For the Term of His Natural Life

An innocent man is transported to Van Diemen''s Land and passes through the whole convict system - the hulks, Macquarie Harbour, Norfolk Island - and out the other side barely human. Clarke researched it in the colonial archives and interviewed survivors; it is the great Australian novel of the convict era. Fifty-seven plates from Hogarth to Holman Hunt, 1732 to 1877, fix the novel in the English social world whose courts and prisons sent its characters to the other side of the earth.