For the Term of His Natural Life
1872
The most unflinching portrait of Australia's penal origins ever written. Marcus Clarke witnessed the convict system at Port Arthur as a young man, and his novel burns with the accumulated horror of what he saw. Rufus Dawes is transported for a murder he did not commit, and what follows is a descent into a world where men are worked, starved, flogged, and broken by design. The settlement is not merely a prison but a machine for erasing identity, a place where the innocent and guilty alike are reduced to numbers, to "souls at sixpence each." Clarke writes with the moral fury of a man who cannot look away from injustice, and his prose carries the physicality of chain-gangs, starvation, and the endless Tasmanian rain. This is a novel that refuses to let its readers forget what building a nation cost in human suffering. More than a century later, it remains an essential act of remembering - and an unforgettable story of one man trying to retain his humanity in a system designed to destroy it.
Editions
X-Ray
“Take care what you say! I'll have no hard words. Wretch! If I am a wretch, who made me one? If I hate you and myself and the world, who made me hate it? I was born free - as free as you are. Why should I be sent to herd with beasts, and condemned to this slavery, worse than death? Tell me that, Maurice Frere - tell me that!””
— Marcus Andrew Hislop Clarke
“...he was so horribly unhuman, that one shuddered to think that tender women and fair children must, of necessity, confess to fellowship of kind with such a monster.””
— Marcus Andrew Hislop Clarke
“Simt că port în mine două inimi, e ca și cum aș trăi o a doua viață”
— Marcus Andrew Hislop Clarke
“Only fools were honest, only cowards kissed the rod, and failed to meditate revenge on that world of respectability which had wronged them." "Displeased with himself for having allowed his tongue to get the better of his dignity.""With the hypocrisy of selfishness which deceives even itself." "He began to think that this religion which was talked of so largely was not a mere bundle of legends and formula, but must have in it something vital and sustaining. Broken in spirit, and weakened in body, with faith in his own will shaken, he longed for something to lean upon and turned- as all men turn when in such case- to the Unknown.""But the convict's guilty conscience, long suppressed and derided, asserted itself. In this hour when it was alone with Nature and Night. The bitter intellectual power which had so long supported him succumbed beneath imagination- the unconscious religion of the soul.""It is the terrible privilege of insanity to be sleepless." I loathe myself and all around me. I am nerveless, passionless, bowed down with a burden like the burden of Saul. I know well what will restore me to life and ease- restore me, but to cast me back again into a deeper fit of despair. I drink. One glass- my blood is warmed- my heart leaps, my hand no longer shakes. Three glasses, I rise with hope in my soul,- the evil spirit flies from me. I continue- pleasing images flocked to my brain, the fields break into flower, the birds into song, the sea gleams sapphire, the warm heaven laughs. Great God! What man could withstand a temptation like this?"Two human beings felt that they had done with life. Together thus, alone in the very midst and presence of death, the distinctions of the world they were about to leave disappeared. Their vision grew clear. They felt as beings whose bodies had already perished, and as they clasped hands, their freed souls, recognising each the loveliness of the other, rushed trembling together.””
— Marcus Andrew Hislop Clarke
“The hot wind, born amid the burning sand of the interior of the vast Australian continent, sweeps over the scorched and cracking plains, to lick up their streams and wither the herbage in its path, until it meets the waters of the great south bay.””
— Marcus Andrew Hislop Clarke
“To describe a tempest of elements is not easy, but to describe a tempest of the soul is impossible.””
— Marcus Andrew Hislop Clarke
“I have examined you long enough. I have read your heart, and written out your secrets! You are but a shell-the shell that holds a corrupted and sinful heart. He shall live; you shall die!””
— Marcus Andrew Hislop Clarke
