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Who were the convicts who were discharged onto the ''fatal shore''? While it is hard not to think of most of them as in some sense victims -whether of their circumstances, or of a ferocious penal code - that doesn't necessarily mean they were innocent victims. Contrary to what Mr. [Robert Hughes] calls a ''stout and consoling fiction'' of later times, the majority had previous convictions, and only around 1 in 50 could be considered a political prisoner (though the proportion was at least twice as high among the Irish, who constituted nearly a quarter of the convict population as a whole). Yet the horrors represent only part of the story. Employers slowly learned that they got better results from their convict laborers when they treated them well. Many emancipists prospered (a few even made large fortunes, especially in whaling and sealing). The emancipists' children, the ''Currency lads'' and ''Currency lasses'' - the term implied local currency, with a limited circulation, as opposed to sterling - grew up thinking of Australia as a homeland, not as a jail, and one in which for most of them prospects were rosier than they would have been back in Britain. Nor is ''The Fatal Shore'' a depressing book, painful though much of it is. It has its heroes as well as its ogres; it resurrects some strange personalities and extraordinary careers; there is material in it for 20 different movies, from the tense account of an abortive uprising among the convicts on Norfolk Island - how you want it to succeed! - to the adventures of Mary Bryant, ''the Girl from Botany Bay,'' a prisoner who in 1790 led an escape party that sailed a stolen boat all the way from Sydney to Timor.