Luke Slattery has lofty ambitions for this novel – his first, though he’s written other books. In the Author’s Note at the back of the book, he writes that he wants Australians to be proud of their convict beginnings rather than embarrassed, and he wants to subvert the notion of colonial Australia as a ‘gulag’, a perception, he says, that arose from the popularity of Robert Hughes The Fatal Shore (1986).
Slattery says that Hughes’ vision of early colonial Australia is flawed:

It is certainly at odds with the reality of the earliest years, when convicts were told after the first muster at Sydney Cove that they could find their own lodgings and fare for themselves as long as they turned up for work at the appointed hour. Afterwards they were permitted to work for piece rates, or goods in kind. Only the worst – and particularly repeat offenders – manned the iron gangs. The sites of secondary punishment, such as Port Arthur and Moreton Island, might have been a truer reflection of the book’s title. But Sydney Cove, for the vast majority of convicts who landed there – 160,000 in all – offered a path out of poverty, pollution, oppression and the bleakness of a European winter. It wasn’t so much a benighted as a blessed shore. (p.311)

But, he says,

Australians have largely failed to appreciate the moral force of their society’s creation, so blinkered are they by the shame of it, by the convict stain.[…] France knew Liberty as a slogan. Early Australia experienced it as a lived and felt reality, as a release, en masse, into freedom from penal servitude. (p.306)

Slattery’s intention in writing this book is to draw attention to the idealism of the Macquarie years and the reaction these ideals of criminal redemption and sub-proletarian betterment provoked from a quite vicious Tory Government. To achieve this, he has chosen not to write non-fiction, but created instead an imagined portrait of Elizabeth Macquarie, wife of Governor Lachlan Macquarie, and her affectionate partnership with the architect who designs many of the government buildings in early Sydney and Parramatta. Mrs M is written entirely from Elizabeth’s partisan point-of-view, showing the Macquaries as a benign partnership based on shared ideals of rehabilitation and social justice as a deterrent to crime.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/11/28/mrs-m-by-luke-slattery/ ( )