Novel
His Natural Life
Marcus Clarke · 1874
Opening lines
In the breathless stillness of a tropical afternoon, when the air was hot and heavy, and the sky brazen and cloudless, the shadow of the Malabar lay solitary on the surface of the glittering sea.
Text quoted from gutenberg.net.au
Synopsis
Richard Devine, son of a shipbuilder, learns that he was born of Lord Bellasis. After a family scene, he finds the latter murdered and is arrested; to keep the secret of his birth and his mother's honour, he takes the name Rufus Dawes, is acquitted of the murder but convicted of robbing the dead man, then transported. Wrongly accused of a mutiny on board, he has his sentence doubled. There follow the penal settlement of Macquarie Harbour, an escape, Port Arthur and the lash, then Norfolk Island, under the gaze of the officer Maurice Frere and of Sylvia Vickers, who has lost her memory.
Context
The novel first appeared in twenty-seven instalments in the Australian Journal, from 1870 to June 1872; according to the State Library of Victoria, this serial took its hero as far as the Ballarat goldfields and the Eureka rebellion. Its author had gone to Tasmania in 1870 to study the convict-prison archives and met at Port Arthur a former convict whose name he took over. Revised and abridged, the text became a volume in 1874; the long title came only in 1884. Several London reviews noticed it favourably, and the book was adapted for the stage as early as 1886, then for the cinema in 1908 and 1927.
Who it is for
More than five hundred pages in Victorian English; Jean-Paul Delamotte's French translation appeared in 1986 and was reissued in 2009.
Prizes and reception
For Brian Elliott, the monumental work of fiction of Australia's first century; it is seen as one of the first novels of Tasmanian Gothic.
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