought not covering the time spent on the transport ship to Australia at all was a major omission. Nearly a year out of William and Sally Thornhill’s life and for the first time [at least for William] under confinement as a convict would have helped shaped their characters forever I would think.

I understand the concern that can arise when a book touches on a subject like this that the author may stray into an idealized “noble savage” depiction of the indigenous people, but I don't think that happened here. Perhaps because there really was little in depth presentation of the aborigines, as Bookpossum has stated only the view through the Thornhill’s and other British immigrants eyes. The truth is that by the time any Europeans would have been interested in actually trying to understand the aboriginal culture that culture would have been so altered by contact and conflict with the British that it would not have been what existed before the arrival of the Europeans.

I took away from this an examination of the spectrum of morality present among the British who came to Australia and basically stole the country from the existing inhabitants, often enough willing to engage in a policy of extermination of the aborigines as part of that. Yes the author is presenting a modern point of view of it and probably the British of the time in question had fewer moral qualms about it all. When the aborigines would have been viewed at best as simple people inferior to any white and at worst not even human. Still I liked the presentation of the spectrum of views on it all that must have existed , and from the quotes cited by Bookpossum did exist. At one end Blackwood who recognizes the aborigines as people and the rightful owners of the land and who attempts to accommodate that; “Matter of give a little, take a little.” At the opposite end is someone like Smasher who has no doubts or qualms. Then there is William Thornhill who knows that the land he claims really belongs to the aborigines that had been living there, who knows that killing them is wrong, suppresses that knowledge when needed for his own self-interest, and later feels guilt over it. The question is which of the latter two is the higher morality? To do evil without any moral misgiving or to do evil knowing it is wrong and then feel guilty about it later?