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INTRODUCTION
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I am a “White convert.” This phrase is used by teachers and scholars in the field of Australian literature to identify enthusiasts who find their way to Australian fiction through the works of the novelist Patrick White.
 
It was during the late 1960s in a Boston hotel room that, by chance, I found a copy of White’s novel Voss. I was there for a teachers’ conference, but, as things turned out, that night I was the student. Turning the pages of White’s masterpiece, I was exhilarated and read until dawn. I learned that a great voice, a major writer in English, was alive and well and living in Australia. All I remember about that conference now is my reaction to Patrick White, contemplating what I read, wondering what else was out there. As soon as I got home, I looked for his work, but not much was then readily available. From London I got his other books, which confirmed my first impression. I had encountered a literary giant.
 
Most of his fiction is set at the other end of the world, Australia, a place to which I, like many Americans at the time, had not given much thought. White’s novels led me to investigate the literature further, and I found that there is, in fact, a storehouse of strong and delightful fiction, a treasury, written by Australians. Much of this fiction is in one way or another actually about Australia, at once both faintly familiar and strange.
 
Australia seemed to me to be the distant home of distant family. I felt both the strangeness of the writing and the tug of a common bond. That I, or any American, should experience a lingering sense of knowing is not surprising. The United States and Australia are, after all, parts of the new world built of immigrant dreams and colonial economics. History records that in the British Empire both were colonies, seen as children, all bound to the founding mother, England, by ties of sentiment as well as trade.
 
Nineteenth-century observers tell us just how closely the United States and Australia were linked in the colonial mind. In 1885, for example, a Melbourne statesman envisioned Australia as becoming “a second United States in the Southern Hemisphere.”1 And a Victorian writer impressed with the good manners of Australians described them as having an “American smartness” tempered by an “Australian softness,” of which he greatly approved.2 There were and are resemblances, serious and substantial parallels, between the United States and Australia, including our common language, our pioneer experience, our historical encounter with native peoples, and, of course, our tradition of democratic political values.
 
My recognition of national kinship, the sense that I knew these people from somewhere way back, made Australian novels and short fiction accessible and comfortable for me. However, the more I read, the more I took note of significant differences between American and Australian national experiences. Probing deeply into their country’s history and culture, Australian writers tell a distinctive story. Their fiction reveals, underneath the surface similarities, a unique heritage.
 
It can be a real surprise for an American to discover, for example, just how different the land of Australia is from North America, how harsh and forbidding it was to early colonists. Unlike fertile, well-watered North America, Australia’s river systems are scanty, its rainfall modest. As the first Australian literature—diaries, journals, and official reports—suggests, the continent was not a place that early settlers could easily call home. They took possession of a flat land, a large part of it desert, that seemed immense.
 
Everything about it was strange to European eyes. There were trees whose bark fell off in sheets, birds that could not fly, and egg-laying mammals. In the very center of the land early settlers found a “dead heart.” The sand and stone of the Outback penetrated deeply into the Australian psyche, even though most Australians settled in the forest and woodland coastal basins. Early Europeans were struck by the vast silence. We find in their writing such phrases as “the trackless immeasurable desert,” the “awful silence,”3 the “indescribable solitude [of] untenanted wastes.”4 This reaction to the land persists, finding its way into contemporary literature.
 
In fact, a number of central themes in Australian literature have their roots in the Australian national experience. Knowing something of Australia’s history enriches the reader’s pleasure in its fiction.
 
A Brief History of Australia and Its Literature
 
Early Australian literature can be traced back in time to well before the British arrived on the continent. For there was in Europe a literature about Australia, a number of legends that whispered of gold in a southern continent inhabited by a savage race. It was legend that spurred the exploration of the great land mass that stretched out between Africa and America, called on old maps terra australis. Although the Portuguese and the Dutch visited the continent with their ships, looking for gold or other marketable resources, the English came to stay. They did not come, however, for typical colonial reasons.
 
To look at colonial origins, it is necessary to go back to the English explorer Captain James Cook, who visited the east coast of Australia in the ship Endeavour in 1770 and found a good harbor just south of present-day Sydney. The expedition’s passengers busily collected specimens of strange plants, suggesting the name for the spot—Botany Bay. Cook annexed the eastern coast of Australia for England and called it New South Wales. The captain is justly celebrated in Australian poetry, but the settlers who followed him are of much greater literary concern. Most of them arrived in chains.
 
Following the war of independence with its American colonies, England was forced to find a new place to dump its overflow of convicts. That place was Australia. Eleven vessels arrived in Australia in January 1788: two armed ships, three cargo boats, and six transports loaded with convict passengers. These new settlers, already exiled from their own society thanks to their prison terms, were exiled once again, this time dispatched across an ocean to an unknown world.
 
Australia was a strange settlement and certainly didn’t fit the notion of “colony” that Americans associate with their own historical beginnings. Convicts and their guards, a special corps of military police, made up the community. Survival was a question and near-starvation a reality for a few years, but gradually the new place took shape. Convicts worked on government farms or officers’ lands.5 The guards accumulated large property holdings, backed by supplies, seed, and free convict labor, courtesy of the English Crown. While they policed the convicts, many of them also prospered in business, particularly the rum trade, buying from incoming ships and selling at a profit.
 
The ladder of social class was firmly constructed right from the beginning. Convicts serving time were at the bottom. Convicts who, for various reasons, were allowed to work on their own were known as ticket-of-leave workers and were a step above. In time, some convicts were pardoned or their sentences expired; they were called emancipists and stood a rung higher, but of course below those who came to the colony as free settlers. Civil officers sent by the Crown were near the top of the social ladder, while the military officer corps was the “aristocracy” of the prison settlement, at least insofar as power was concerned.
 
The governors sent from England to take charge of the colony had no lack of work. Economic troubles; difficulty in controlling the unbridled military, which wanted to run things its own way; conflict with Aborigines who resisted the loss of their land; the threat from rebellious Irish convicts, many of whom were political prisoners—all of these were recurrent problems.
 
Given such a start, it is not surprising that the very first Australian novel was a convict narrative. Quintus Servinton, a Tale Founded upon Incidents of Real Occurrence (1830), written by a convicted forger and debtor, Henry Savery, is autobiographical. The central character is an English businessman who is imprisoned and transported. Another convict-theme colonial work, Ralph Rashleigh by James Tucker, was written in the late 1840s. The very Australian experiences of the central character, a London thief, include his convict days, his life with a gang of outlaws, and his encounters with Aborigines.
 
Many Australian novels and short stories make central use of the convict or prison theme. However, the centerpiece of this tradition is Marcus Clarke’s classic His Natural Life (1870—1872), unfortunately little known outside Australia. (A portion of this novel is included in the present volume.) To tell the story of Rufus Dawes, an innocent man unjustly dispossessed, exiled, and brutalized, Clarke did on-site research into the prison system and shaped a narrative based in good part on history. The experience of Rufus Dawes has haunted me ever since I read this novel. Going far beyond merely a literary re-creation of the convict era, His Natural Life describes life itself as a prison and suffering as human destiny.
 
In a different style, another convict tale, this time by the contemporary Thomas Keneally, adopts the point of view of an unwilling soldier conscripted by force into the low ranks of the military police. Bring Larks and Heroes (1967) narrates the miseries of life for a thoughtful and sensitive man in Australia’s first prison colony. Patrick White also makes excellent use of a convict character and a setting of whips and leg irons in the Tasmanian prison colony. His vivid novel A Fringe of Leaves (1967) combines adventure and early Australian history to trace the contours of the human spirit when it is challenged to the extreme.
 
Australia’s prison heritage has left a deep cultural impression. It was no small enterprise. More than 160,000 men, women, and children, sentenced for crimes ranging from attendance at a politically suspect meeting to murder, were sent to Australia before the last penal colony was closed in 1877. The idea of the prison has been used metaphorically as well as literally. For example, John Ireland in an experimental novel, The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (1971), portrays contemporary industrial Australia as one huge prison. The modern worker is captive to international business that is mindless, rudderless, and heartless. The contemporary worker is like the convict, a slave to a dehumanizing system.
 
The reader of Australian literature begins to think about the consequences of a prison origin for a nation’s self-image and sense of identity. What a contrast Australia’s origins pose, for example, to Americans whose nation grew out of the search for religious freedom. What does it mean for a nation to know that it began as a society of convicts and guards?