Hughes's interest in Australia's convict era began in the early 1970s, when he was filming a TV documentary about the history of Australian art that took him to Port Arthur in Tasmania.

[5] Australian novelist Thomas Keneally, in a review for The New York Times, described the book as "an authoritative and engrossing record," stating that "although the story of the convict system has recently been covered by a number of Australian historians, this account, richly peopled with bizarre and compelling characters, is probably the most full-blooded and monumental treatment the subject has been given.

"[3] Brian Smith, writing in the World Socialist Web Site, gave a positive review of the book, declaring that it "provide[s] a vivid portrayal of the human cost of Britain's colonial venture and how these experiences have helped shape modern Australia.

"[7] In a 2013 Quadrant article, historian Keith Windschuttle argued that The Fatal Shore "remains the most widely read representation of the old anti-British historical paradigm created from the 1940s to the 1970s by Marxists and other leftists in university history departments."

Windschuttle wrote that "Hughes’s gift for the dramatic phrase led him to go further than his sources and argue that nineteenth-century New South Wales was actually a precursor to Stalin’s Gulag Archipelago.