His Natural Life

This edition is the first to print the complete original version of the novel in volume form. Foreshadowing the nightmare visions of the twentieth century in which evil is perceived as central to the condition of man, His Natural Life is a novel of startling power and originality. It is the greatest novel to come out of colonial Australia and pinpoints with shocking immediacy the reality of Botany Bay and the horrors of the transportation system - a fate so awful tht many convicts hanged themselves rather than suffer it. Written by a ‘kaleidoscopic, particoloured, harlequinesque, thaumatropic being’, as his friend Gerald Manley Hopkins described Marcus Clarke, it traces the fortunes of Richard Dawes at the hands of th ‘system’. Broken and disastrously changed by his treatment, Dawes nevertheless survives, a figure haunting as much for the vicissitudes he suffers as for the psychological brilliance of his characterization. Yet Marcus Clarke’s novel is more than an enthralling narrative and a catalogue of horrors. Its descriptive vigour and the telling portrayal of a struggling new society fraught with tension and paradoxes endow it with a moral and spiritual resonance that ‘will always assure it a place in the evolution of the literature of evil’.