THE PENAL SETTLEMENT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 732, 24 July 1953, Page 12

THE PENAL SETTLEMENT

RALPH RASHLEIGH, by James Tucker; are and Robertson. Australian price, 1 . wae 0

(Reviewed by

P.J.

W.

pioneer novels, Robbery Under Arms and For the Term of His Natural Life, it would not be’ inappropriate to add as a third this story about life in the convict colony, among the bushTangers and aborigines. It was written in 1845, some 30 or 40 years earlier than its better-known successors, and has only now been published in full, although a mutilated form of it appeared in'1929. The author was transported for life in 1827, and after a miserable existence in and out of the penal settlements, as a_ ticket-of-leave man and an old lag, finally died in 1866 at Liverpool Asylum. His masterpiece, along with two plays, was written while he was in the Port Macquarie gaol. The story of Ralph Rashleigh is in the picaresque or rogue novel tradition of Smollett’s Roderick Random or Fielding’s Jonathan, Wild, and with its 18th Century flavour it is- an interesting example of a transplanted culture continuing to produce works in a mode which had become obsolete in the old world. The action moves at a fast pace ie the two great Australian

through incident after incident, without the moralising of Marcus Clarke’s Tasmanian tale; and the gruesome, repulsive, or cruel episodes which are related with such convincing authenticity, the murders, robberies, battles, mutinies, fights, fires, shootings and debauches, are relieved only on occasions-by Rashleigh’s idyllic account of work with the Australian-Irish farmers, of his years as an adopted son of a tribe of aborigines, or of his comic experiences with a prison theatrical company. Ralph Rashleigh is slighter in construction than its successors in the field of Australian pioneer fiction, yet it gains in narrative excitement and intensity what it loses in the weight of a more solid social background. The important fact about its author is that unlike Clarke or Boldrewood he knew the convict system from the inside. He is occasionally naive in his comments, and his hero, portrayed as a sensitive, educated man, vacillates curiously between compassion and contempt for the "wretches" with whom he has to associate. But the heavy gloom of atrocity forms a cloud which the author is never able to shake off, and despite Rashleigh’s eventual release, to become manager of a sheep farm owned by a girl he had rescued from shipwreck in Torres’ Strait, the book’s concluding

pages are a sad reminder that from such sufferings as these the human‘ Spirit rarely recovers,