For the Term of His Natural Life Read online

  MARCUS ANDREW HISLOP CLARKE was born in 1846 in London and educated alongside the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in Highgate. Witty and intelligent yet sickly, he was the only son of a successful lawyer who, after a sudden breakdown, was institutionalised and a year later died. At sixteen, Clarke was without prospects; he was, according to his biographer Brian Elliott, ‘spoilt, conceited and aimless…his view of life was much coloured by the novels which he avidly read.’

  In 1863 Clarke arrived in Melbourne, where he was to be supervised by his uncle James Langton Clarke, a judge in Ararat. Failed forays into banking, station work and exploration soon led Clarke to return to Melbourne.

  There he wrote a column for the Argus for many years, before moving to the Herald, the Daily Telegraph and the Age. In the late 1860s he edited and invested in the Colonial Monthly, for which he wrote (with some assistance from G. A. Walstab) the serialised novel Long Odds. He married Marian Dunn, an actress, and they had six children.

  Over two years from early 1870 the Australian Journal, under Clarke’s editorship, serialised His Natural Life. The novel, written when Clarke was in his mid-twenties, was published in book form in a series of editions from 1874 onwards; it was praised in England and the United States, translated into German, and later retitled For the Term of His Natural Life.

  Clarke’s career was still in trouble. He began working at the Public Library of Victoria, while writing for the stage and living beyond his means. The flow of his brilliant, scathingly funny and often controversial journalism was undiminished.

  Marcus Clarke died in 1881, aged only thirty-five. For the Term of His Natural Life has been filmed numerous times and remains the great nineteenth-century Australian novel, an unparalleled evocation of the brutal penal system.

  ROHAN WILSON is the author of two novels: The Roving Party (2011), which won the Australian/Vogel Literary Award, a New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award and a Tasmanian Literary Prize; and To Name Those Lost (2014), which won a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and an Adelaide Festival Award for Literature. He grew up in Tasmania and lives in Queensland.

  ALSO BY MARCUS CLARKE

  FICTION

  Long Odds

  NON-FICTION

  Old Tales of a Young Country

  Australian Tales

  The Marcus Clarke Memorial Volume

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Introduction copyright © Rohan Wilson 2016

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published 1874

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2016

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Jessica Horrocks

  Primary print ISBN: 9781925355659

  Ebook ISBN: 9781925410099

  Creator: Clarke, Marcus, 1846–1881, author.

  Title: For the term of his natural life / by Marcus Clarke ; introduced by

  Rohan Wilson.

  Series: Text classics.

  Dewey Number: A823.1

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  The Unluckiest Man Who Ever Lived

  by Rohan Wilson

  For the Term of His Natural Life

  The Unluckiest Man Who Ever Lived

  by Rohan Wilson

  VISIT a gift shop in Tasmania. Beyond the plush tigers and devils, the Huon pine key rings, the wilderness postcards and the dried lavender, somewhere in a corner on a low bookshelf you’ll find a copy of For the Term of His Natural Life. Marcus Clarke’s fictional history, first published in book form in 1874, is the face Tasmania presents to the world. It’s how we explain our idiosyncrasies. Read this, we say, and you’ll understand. Read this, and see where we come from. You could be in Hobart, Strahan, Burnie or Bicheno. It doesn’t matter. There’s always a gift shop, always a copy of Clarke’s great book.

  I first encountered Clarke in a gift shop. My father, a peerless cray fisherman, docked his boat full of pots at the Port Arthur jetty and let us out to explore. It was the school holidays, sometime in the late 1980s. I was terrified. I knew all about Port Arthur. I knew it was haunted by ghosts and was the site of unspecified horrors. We had breakfast in the café—the same café where Martin Bryant would later commit his infamous massacre—and after we ate I went straight for the gifts. I remember holding Clarke’s book and looking at the cover, which depicted men in chains and men in cells. Something about the expressions of those men told me that the real story of Port Arthur was not the ghosts. The real story was what had happened to the prisoners. To a young, easily scared boy, that story seemed too forbidding.

  It would be another two decades before I finally read For the Term of His Natural Life: the tale of Rufus Dawes, the unluckiest man who ever lived, who is transported to Van Diemen’s Land after being framed for the murder of his father. On being transported, he survives a series of ever more unlucky events—a mutiny, a failed suicide attempt, a gutsy rescue mission—before eventually arriving at Port Arthur, where the worst luck of all awaits. The only person who can save him, the forthright colonial girl Sylvia Vickers, has married his sworn enemy, the cruel overseer Maurice Frere. After suffering a bout of pneumonia, Sylvia forgets that it was Rufus who rescued her and Maurice from starvation at the Sarah Island prison settlement. This is the last arrow of outrageous fortune that poor Rufus can take. He descends into misery. But his suffering is not yet complete. Just when it appears things can get no worse for Rufus, the roguish John Rex arrives to steal his identity and his inheritance.

  If all this sounds nightmarish, then that is more or less the point. Clarke wrote the original serialisation of His Natural Life in the early 1870s, almost twenty years after transportation to the island had ceased and the colony had been renamed Tasmania. By then, convictism was already history. Like many people, Clarke found the period fascinating. He began a series of articles for the Australasian called ‘Old Stories Retold’, which looked at some of the nastiest aspects of convict life. He researched, he interviewed and he travelled. And soon the articles morphed into something much larger. In this regard, Clarke’s novel is perhaps best understood as Australia’s first major work of historical fiction, and it begins the nation-building project of capturing, in narrative form, the process of our becoming. That process in Tasmania, of course, was one of brutal penal servitude.

  There is no more potent a symbol of transportation than Port Arthur. Nowadays, the Penitentiary has lost much of its Gothic power. The ruins of it stand peacefully in the forest of the Eaglehawk Peninsula, just as the remains of the Roman past stand in forests all over Europe. Perhaps its chief function is to remind us that we don’t have access to the past, only to its mediated restorations. (The English artist John Glover used the imagery of Roman ruins in his paintings until he came to Van Diemen’s Land in 1831, whereupon he started filling the holes in his landscapes with frolicking Aborigines, which served a similar thematic purpose.) It’s easy to imagine the young English-born journalist Marcus Clarke visiting Port Arthur in 1870, while the prison was still in operation, and hearing the stories of how hard life had bee
n in the early days. He was surely overwhelmed by the horror of what he heard and saw, or at least that’s the impression you get from reading For the Term of His Natural Life. And in no small measure it was his writing which ensured that Port Arthur became the pre-eminent symbol of the humiliation and suffering visited upon the convict class.

  This is reflected in the sensationalist nature of the novel. The bad luck that Rufus Dawes suffers often strains credulity—but, as incredible as much of the action appears, most of it has a basis in the historical records. The final ship to leave the Sarah Island settlement was in fact commandeered by its convict crew and sailed to South America, as Clarke portrays. A group of escaping prisoners, finding themselves lost in the wilderness, did in fact resort to cannibalism to survive, as Clarke portrays. Convicts were flogged to death. They were stretched on racks. They were locked in isolation. These stories are resituated, combined and tidied up, as is the way with historical fiction. This does not diminish their power. Rather, For the Term of His Natural Life reads like a distillation of the convict experience. It feels like the full breadth of the past brought down to five hundred pages.

  *

  Early in the novel, Clarke tries to probe how convict life may have felt to the men and women subjected to it. The narrator suggests that ordinary people, ‘chained and degraded, fed like dogs, employed as beasts of burden, driven to…daily toil with threats and blows, and herded with wretches’ in the manner of the Sarah Island convicts, would ‘die, perhaps, or go mad’.

  No human creature could describe to what depth of personal abasement and self-loathing one week of such a life would plunge him…As one whom in a desert, seeking for a face, should come to a pool of blood, and seeing his own reflection, fly—so would such a one hasten from the contemplation of his own degrading agony. Imagine such torment endured for six years!

  That type of sublime suffering is beyond our comprehension. The passage is memorable not merely because it draws a distinction between the comfortable present of the narrator and the horrific past of which he speaks, but also because in the drawing of this distinction we see the task of the author laid bare. How could Clarke ever have hoped to capture what really happened? Could he ever have described those feelings and experiences accurately? We see Clarke confronting the past as something genuinely unknowable and unfathomable. It is the question that troubles all writers of history, but especially the writer of historical fiction, who has to mediate the human experience of the past for readers in the present and future. It is rare to see this question tackled as openly as Clarke does here.

  In the years after his book first appeared, Marcus Clarke worked for the Public Library of Victoria, having been fired from various positions at newspapers around Melbourne. He spoke with a stammer, which was apparently not a hindrance. He drank. He socialised a little too much. He wrote in every form he could—short fiction, stage play, history, essay, even poetry. None of it amounted to much. He died, bankrupt, in 1881, leaving behind a wife and six children. He also left behind the foundation work of Australian fiction.

  The last word on the book belongs to Martin Frobisher, the narrator of Michael Meehan’s brilliant, innovative novel Below the Styx (2010). Meehan merges fiction with a biographical investigation into Clarke and the body of work he left behind. His character Frobisher, a publisher locked away for murdering his wife, takes it upon himself to write the definitive Clarke biography. In Frobisher’s view, For the Term of His Natural Life is ‘an excellent example for all of us in how not to go about putting a novel together. And with luck, just a few of us might show ourselves capable of making the same mistakes.’ Marcus Clarke’s novel, for all its faults, stands alone in the Australian literary canon as a monument to wild genius.

  PREFACE

  THE convict of fiction has been hitherto shown only at the beginning or at the end of his career. Either his exile has been the mysterious end to his misdeeds, or he has appeared upon the scene to claim interest by reason of an equally unintelligible love of crime acquired during his experience in a penal settlement. Charles Reade has drawn the interior of a house of correction in England, and Victor Hugo has shown how a French convict fares after the fulfilment of his sentence. But no writer—so far as I am aware—has attempted to depict the dismal condition of a felon during his term of transportation.

  I have endeavoured in “His Natural Life” to set forth the working and results of an English system of transportation carefully considered and carried out under official supervision; and to illustrate in the manner best calculated, as I think, to attract general attention, the inexpediency of again allowing offenders against the law to be herded together in places remote from the wholesome influence of public opinion, and to be submitted to a discipline which must necessarily depend for its just administration upon the personal character and temper of their gaolers.

  Some of the events narrated are doubtless tragic and terrible; but I hold it needful to my purpose to record them, for they are events which have actually occurred, and which, if the blunders which produce them be repeated, must infallibly occur again. It is true that the British Government have ceased to deport the criminals of England, but the method of punishment, of which that deportation was a part, is still in existence. Port Blair is a Port Arthur filled with Indian-men instead of Englishmen; and, within the last year, France has established, at New Caledonia, a penal settlement which will, in the natural course of things, repeat in its annals the history of Macquarie Harbour and of Norfolk Island.

  M.C.

  MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

  PROLOGUE

  ON the evening of May 3, 1827, the garden of a large red-brick bow-windowed mansion called North End House, which, enclosed in spacious grounds, stands on the eastern height of Hampstead Heath, between Finchley Road and the Chestnut Avenue, was the scene of a domestic tragedy.

  Three persons were the actors in it. One was an old man, whose white hair and wrinkled face gave token that he was at least sixty years of age. He stood erect with his back to the wall, which separates the garden from the Heath, in the attitude of one surprised into sudden passion, and held uplifted the heavy ebon cane upon which he was ordinarily accustomed to lean. He was confronted by a man of two-and-twenty, unusually tall and athletic of figure, dressed in rough seafaring clothes, and who held in his arms, protecting her, a lady of middle age. The face of the young man wore an expression of horror-stricken astonishment, and the slight frame of the grey-haired woman was convulsed with sobs.

  These three people were Sir Richard Devine, his wife, and his only son Richard, who had returned from abroad that morning.

  “So, madam,” said Sir Richard, in the high-strung accents which in crises of great mental agony are common to the most self-restrained of us, “you have been for twenty years a living lie! For twenty years you have cheated and mocked me. For twenty years—in company with a scoundrel whose name is a byword for all that is profligate and base—you have laughed at me for a credulous and hood-winked fool; and now, because I dared to raise my hand to that reckless boy, you confess your shame, and glory in the confession!”

  “Mother, dear mother!” cried the young man, in a paroxysm of grief, “say that you did not mean those words; you said them but in anger! See, I am calm now, and he may strike me if he will.”

  Lady Devine shuddered, creeping close, as though to hide herself in the broad bosom of her son.

  The old man continued: “I married you, Ellinor Wade, for your beauty; you married me for my fortune. I was a plebeian, a ship’s carpenter; you were well born, your father was a man of fashion, a gambler, the friend of rakes and prodigals. I was rich. I had been knighted. I was in favour at Court. He wanted money, and he sold you. I paid the price he asked, but there was nothing of your cousin, my Lord Bellasis and Wotton, in the bond.”

  “Spare me, sir, spare me!” said Lady Ellinor faintly.

  “Spare you! Ay, you have spared me, have you not? Look ye,” he cried, in sudden fury, “I am not
to be fooled so easily. Your family are proud. Colonel Wade has other daughters. Your lover, my Lord Bellasis, even now, thinks to retrieve his broken fortunes by marriage. You have confessed your shame. To-morrow your father, your sisters, all the world, shall know the story you have told me!”

  “By Heaven, sir, you will not do this!” burst out the young man.

  “Silence, bastard!” cried Sir Richard. “Ay, bite your lips; the word is of your precious mother’s making!”

  Lady Devine slipped through her son’s arms and fell on her knees at her husband’s feet.

  “Do not do this, Richard. I have been faithful to you for two- and-twenty years. I have borne all the slights and insults you have heaped upon me. The shameful secret of my early love broke from me when in your rage, you threatened him. Let me go away; kill me; but do not shame me.”

  Sir Richard, who had turned to walk away, stopped suddenly, and his great white eyebrows came together in his red face with a savage scowl. He laughed, and in that laugh his fury seemed to congeal into a cold and cruel hate.

  “You would preserve your good name then. You would conceal this disgrace from the world. You shall have your wish—upon one condition.”

  “What is it, sir?” she asked, rising, but trembling with terror, as she stood with drooping arms and widely opened eyes.

  The old man looked at her for an instant, and then said slowly,—

  “That this impostor, who so long has falsely borne my name, has wrongfully squandered my money, and unlawfully eaten my bread, shall pack! That he abandon for ever the name he has usurped, keep himself from my sight, and never set foot again in house of mine.”

  “You would not part me from my only son!” cried the wretched woman.

  “Take him with you to his father then.”

  Richard Devine gently loosed the arms that again clung around his neck, kissed the pale face, and turned his own—scarcely less pale—towards the old man.