Introductory activities
Students could start to read the novel before the unit begins, writing chapter summaries as outlined below.
Contemporary Australians are aware to various degrees that the first British settlement in the colony at Port Jackson (today’s Sydney) was established as a prison for convicts and that other convict settlements were set up in places such as Macquarie Harbour and Port Arthur in Tasmania and on Norfolk Island.
- Initiate a class discussion to find out what prior knowledge students have of the conditions in Britain which led to the need for a convict settlement on the other side of the world, of the transportation system and of convictism in the Australian colonies.
- Read to the class the poem ‘The Old Prison’ by Judith Wright and analyse it in terms of its message and its literary features.
- Similarly, read selected extracts from The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes. Read passages that parallel scenes from the novel.
- Have students search online for documents about Martin Cash, the ‘gentleman’ bush-ranger, and Bishop Ullathorpe who led a campaign against continued transportation to the Australian colonies on moral grounds. Explain that Marcus Clarke would have been aware of both the bush-ranger’s account of his adventures in Tasmania and of the anti-transportation campaign and these may have influenced the writing of his novel.
- Ask students to speculate about the meaning of the title of the novel.
- Have students explore one aspect of the history of the penal colonies in Tasmania that has captured the popular imagination in recent times, the story of Alexander Peace, the cannibal convict. Some of this may be attributable to the popularity of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels and the films made from them. Students will also be aware of the recent Wolf Creek movies, examples of Australian Gothic Horror. (Remind students that the character of Gabbett in For the Term of His Natural Life is modelled on Pearce.)
Personal response on reading the text
1. Keeping a reading journal
Ask students to keep a reading journal as they read the novel for the first time, keeping a record of events and their responses to them, by writing a series of chapter summaries.
2. Writing a journal-type entry after reading the novel
Ask students to write a response to the novel in the form of a journal entry. The journal entry should be a piece of continuous prose in which students consider:
- Textual features related to possible genres. (Is this novel a romance, a murder-mystery, a historical novel?)
- The social context of the classroom and how other students make meaning of the novel. (Are the students fairly similar or different in terms of background, gender, ethnicity, for example? Obviously, class discussion around these issues needs to be handled with sensitivity. However, as long as there is goodwill among class members discussion should be productive, encouraging students to become aware of how their social identity affects how they read and the meanings that they make.)
- The psychological response of students to various characters. Empathy? Revulsion?
- Their own experiences. (Have they ever been to Port Arthur or Norfolk Island on holiday?)
- Different responses by different cultural groups. (For example, by a conservative ‘law and order’ group? By a prisoner support group like Sisters Inside? Are these differing cultural positions likely to be reflected among students in this classroom? Students should be asked to share their ideas in pair interviews and later in whole class discussion. Students could also be asked to contribute to a class blog if this facility is available to the class. This would have the advantage of allowing students the opportunity of expressing an opinion without the pressure of having an immediate, perhaps ill-considered, response from other students.)
(Students should read the attached example model response for The Lord of the Rings (PDF, 109KB) to help them with this exercise.)
(ACELRO37)
Outline of key elements of the text
Plot
Explain to students some different narrative structures and have them consider these in relation to the structure of this novel:
- The Hero’s Journey. (Does this apply here?)
- Mythic structure. (Four archetypes: romance; tragedy; satire and irony; comedy. Which describes For the Term of His Natural Life?)
- Aristotle’s theory. (A three-stage plot structure: a weakness in the protagonist’s character; self-recognition by the protagonist; a ‘reversal’ in the protagonist’s situation. How well does this describe the plot of this novel and its protagonist, Rufus Dawes?)
Character
The tendency for most readers is to think of the characters in a novel as real people. The author creates this illusion by providing some information about them which readers then embellish.
Ask students to create a retrieval chart on which they list the following information headings:
- Physical appearance,
- Behaviour,
- What they say,
- Reactions of other characters,
- What the author says,
relating to the major characters from the novel:
- Rufus Dawes,
- Maurice Frere,
- Sylvia Vickers,
- Sarah Purfoy,
- John Rex,
- James North,
- Reverend Meekin.
Themes
Writers do not usually begin with themes or issues but instead with characters and situations. The themes in a novel then emerge as characters interact with each other in the episodes that make up the plot of the novel. However, it is also possible that an author does begin with a theme in mind and then assembles the elements of the novel to develop that theme.
Ask students to brainstorm the themes that they think emerge from a reading of For the Term of His Natural Life.
Here are some that they might think of:
- the role of fate in our lives,
- the nature of love,
- materialism versus spirituality,
- crime and punishment,
- state power and the individual,
- representations of masculinity and femininity,
- man’s inhumanity to man,
- colonialism.
Ask students to rate the themes in order of importance, 1–6 etc., on a two-column table, one headed ‘Readers in 1874’ and the other ‘Readers in 2015’. (Of course, explain that readers today can only make an educated guess about what readers in the past have considered important.)
Then, ask students in small groups or a whole class discussion to share their lists and examine perceived changes over time.
(ACELRO40)
Synthesising task
Ask students to prepare and deliver a short talk to the class on one of the following topics.
- Explain which character was of most interest to them and reflect on how the author has positioned them as readers to ‘read’ that character. Explain that the character may be interesting because of the complexity of their representation or because they are simply a major character but ask students also to consider the possibility that they actually ‘read’ themselves into the character. (This is particularly applicable for female readers who might resist reading the story from the position of the male protagonist.)
- Explain which theme of the novel they think would have most resonance with modern readers.
- Respond to the climax and resolution of the plot by giving a personal view on how satisfactorily they think the author has concluded the novel.