Australian Writers. Desmond Byrne
excuse, therefore, in offering to the Australian public a novel in which the plot, the sympathies, the interest, and the moral, are all English, must be that I have endeavoured to depict with such skill as is permitted to me the fortunes of a young Australian in that country which young Australians still call “Home.” ’
Without this prefatory sign-post, the reader could never have suspected such a purpose. Clarke may have had it definitely in his mind when he first sat down to the work; but if so, it was put aside, consciously or unconsciously, after the completion of the first few chapters, in favour of more complex characterisation. Bob Calverley, the young squatter, really holds a third or fourth place [p 59] in relation to the main motive of the story, and is used rather as a foil than as an exemplar of anything typically Australian. He does not bear any active part in the drama of passion and intrigue; he is not even permitted to be a passive spectator of it.
To say that he was good-natured, jovial, popular, ‘the sort of man that one involuntarily addresses by his Christian name’; that although he was shy and awkward in the society of ladies, at ease with his own sex only when cattle and horses were the subject of conversation, ignorant of music, and unable to tell Millais from Tenniel, he ‘could pick you out any bullock in a herd … shear a hundred sheep a day … and drive four horses down a sidling in a Gippsland range with any man in Australia,’—to say all this by way of preliminary, to add that Calverley was no fool, and yet to show him in scarcely any other guise than that of a trusting victim of rogues, is to go a very short distance in the portrayal of a typical Australian.
In the slack-baked condition in which we find him, he merely repeats the ordinary [p 60] spectacle of green youth in the process of seeing life and buying experience at the usual high figure. Compared with the real squatter (who, ordinarily, is college-trained, and does not shear sheep nor risk his neck unnecessarily), Bob, the son of rich ‘Old Calverley,’ and nephew of an English baronet, is as an exaggerated stock-figure of the stage to the commonplace blood and brain of everyday life. A childlike trust in one’s fellows, a reputation for good-nature, an untamable taste for horseflesh and the pursuits of the Bush, belong to every young squatter in a certain class of Australian fiction; they are qualities which may be applied indiscriminately, with always some effect.
The real squatter is a more civilised and reliable, if less picturesque, person. He likes both work and pleasure, provided they be suitably proportioned. His work is in the personal management of his properties; his pleasure is taken in the large cities. He entertains no fantastic prejudices against urban life, in proof of which he often spends his later years in some city hundreds of miles [p 61] from the scene of his early toil and pastoral successes.
As a young man in London, he can be found with rooms at the Langham, the Métropole, or some other of the half-dozen fashionable hotels known to colonial visitors. There he will entertain his friends, joining with them, in turn, the continuous movements of the society season. He frankly lacks much of the ease and polish of the young Englishman, but his natural amiability and good spirits largely compensate for these deficiencies, while they preclude any feeling of discomfort on his own part.
During his three or six months’ stay in London (the combination usually of a little business with a very full programme of pleasure) he spends freely, and in his tour of the clubs plays here and there a little at cards—perchance loses. Worldly beyond his reputation, and somewhat Chesterfieldian in his principles, he consents to be a Roman while at Rome. He has inherited the British hatred of fuss and personal peculiarity, and none shall call him mean. But, unlike many [p 62] of his English friends at club and course, he has watched and taken some part in the hard process of making money, and knows the difference between a little gentlemanly extravagance and the reckless hazarding of a fortune. At least, it may be affirmed of him that in nine cases out of ten he is decidedly no fool.
These are only a few of the prominent outlines of the type of young man who, his holiday over, returns unspoiled to work on his own or his father’s estates. Those whose passion for a horse destroys all self-control, who spend thousands in gambling and betting, who innocently take every smooth gentleman at his own valuation, are merely individuals—persons who may as unfailingly be found in England or elsewhere as in Australia.
Sam Buckley is a typical descendant of the British pioneer colonists, as every Australian knows. In attempting to give an answer to his own speculation of ‘How would Sam Buckley get on in England?’ Clarke presumably undertook to continue the portrayal of this type. The result, considered [p 63] apart from the function Calverley fulfils in Long Odds, must be held as emphatically a failure.
Never was a novel written with a franker or more deliberate purpose than that shown in For the Term of his Natural Life. The author had the twofold object of picturing the dreadful crudities and brutalities of the early system of convict ‘reformation’ in Australia, and of preventing their possible repetition elsewhere. The first of these aims was attained with a fuller employment, and perhaps more moderate statement of historical facts, than can be found in any other fiction of the same class; the second was ineffective, because, when it found expression, the abuses which had suggested it no longer continued at the Antipodes, and could not conceivably be repeated on the existing settlements at Port Blair and Noumea.
The story was written a quarter of a century too late to assist the abolition of convict transportation to Australia. Had it appeared at the right time, it might have done much where formal inquiries and the [p 64] testimonies of disinterested and humane observers had repeatedly failed. For sixty years the practice of deporting criminals had been carried on, upheld in England by official indifference and callousness, and in the colonies themselves by the greed of a small class of private persons who grew rapidly wealthy upon the strength of assigned convict labour, until the free emigrants by the authority of their numbers were able to insist upon its cessation. For so long as the colonies were willing to receive a population of criminals, so long was England only too anxious to supply them and make a virtue out of it. It mattered little to the official mind that the system was incurably bad and immoral; the main thing was to speedily and effectually transfer an awkward burden to other shoulders. The entire history of penal transportation from Great Britain throws a sinister light upon the national character. The practice originated with banishment of convicts to the American colonies under conditions which constituted a form of slavery.
[p 65]
The criminal on being sentenced became a marketable chattel of the State. His services were sold by public auction, the purchaser acquiring the right to transport him and sell him for the term of his sentence to a builder, planter, manufacturer, or other employer beyond the Atlantic. The price paid to the British Government averaged five pounds per head, and some of the more useful prisoners were resold in America for twenty-five pounds each. One of these dealers in convict labour, in giving evidence before a committee of the House of Commons, made a matter-of-fact complaint that ‘the trade’ was not so remunerative as people supposed. Artisans sold well, but the profit realised upon them was often consumed by losses upon some of the others. One-seventh of his purchases died on his hands, and in the course of business he had been obliged to give the old, the halt and the lame in for nothing. When the War of Independence closed the United States against the traffic, Britain was given a fresh opportunity to reconsider and place its penal system upon a more [p 66] humane basis; but the temptation to adopt sweeping measures was once more too strong to be resisted. The promoters of the Australian scheme were in so great a hurry to seize their chance that they despatched over seven hundred convicts before even the site for the first settlement was chosen. The hardships which this characteristic act afterwards entailed are too familiar in history to need repetition. After such recklessness, it is no wonder that, as Sir Roger Therry has observed, ‘the first-fruits of the system exhibited a state of society in New South Wales which the world might be challenged to surpass in depravity.’
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