Born in Kensington, London in 1846, Marcus Clarke migrated to Australia and arrived in Melbourne in 1863. He initially worked in a bank and then on stations in the Ararat area between 1865 and 1867, before becoming a journalist, theatre critic and playwright. His short stories introduced a new style taken up further by writers in the 1890s: a focus on existence itself rather than dramatic incidents. He was a prolific writer, though is best known for his novel His Natural Life (1874). Through this novel he cemented his reputation as one of the major writers of the Australian canon before the 1890s.
Clarke is also well known for his preface to the 1876 edition of Adam Lindsay Gordon’s Sea Spray and Smoke Drift. In this preface Clarke describes the Australian landscape as expressing a kind of “weird melancholy”, an adaptation from descriptions of paintings by Buvelot and Chevalier which he had written earlier. From the 1890s on, this preface was continually held up as typical of a negative, alienated “English” view of the Australian landscape, compared unfavourably with the cheerful, sunlit vision of the 1890s generation as characterised by “Banjo” Paterson.
His Natural Life was first published in serial form between 1870 and 1872, before being published in book form in Britain in 1874. There are many differences between the serialised and book version, most particularly the ending. The book finishes with the death of the lead character, Richard Devine, whereas in the serial version he lives. Devine is convicted of a crime he did not commit and sentenced to life as a convict in Tasmania. He then takes on a new identity as Rufus Dawes, and is thrown into the Tasmanian convict system where he encounters brutality from his cousin Maurice Frere, a penal officer, and other convicts like John Rex and the cannibal Gabbett. The novel explores the belief that man and civilisation could survive without God. It also covers a common theme of its time: the effect of the environment on man. It dealt with the question of whether a good man will succumb to an evil environment such as that found in the penal colonies. All of Dawes’ good acts backfire on him, until he is left in total despair and utterly alienated. The novel also questions the future of a colony that has such an evil past. His Natural Life continues to be read, with a new edition published in 2002. It still captivates because of its themes and also for its emotional power. There are several film and stage versions of the novel.