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His Natural Life (1874) by the English-born Australian journalist Marcus Clarke is generally acknowledged as the most compelling and significant work of fiction in 19th-century Australian literature, despite having what some critics consider an overly dramatic tone and some improbable plot twists. The novel examines the British practice of transporting convicted criminals to Australia, which was intrinsic to the early development of the colony but in decline by the time Clarke visited the Tasmanian prisons in 1870. Also titled For the Term of His Natural Life, the novel follows the tragic story of Rufus Dawes, an Englishman falsely accused of murder. This excerpt considers Dawes’s mental state after being imprisoned in Tasmania for six years.
By Marcus Clarke
We have some dim notion of what life on a convict ship means; and we have seen through what a furnace Rufus Dawes had already passed before he set foot on the barren shore of Hell's Gates. But to appreciate in its intensity the agony he had suffered since that time, we must multiply the infamy of the ‘tween decks of the Malabar an hundred fold. In that prison was at least some ray of light. All were not abominable; all were not utterly lost to shame and manhood. Stifling though the prison, infamous the companionship, terrible the memory of past happiness—there was yet ignorance of the future, there was yet Hope. But at Macquarie Harbour [a penal colony in Tasmania known for particularly harsh discipline] was poured out the very dregs of this cup of desolation. The worst had come, and the worst must for ever remain. That pit of torment was so deep that one could not even see Heaven. There was no hope there as long as life remained. Death alone kept the keys of that island prison.
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Is it possible to imagine, even for a moment, what an innocent man, gifted with ambitions and disgusts, endowed with power to love and to respect, must have suffered during one week of such a punishment? We ordinary men, leading ordinary lives—walking, riding, laughing, marrying and giving in marriage—can form no notion of such misery as this. Some dim ideas we may have about the sweetness of liberty and the loathing that evil company inspires; but that is all. We know that were we chained and degraded, fed like dogs, employed as beasts of burden, driven to our daily toil with threats and blows, and herded with wretches among whom all that savoured of decency and manliness was an open mock and scorn, we would—what? Die, perhaps, or go mad. But we do not know, and can never know, how unutterably loathsome life must become when shared with such beings as those who dragged the tree trunks to the banks of the Gordon, and toiled, blaspheming, in their irons, on the dismal sandspit of Sarah Island. No human creature could describe to what depth of personal abasement and self-loathing one week of such a life would plunge him. Even if he had the power to write, he dared not. As one who, in a desert, seeking for a face, comes to a pool of blood, and, seeing his own reflection, flies—so would such a one hasten from the contemplation of his own degrading agony. Imagine such an agony endured for six years!
Ignorant that the sights and sounds about him were the symptoms of the final abandonment of the settlement, and that the Ladybird was but sent down to bring away the prisoners, Rufus Dawes decided upon getting rid of that burden of life which pressed upon him so heavily. For six years he had hewn wood and drawn water; for six years he had hoped against hope; for six years he had lived in the valley of the shadow of Death. He dared not recapitulate to himself what he had suffered. Indeed, his senses were deadened and dulled by torture. He cared to remember only one thing—that he was a Prisoner for Life. In vain had been his first dream of freedom. He had done his best, by good conduct, to win release; but the villany of Vetch and Rex [his antagonists throughout the novel] had deprived him of the fruit of his labour. Instead of gaining credit by his exposure of the plot on board the Malabar [Dawes thwarted a planned mutiny among the prisoners being transported from England aboard the Malabar], he was himself deemed guilty, and condemned despite his asseverations of innocence. The knowledge of his ‘treachery,’ for so it was deemed among his associates, while it gained for him no credit with the authorities, procured for him the detestation and ill-will of the monsters among whom he found himself. On his arrival at Hell’s Gates he was a marked man—an outcast among outcasts, a Pariah among those beings that were Pariahs to all the world beside.
Thrice his life was attempted; but he was not then quite tired of living and he defended it. This defence was construed by an overseer into a brawl, and the irons from which he had been relieved were replaced. His strength—brute attribute that would alone avail him—made him respected after this, and he was left at peace. No one spoke to him. At first this treatment was congenial to his temperament; but by-and-bye it became annoying, then painful, then almost unendurable. Tugging at his oar, digging, up to his waist in slime, or bending beneath his burden of pine-wood, he looked greedily for some excuse to be addressed. He would take double weight when forming out of that human caterpillar along whose back lay a pine-tree, for a word of fellowship. He would work double tides to gain a kindly sentence from a comrade. In his utter desolation he agonised for the friendship of robbers and murderers.
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Then the reaction came, and he hated the very sound of their voices. He never spoke, and refused to answer when spoken to. He would even take his scanty supper alone, did his chain so permit him. He gained the reputation of a sullen, dangerous, half-crazy ruffian. Captain Barton, the superintendent, took pity on him, and made him his gardener. He accepted the pity for a week or so, and then Barton, coming down one morning, found the few shrubs pulled up by the roots, the flower-beds trampled into barrenness, and his gardener sitting on the ground among the fragments of his gardening tools. For this act of wanton mischief he was flogged.
Source: Clarke, Marcus Andrew Hislop. His Natural Life. Penguin Books.
Appears in
Australian Literature; Australia; Tasmania
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