From England, Ireland and Scotland to Sydney, the epic history of the founding of Australia. In 1787, the 28th year of the reign of King George 111, the British Government sent a fleet to colonize Australia. Never had a colony been founded so far from its parent state, or in such ignorance of the land it occupied. For thousands of years an enigmatic continent had been locked in its historical immensity of blue heat, bush, sandstone and the measured booming of glassy Pacific rollers. This coast was to witness an invasion, in the form of a new colonial experiment, never tried before, and not repeated since. An unexplored continent would become a jail. The space around it, the very sea and air, the whole transparent labyrinth of the South Pacific, would become a wall 4,000 miles thick. In Australia, England drew the sketch for the 20th century’s vaster and more terrible fresco of repression, the Gulag.