I've owned a copy of this book but never actually read the whole thing from cover to cover for decades, but it's marvellous. Beautifully written, excellently researched, full of incident and drama. A masterpiece.
So many memorable sketches: First Fleet shore leave in Rio and Cape Town, tense run ins with La Perouse and the French (causing a semi comic quasi pile up of boats as they desperately tried to hot foot it to Port Jackson), the orgy on the night the women moved in, the escape of Alexander Pearce and his mates, the several mutinies on Norfolk Island.
Some of it made me angry, even after all these years - the fact they found such a workable system of using prisoners for the benefit of the colony and the prisoners (assignment labour) but stopped it because prisoners weren't suffering enough; the continuous setting up of "terrifying" penal settlements (Norfolk Island, Moreton Bay, Port Macquarie); the horrific treatment of the Tasmanian aboriginies; attitudes towards women; the fate of officials who actually tried to do the right thing.
Lots of great villains, although the sadistic prison guards/wardens do tend to blend into one; the Exclusives make a great snobbish prison class. Very few out and out heroes - maybe Macquarie, Gipps, and Maconochie, although it's clear Arthur Phillip was a complete pro... modern Australia thrived less because of the manic depressives who lit up other corners of the British Empire (Clive, Wolfe) but because of professional old hands and the hard work of the convicts. And the suffering of the local people and wildlife of course.
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