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The Art is in the History: A review of Our Country’s Good Aboriginal Australians look at their lives as the re-enactment of the journeys and quests taken by ancestor heroes in the Tjukurapa, the Dreamtime, the time before which the earth did not exist. And yet it took less than 75 years of colonization to wipe out most of the people who had occupied the Australian continent for over 40,000 years. The hardships faced by their ancestors could not have prepared them for the boatloads of disease and destruction that landed at Botany Bay in 1788. In the twenty-eighth year of the reign of King George III (1787), the British Government sent a fleet to colonize Australia. Eleven ships, carrying supplies and almost 1,500 officers, seamen, marines, and convicts, traveled for eight months before reaching New South Wales. Few of the convicts on board were dangerous criminals. Contrary to popular belief, of the 736 convicts shipped out in 1787, not one was convicted of murder or rape, although more than a hundred had been convicted of thefts in which violence or threat had played some part. Also no woman on the First Fleet had been transported for prostitution, as it was not a transportable offense in this day. Over half the women were domestic servants by trade. The vast majority had been convicted of a minor theft. The penalties were severe - generally death by public hanging. Most of the First Fleet convicts had been found guilty of stealing, been sentenced to hang, and then had their sentence commuted to seven years transportation, with the understanding that this was essentially exile for life. Our Country’s Good, by Timberlake Wertenbaker, is based on the novel The Playmaker by Thomas Keneally (also the author of Schindler's List), which uses as it’s source the letters and journals of Ralph Clark, Watkin Tench, David Collins, and other First Fleet officers.
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