Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life

By Michael Wilding

Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life was the first great Australian novel. To my mind, it still remains the greatest. Its account of the horrors and brutalities of the convict settlement of Australia is unforgettable. And the details are all horribly true. Brutal floggings, futile escapes, child suicides, cannibalism – it is all there and it all happened. But the novel is not only concerned with imprisonment. In his account of John Rex, Clarke draws on the contemporary Tichborne Case in which a butcher from Wagga Wagga claimed to be a missing British heir. With the prison chaplain Rev. James North, Clarke explores the temptations of forbidden love and the consolations of alcohol. With the inter-relationships of the protagonist Rufus Dawes, his alter ego Rex, and the tormenting prison officer Maurice Frere (French for brother, and pronounced ‘free-er’), he explores the alternative destinies of ‘natural life’

The horrors of transportation were all in the public records. But no one wanted to know. At the time Clarke wrote, and for long afterwards, Australian society preferred to close its eyes to the realities of the brutal system on which it was founded. Clarke simply used the Melbourne Public Library and dug out the truth. He wrote:

In the folio reports of the House of Commons can be read statements which make one turn sick with disgust, and flush hot with indignation. Officialdom, with its crew of parasites and lickspittles, may try to palliate the enormities committed in the years gone by; may revile, with such powers of abuse as are given to it, the writers who records the facts which it blushes for. But the sad, grim truth remains. For half a century the law allowed the vagabonds and criminals of England to be subjected to a lingering torment, to a hideous debasement, to a monstrous system of punishment, futile for good and horribly powerful for evil.ⁱ

The Bulletin critic A. G. Stephens was grudging in his recognition of Clarke, suggesting that ‘much of the force of His Natural Life must havelain perdu [lost] in the original records’.ⁱⁱ Well, the original of every novel lies in some records or in some experience. The skill comes in handling those materials engagingly. Wrestling with historical records is one of the great struggles of the novelist’s life. The novelist tries to ensure that he or she shapes the material and isn’t overwhelmed by the documentation. Lord Rosebery understood Clarke’s achievement better than Stephens did. In a letter to Clarke’s widow he wrote: ‘the materials for great works of imagination lie all around us; but it is genius that selects and transposes them’.ⁱⁱⁱ

Towards the end of January 1870, overworked and stressed, Clarke was advised by his doctor to take a holiday. Typically, he financed it by a journalistic assignment. F. W. Haddon, the editor of the Melbourne Argus, commissioned a series on the convict system. Clarke had written about low-life and night-life and the margins of society.^iv An extension into the convict records was natural and appropriate. His series, ‘Old Stories Retold’ duly appeared and was collected in a book as Old Tales of a Young Country^vBut Clarke had a further scheme in mind, as A. H. Massina, the publisher of the Australian Journal recalled:

Clarke came to me one day and said, ‘Massina, I want £50.’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘You’ve had enough out of me. What more do you want?’
‘£50,’ replied Clarke, ‘I can write a story for your journal. I am going to Tasmania to write up the criminal records and I’ll do the story for one hundred pounds.’

We jumped at it. Now Clarke was going to write that story in twelve monthly sections. At first he wrote enough for two months, then enough for one month, and got down to very little. In fact we had once to put it in pica type, instead of brevier to swell out the size of that month’s contribution. But on one occasion he had nothing ready and we had to go to press with an apology to our readers. Finally we had to lock him in a room to get his matter written.

On 21 January 1870 Clarke and Haddon arrived in Launceston, and visited Port Arthur. Clarke wrote:

To me, brooding over stories of misery and crime, sitting beside the ironed convicts, and shivering at the chill breeze which whitened the angry waters of the bay, there was no beauty in those desolate cliffs, no cheering picturesqueness in that frowning shore. I saw Port Arthur for the first time beneath a leaden and sullen sky; and as we sailed inwards past the ruins of Point Puer, and beheld barring our passage to the prison the low grey hummocks of the Island of the Dead, I felt that there was a grim propriety in the melancholy of nature.

Clarke’s account of his visit, ‘Port Arthur’ captures the horror of the place:

I know that I thought to myself that I should go mad were I condemned to such a life, and that I caught one of the men looking at me with a broad grin as I thought it. I know that there seemed to me to hang over the whole place a sort of horrible gloom, as though the sunlight had been withdrawn from it, and that I should have been ashamed to have suddenly met some high-minded friend, inasmuch as it seemed that in coming down to stare at these chained and degraded beings, we had all been guilty of an unmanly curiosity.

There were still some 574 inmates at Port Arthur. Looking through the records Clarke asked to see one of them, transported for poaching when he was thirteen:

The warder drew aside a peep-hole in the barred door, and I saw a grizzled, gaunt and half-naked old man coiled in a corner. The peculiar wild-beast smell which belongs to some forms of furious madness exhaled from the cell. The gibbering animal within turned, and his malignant eyes met mine. ‘Take care,’ said the gaoler; ‘he has a habit of sticking his finger through the peep-hole to try and poke someone’s eye out!’ I drew back, and a nail-bitten hairy finger, like the toe of an ape, was thrust with rapid and simian neatness through the aperture. ‘That is how he amuses himself,’ said the good warder, forcing-to the iron slot; ‘he’d best be dead, I’m thinking.’^vi

The serialisation of His Natural Life was completed in June 1872. A. H. Massina recalled:

A funny thing happened when Clarke brought in the last of his copy of His Natural Life.
He said, ‘There’s the end of it,’ and I said, ‘Thank God!’
Clarke said, ‘Why?’ and I said ‘I don’t want to hear the name of the blessed thing any more!’
‘Will you give the story to me?’ said Clarke.
I did there and then.
He went right away and got £25 for it to start with from George Robertson. I could have made a lot of money out of it, but at the moment was glad to get rid of it.

Clarke revised the serial for publication in book form. He asked Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, the Irish patriot and writer, now a politician in Victoria, for advice. The opening of the serial was a 40,000 word account of Richard Devine’s apprenticeship to an alchemist, who is murdered. Devine, his name changed to Rufus Dawes, is transported for the crime. Then, after what is essentially the novel as we know it, the serial continued for another 100,000 words with Devine’s escape and experiences as a free man – participating in the discovery of gold (the alchemists’ aim) and the Eureka Stockade, and ultimate success as a man of property. Duffy suggested some massive abridgement. The beginning and end of the serial were removed, and the book version of the novel is focused in its entirety on the convict experience. The full serial version was published by Penguin in 1970 though is currently out of print. ^vii But the edition most frequently read is the shorter version, first published in book form in 1874. It was called simply His Natural Life, suggesting its concerns are not simply the convict prison sentence, but the very nature of human existence. The longer title For the Term of His Natural Life was not given to the book until after Clarke’s death.

Clarke dedicated His Natural Life to Duffy, who had been twice imprisoned by the English for his involvement in Irish independence movements. It is a mark of Clarke’s increasing alienation from English establishment values. In the serial, Dawes finally returns to England. In the book version he drowns. There was no return.

Clarke never returned to England either. He had gone to school there with the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Gerard’s brother Cyril. Cyril wrote a life of Clarke, drawing on boyhood recollections and Clarke’s letters from Australia. It has just been published after lying in manuscript for a hundred years. On 11 January 1877 Clarke wrote to Cyril Hopkins: ‘How did you like His Un-Natural Life?  I mean really you know? [The word ‘really’ is strongly underlined.] Tell me in thy reply!’^viii

 

ⁱ Marcus Clarke, ‘Port Arthur’, in Marcus Clarke: For the Term of His Natural Life, Short Stories, Critical Essays and Journalism, Michael Wilding ed., St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1976, p.530.

ⁱⁱ A. G. Stephens, ‘Marcus Clarke’s Minor Writings’, Bulletin, 29 April 1899, in Marcus Clarke, Michael Wilding ed., Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1977, p.43.

ⁱⁱⁱ Marcus Clarke, Stories of Australia in the Early Days, London: Hutchinson, 1897.

^ivThese articles are reprinted in A Colonial City: High and Low Life; Selected Journalism of Marcus Clarke, ed. L. T. Hergenhan, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1972.

^v Marcus Clarke, Old Tales of a Young Country (1871), facsimile reprint with an introduction by Joan Poole, Sydney University Press, 1972.

^vi Clarke, ‘Port Arthur’, in Marcus Clarke, Wilding ed., pp.519, 521, 524.

^viiMarcus Clarke, His Natural Life, ed. Stephen Murray Smith, Penguin, Ringwood, 1970.

^viiiCyril Hopkins’ Marcus Clarke, ed. Laurie Hergenhan, Ken Stewart and Michael Wilding, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2009.