AustLit

Van Diemen's Land transportee John Leonard wrote an autobiographical account of his experiences in the penal colony between his arrival in Hobart Town in 1835 and his pardon in 1844. His manuscript came to the attention of the editor of short-lived Melbourne serial Australian Magazine, who published excerpts from Leonard's manuscript in the Reviews section of the November 1859 issue. The article 'The Life and Adventures of John Leonard, a Prisoner in V.D. Land' is the only surviving version of Leonard's testimony. The published article records how accounts by convict authors were rendered communicable, publishable and saleable in mid-nineteenth-century Australia.

The published excerpts of Leonard's manuscript are characteristic of prison narrative in the way the author constructs an autonomous and individualised subject-protagonist. The editor who prepared Leonard's manuscript for publication, however, constructs the protagonist as entirely passive and victimised in accordance with the magazine's stated objective to illustrate the failure of transportation as reformative and rehabilitative punishment. This paper argues that Leonard's carefully crafted autonomous autobiographical subject is confined and subjugated in publication and rendered a 'narrative captive,' incapable of autobiographical autonomy within the confines of the publication apparatus.

This narrative captivity is elucidated through a close reading of examples from the published text. Three particular conditions of confinement are identified and illustrated: extensive editorial interruption and manipulation of Leonard's manuscript; editorial adherence to received modes of writing about convictism in preparing the manuscript for publication; and the editor's misreading of Leonard's strategies to recover within autobiography the autonomy and individuality denied in the experience of Van Diemen's Land convictism. The paper concludes by situating Leonard's narrative captivity as illustrative of the machinations encoded in the publication of convict narratives, in which the convict author is only one contributor. (Author's abstract)