Hughes News

SPOTLIGHT

For decades, art criticism has been either chalk or cheese—either the inscrutable scribbles of art-magazine solipsists or the bland and cutesy maunderings of daily-newspaper dullards. And then there is Robert Hughes. Hughes is an art critic whose prose chimes like crystal, who knows history and politics and literature, and how to mix them without flattening the souffle. He's a critic in the grand tradition of Shaw and Hazlitt, plying his trade in the pages ofTimemagazine andThe New York Review of Booksand even on TV, where his 1981 PBS series,The Shock of the New,made his nimble Aussie tongue familiar to millions.

In his new book, he writes of aborigines and criminals, kangaroos and cockatoos—galah cockatoos, to be exact, which "had gray backs, white crests and fronts of the most delicate, intense dusty pink, like the center of a Bourbon rose; so that a flock of them passing against the opaline horizon would seem to change color—pink flicking to gray and back to pink again—as it changed direction, uttering small grating cries like the creak of rusty hinges." Such prose would enliven the analysis of any painting, but Hughes's concern here isn't art, it's his motherland, Australia. His book, due out from Knopf in November, is called The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787—1868, and though the cumbersome title accurately announces a vast, scholarly tome, it doesn't hint at how wickedly entertaining Hughes's chronicle is. From his magniloquent descriptions of Georgian London—including a hilariously macabre list of euphemisms by which the British underclass referred to public hangings—to his careful, step-by-step account of a civilization's birth atop this most bewildering and foreign of landscapes, Hughes writes history the way it ought to be written—with a hardheaded command of the facts and an openhearted wonder at the shock of the new.

STEPHEN SCHIFF