Image: Wikipedia
Marcus Clarke was confident. In the preface to For the Term of His Natural Life, he addressed his readers directly: “I do not think, however, that you will discover any exaggerations.”
That sentence has been quietly doing damage ever since.
More than 150 years after its serialisation in The Australian Journal, Clarke’s novel remains the dominant lens through which many Australians understand the convict experience. It has been adapted for film and television. It is taught in schools. It sits on the shelves of people who would never describe themselves as history readers, but who will tell you, with some confidence, what life was like for convicts in Van Diemen’s Land. The problem is that what they know is largely fiction: and not always fiction grounded in careful research.
Image: National Film and Sound Archive
I’ve spent years working with the primary sources of the convict period: records of the Supreme Court and Magistrates’ Courts, conduct registers, minutes of the Executive Council, newspaper archives, the remarkably intact collections held at the Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office. I’m currently completing Speaker for the Dead, a history of capital punishment in Van Diemen’s Land and Tasmania. That work has taken me deep into the documentary record of what actually happened to convicts who fell foul of the system: the worst cases, the most serious offenders, the people for whom things went as badly as they possibly could. And even at that extreme end of the spectrum, the picture looks nothing like Rufus Dawes.
So let’s talk about the exaggerations Clarke was so sure didn’t exist.
The Research Problem
Clarke visited Tasmania once, briefly, in 1870. He was sent by his employers to research a series of newspaper pieces on the convict era. Shortly afterwards, His Natural Life began its serialisation, which means he was writing a novel about Van Diemen’s Land while simultaneously editing the journal that published it, on a deadline, based on a short research trip and whatever documentary sources he could access in Melbourne. The novel was, in short, written on the run.
This matters. Clarke was an accomplished writer with real literary ambitions, but he was not an historian. He visited Port Arthur once. He did not have access to the systematic analysis of conduct records that later scholars would undertake. What he had was dramatic instinct, a taste for Gothic atmosphere, and a polemical purpose: he wanted to condemn the transportation system. Those are excellent qualities in a novelist. They are not a substitute for archival research.
One Man, Every Horror
The structural problem with reading For the Term of His Natural Life as history is what we might call the aggregation problem. Clarke took the worst documented incidents from the entire transportation period, across multiple decades, multiple locations, multiple penal stations, and threaded them into the life of a single man.
Rufus Dawes experiences Macquarie Harbour. He experiences Norfolk Island. He experiences Port Arthur. He survives a shipwreck. He witnesses cannibalism. He is flogged, and does the flogging, repeatedly, comprehensively, throughout. He encounters almost every horror that the transportation system produced at its most extreme, in sequence, as a single continuous biography.
No actual convict experienced anything like this. The dramatic logic of the novel required the accumulation of suffering. The historical record does not support it. What Clarke created was not a representative convict life but a kind of greatest-hits compilation of colonial brutality: vivid, morally serious, and profoundly misleading as a guide to what transportation typically meant.
Image: IMDB
The Flogging Question
Clarke’s novel is saturated with the lash. Flogging is the system’s primary instrument of control, its default response to any infraction, the background noise of convict existence. This is the image that has lodged in the Australian imagination: the convict back, the cat-o’-nine-tails, the magistrate with his quota of stripes.
The historical record tells a more complicated story.
The landmark work Convict Workers (1988), edited by Stephen Nicholas, drew on systematic analysis of convict records to reach a conclusion that surprised many readers: while cruel treatment certainly existed, the likelihood of a convict receiving numerous floggings across their sentence was, in Nicholas’s own word, a myth. The majority of convicts, most of the time, were not being flogged.
More specifically, data from New South Wales in 1833, one of the harder periods of the system, shows that around one in five convicts received a flogging sentence in that year. That is not a trivial number. But it also means four in five did not, in a year that historians consider relatively punitive. Clarke’s novel implies something closer to the reverse.
Hamish Maxwell-Stewart’s meticulous work on VDL conduct records adds further nuance. The rate of flogging in Van Diemen’s Land was already declining well before the Molesworth Committee of 1837, which is conventionally credited with reforming the system.
Image – Wikipedia
George Washington Walker and James Backhouse: 1832 – 1837 they did the leg work for the Molseworth report of the penal settlements in Australia, Van Diemen’s Land, and Norfolk Island
Image: Wikipedia 1794 – 1869
And the reason it declined tells us something important about how the system actually operated: flogging was being replaced not by enlightenment but by solitary confinement, which administrators found more effective as a control mechanism and which, unlike flogging, has been shown to have actually shortened convict life expectancy. The punishment Clarke dramatises so vividly was, in practice, giving way to a quieter and more insidious form of suffering that doesn’t make for nearly as gripping a novel.
Image – TMAG
Maxwell-Stewart’s research also shows that punishment rates in VDL varied significantly with labour market conditions. Convicts with skills that were in colonial demand were less likely to be punished than unskilled shipmates. The system was calibrated, at least partly, by economic logic. This is not the portrait Clarke paints. His system is driven by sadism, personal cruelty, and the moral failures of individual administrators: Frere being the prime exhibit. The historical system was driven by something colder and in some ways more disturbing: rational exploitation.
My own work with TAHO conduct records bears this out. The convicts whose cases I’ve examined most closely are those who were ultimately executed: people for whom the system failed most catastrophically. Even in those records, the picture is not one of unrelenting flogging from arrival to death. The lash appears, certainly. But it appears alongside a much wider range of punishments, inducements, and administrative calculations. The conduct record is a ledger of a system managing a workforce, not a chronicle of sadism.
How Clarke Manufactured Authority
The flogging statistics are one problem. But there is a deeper issue with Clarke’s method, visible in passages like this one, which appears in the novel as apparent historical observation:
Of the social condition of these people at this time it is impossible to speak without astonishment. According to the recorded testimony of many respectable persons – Government officials, military officers, and free settlers – the profligacy of the settlers was notorious. Drunkenness was a prevailing vice. Even children were to be seen in the streets intoxicated… As for the condition of the prisoner population, that, indeed, is indescribable… a bottle of brandy was considered to be cheaply bought at the price of twenty lashes… All that the vilest and most bestial of human creatures could invent and practise, was in this unhappy country invented and practised without restraint and without shame.
quote from Chapter III – A Social Evening, from For the term of his natural life.
Read it carefully, and the apparatus of historical authority dissolves on inspection.
“According to the recorded testimony of many respectable persons” – no names, no documents, no citations. The phrase “respectable persons” is doing enormous work here, invoking authority without providing any. And notice who is conspicuously absent from Clarke’s list of witnesses: convicts themselves. The entire portrait of convict depravity is drawn from the testimony of their gaolers and social superiors.
“A bottle of brandy was considered to be cheaply bought at the price of twenty lashes” – presented as established fact, but the kind of vivid anecdote that circulated freely in colonial moral panic literature, untethered from any reliable source. It also, incidentally, undermines Clarke’s own flogging narrative: if convicts were voluntarily trading twenty lashes for a drink, the lash was clearly not the annihilating terror he depicts elsewhere in the novel.
“Of too horrible a nature to be more than hinted at here” — a well-worn Victorian-era rhetorical device. The strategic non-description conjures worse horrors in the reader’s imagination than any actual description could, while conveniently requiring no evidence whatsoever.
The paragraph moves from vague attribution to unnamed witnesses to unverifiable anecdote to deliberate vagueness, and arrives at a sweeping conclusion: “all that the vilest and most bestial of human creatures could invent and practise” – that is pure polemic dressed as history. This is not a method that would survive contact with an ethics committee, let alone a peer reviewer.
Clarke was writing Gothic moral outrage, not history. The problem is that generations of readers have not always noticed the difference.
What Clarke Got Right
To be accurate, Clarke didn’t invent the brutality he described. The secondary penal stations: Macquarie Harbour, Norfolk Island, Port Arthur, were genuinely terrible. The flogging of convicts in chain gangs was real. The Alexander Pearce case, which underlies the cannibalism episode, actually happened. Clarke drew on documented incidents, and the transportation system was, by any standard, cruel and exploitative.
Image: TAHO NS1013-1-1866
The problem is not that Clarke fabricated horrors. It’s that he selected, concentrated, and dramatised them in ways that distort the overall picture, and then claimed, with some cheek, that there were no exaggerations. The typical assigned convict, working in a trade they knew, housed and fed by a private employer, living something not entirely unlike a constrained working life, is essentially absent from Clarke’s novel. That person doesn’t make for good Victorian fiction. But that person was the statistical norm.
The Damage Done
None of this is to rehabilitate the transportation system. It was a brutal exercise in colonial power that destroyed lives, separated families, and subjected people, mostly poor, mostly from the margins of British and Irish society, to conditions of coercion that no amount of revisionist reframing can make acceptable.
But there is a difference between condemning the historical reality and accepting a novelist’s dramatisation of it as fact. When Australians read Clarke and come away believing that flogging was the universal, relentless experience of every convict at every stage of their sentence, they carry a distorted picture: one that obscures the economic calculations behind the system, the variation in convict experience, and the actual mechanisms by which the colonial administration controlled its workforce.
Clarke was a great Australian novelist. For the Term of His Natural Life is a serious literary achievement, and it deserves its place in the canon on those terms. What it doesn’t deserve is its unearned status as a history text.
He was wrong about the exaggerations. He exaggerated. And 150 years later, it’s worth saying so.
Further Reading
Primary source Marcus Clarke, For the Term of His Natural Life (1874). Available free at Project Gutenberg: gutenberg.org
Convict history and the revisionist debate Stephen Nicholas (ed.), Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia’s Past (Cambridge University Press, 1988)
Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Closing Hell’s Gates: The Death of a Convict Station (Allen & Unwin, 2008)
Kippen, R., & McCalman, J. (2015). Mortality under and after sentence of male convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), 1840–1852. The History of the Family, 20(3), 345–365.
Flogging and punishment Penelope Edmonds and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, ‘The Whip Is a Very Contagious Kind of Thing: Flogging and Humanitarian Reform in Penal Australia’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 17(1), 2016
Mortality and punishment Rebecca Kippen and Iain McCalman, ‘Mortality Under and After Sentence of Male Convicts Transported to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), 1840–1852’, The History of the Family, 20(3), 2015
Digital resources The Digital Panopticon: digitalpanopticon.org — searchable database of convict records including the Founders and Survivors VDL dataset
TAHO Tasmanian Name Index: linc.tas.gov.au — primary source convict records online
Useful dates in relation to this article
1846 – 1881 Marcus Clarke
1870 – 1872 – serialisation of For the Term of His Natural Life in The Australian Journal
1927 – Movie For the Term of His Natural Life was the most expensive Australian silent film of its time. For more information: The National Film and Sound Archive https://www.nfsa.gov.au/stories/articles/natural-life The film was completely restored by the National Film and Sound Archive in 2024–2025
1983 – Television miniseries For the Term of His Natural Life
Opening and closing dates of penal settlements mentioned in the book
| 1822 | 1833 | Macquarie Harbour and Sarah Island |
| 1788 | 1825 | Norfolk Island 1st settlement |
| 1824 | 1844 | Norfolk Island 2nd settlement |
| 1830 | 1877 | Port Arthur |
| 1834 | 1849 | Point Puer |
| 1844 | 1856 | Norfolk Island under VDL management |
| 1846 | 1847 | Sarah Island re-opened as probation station |
I am the author of hobarthistory.com.au and I am completing Speaker for the Dead – a history of capital punishment in Van Diemen’s Land and Tasmania 1806–1946.
