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Rufus Dawes is sent as a convict to Australia for a murder he did not commit. The prison camps there are brutal places, with cruel guards, hunger, and escape attempts that nearly always fail. Rufus suffers for years, but he never stops being kind, and he never gives up hope. This true to life story shows how unfair the old convict system was, and how one good man endured it.
The novel is built as a descent into the convict system and a long, stubborn refusal to be destroyed by it. Disowned by his father and convicted of a murder he did not commit, Rufus Dawes is transported to Australia and passed through the worst stations of the system, from the prison ship to Macquarie Harbour and Port Arthur.
Clarke structures the book in episodes, escapes, a mutiny, acts of cruelty and of unexpected kindness, so that Dawes's story also becomes a portrait of the whole penal world. The themes are injustice, endurance, and the survival of human feeling under a system designed to extinguish it. Clarke drew on real convict records, and the documented horrors carry more force than any invention.
For the Term of His Natural Life lasts because it is both a gripping narrative and an indictment that helped change how the convict era was remembered. Published in book form in 1874, it remains Australia's first great novel and the defining account of transportation. Its scenes of flogging, escape, and endurance entered the national memory, and Dawes himself, wronged, patient, and unbroken, is still the system's most famous victim and witness.
A young man is cast off by his father, takes a new name, and is then convicted of a murder he did not commit and shipped to the penal colonies of Australia. Marcus Clarke published For the Term of His Natural Life in 1874, drawn from real convict records, and it remains the most powerful novel ever written about the transportation system. Rufus Dawes endures escapes, mutiny, and cruelty beyond measure, yet the book blazes with humanity.
This shelf keeps For the Term of His Natural Life because it is the defining novel of the convict system, and still the most powerful book ever written about transportation. Marcus Clarke published it in book form in 1874, after years of research in the records of the penal colonies, and its authority is documentary as much as literary. The hero, Rufus Dawes, is disowned by his father, convicted of a murder he did not commit, and shipped to the ends of the earth, where the novel follows him through the prison ship, the hell settlement of Macquarie Harbour, and Port Arthur. Expect no comfort and no padding: escapes, a mutiny, floggings, and acts of stubborn kindness follow one another in episodes that Clarke based on real cases. Readers should know the book carries period racial and colonial attitudes alongside its fierce humanity. What lifts it above melodrama is Dawes himself, a man the system was designed to break, whose endurance becomes the book's moral center. It earns its place as Australia's first great novel and as a work of protest that helped fix the convict era in the national memory, grim, gripping, and impossible to forget once read.
Edition: Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 3424.
The first chapter
FOR THE TERM OF HIS NATURAL LIFE
Title: For the Term of His Natural Life
Author: Marcus Andrew Hislop Clarke
Release date: September 1, 2002 [eBook #3424]
Most recently updated: February 26, 2021
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3424
Credits: Produced by Col Choat, and David Widger
FOR THE TERM OF HIS NATURAL LIFE
DEDICATION TO SIR CHARLES GAVAN DUFFY
My Dear Sir Charles, I take leave to dedicate this work to you, not merely because your nineteen years of political and literary life in Australia render it very fitting that any work written by a resident in the colonies, and having to do with the history of past colonial days, should bear your name upon its dedicatory page; but because the publication of my book is due to your advice and encouragement.
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 the 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.
Your critical faculty will doubtless find, in the construction and artistic working of this book, many faults. I do not think, however, that you will discover any exaggerations. 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 produced 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.
With this brief preface I beg you to accept this work. I would that its merits were equal either to your kindness or to my regard.
I am,
My dear Sir Charles,
Faithfully yours,
MARCUS CLARKE THE PUBLIC LIBRARY, MELBOURNE
CONTENTS
HIS NATURAL LIFE.
PROLOGUE.
BOOK I. THE SEA. 1827
BOOK II. MACQUARIE HARBOUR. 1833
BOOK III. PORT ARTHUR. 1838
CHAPTER XIV. Mr. NORTH'S DISPOSITION
BOOK IV. NORFOLK ISLAND. 1846
CHAPTER XII. THE STRANGE BEHAVIOUR OF Mr. NORTH
EPILOGUE.
APPENDIX.
HIS NATURAL LIFE.
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published in book form 1874. Author died 1881. Public domain. Share this book: WhatsApp
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