Jan 31 2008
For the Term of his Natural Life
Another Review today. I’ve been asked about ‘Classic Australian’ books, but what does that mean? I’m never sure, but this one is always described as a classic. In a way. it is. It’s a book I had to study at school, an account of our early European history here, when the English used the country as a dumping ground for their excess prison population. I wonder what they would do nowadays. Set up a penal colony on Mars?
For the Term of His Natural Life
For the term of his Natural Life is an Australian classic, a tale of inhumanity and suffering during Australia’s early colonial history.
The more I read this, the more I see in it the emerging attitudes that play a very large part of Australian culture today. To start with, there’s no significant reference to the Aboriginal people, the actual owners of the land, they seem to barely exist at all and when they do they are dismissed.
The characteristic disrespect for authority is here of course, and there’s no attempt to soften the truth of the degradation and cruelty, it’s a living, breathing image of the times. It broke my heart as a teenager because the prisons that Clarke describes in Tasmania and Norfolk Island are the prisons where my 14 year old great grandfather was cruelly tortured.
But Clarke doesn’t attempt to persuade us with pity. Nor are we persuaded to to decry. Clarke merely portrays the atmosphere and attitudes of the period.
Please, please, don’t confuse the book with the film starring Anthony Perkins. The only similarity is the title.
In the film, the working class Rufus Dawes becomes young aristocrat Richard Devine. The plot dives to the depths as the dashing young gentleman Devine is wrongly accused of murder and shipped off to the penal colony to suffer under the harsh prison conditions where he resolves to escape and restore his good name. Only the help of Sylvia, the prison Commandant’s daughter, can save him. A tacky trite sample of utterly maudlin mush.
Marcus Clarke would be spinning in his grave if he knew of this travesty. So would my great grandfather.
