“So corrupt was their most ordinary language . . . that, in their dialect, evil was literally called good, and good, evil—the well-disposed man was branded wicked, whilst the leader in monstrous vice was styled virtuous.”
—William Ullathorne, a Catholic priest, on the convict society he encounted on Norfolk Island in the early 1800s; quoted by Robert Hughes in The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding, 1987.