If ever you feel unhappy and discontented with the modern world, watching 'For The Term Of His Natural Life' will put an end to your grumbling and make you grateful you are living in the twenty first century and not the nineteenth. This gripping and disturbing movie begins in the year 1834, when England shipped criminals to penal settlements in Australia. Men, women and children were transported to a British colony on the other side of the world - often to serve life sentences of imprisonment imposed as a result of amazingly petty crimes.
One of these unfortunate wretches is the central character of the film, which was made in Australia in 1983. Rufus Dawes (Colin Friels) is wrongly convicted of stealing a watch and sentenced to transportation to Australia - in the words of the judge 'for the term of your natural life'. Based on the novel by Marcus Clarke, the movie shows not only the severity and inhumanity of the penal code of the day, but also the barbaric nature of the treatment of convicts under the transportation system.
Bad luck continues to stalk Dawes on his voyage to Australia. He is once more wrongly accused - this time of master minding a mutiny by the convicts - which earns him six months solitary confinement upon his arrival at Macquarie Harbour, the site of the toughest convict prison in Tasmania. A punishing regime of hard labour follows, overseen by Captain Vickers (Patrick Macnee), the tough but fair commander of the prison colony.
The same cannot be said of his deputy, Lieutenant Maurice Frere (Rod Mullinar), a sadistic disciplinarian who proceeds to bully, abuse and provoke Dawes. When he finally snaps and attacks his tormentor, more solitary confinement follows - this time on a bleak isolated rock out to sea. Frere's vicious behaviour shows dramatically how power can quickly create a monster. In desperation, Dawes jumps off the rock and manages to swim ashore.
At the same time, the penal settlement is moved west/east from Macquarie Harbour to Port Arthur, and in another convict mutiny at sea, Frere is captured by convicts and abandoned on a beach, together with Major Vickers' wife (Samantha Eggar) and daughter Sylvia (Penelope Stewart).
By chance they come across the fleeing Dawes, who builds a coracle enabling them all to be rescued at sea. Frere promises Dawes a pardon, but subsequently goes back on his word and claims Dawes tried to kill him and the Vickers family - vivid proof of the impossibility of winning when faced with a compulsive liar. Dawes is sent to Port Arthur to continue his sentence, where he is ordered to flog another prisoner and then flogged himself for refusing to finish the requisite lashes .
While working in the prison coal mine, the luckless Dawes is wrongly convicted yet again - this time of murdering a fellow prisoner, for which he is sentenced to death. He is saved by the bravery and humanity of the prison chaplain. The Reverend North - brilliantly played by Anthony Perkins - changes place with Dawes and gives him his clerical attire- enabling him to escape from Port Arthur to temporary freedom on a boat to Sydney . His miraculous escape is one of many unexpected twists in Marcus Clarke's riveting narrative.
The sets for this epic movie are superb - the wilderness of Tasmania, the brutal environment of the prisons, the romance of sea voyages in the years of sail, not to mention the horror of storms at sea. 'For The Term Of His Natural Life' brings hardship, brutality, treachery, repression to stark reality. And most importantly, it shows the resilience of the human spirit in the face of impossible odds. It's not a happy tale, but without doubt you should not miss this exciting movie based on a dark chapter in English history.
