AustLit

Quintus Servinton was the first novel printed and published in Australia and tells the moral tale of a flawed businessman and his idealised love for Emily Clifton. Servinton, like Savery, commits forgery for which he is convicted and transported. But with its eventual pardon for Servinton and his return to England and reunion with Emily, the novel’s conclusion is in stark contrast to Savery’s fate at Port Arthur. The novel was edited by Cecil Hadgraft under the title of The Bitter Bread of Banishment, ‘formerly Quintus Servinton,’ in 1984 and is now available as an e-book on Project Gutenberg Australia in their ‘Library of Australiana.’ William Walker’s copy of the 1830/31 Hobart issue of the novel has been digitised by the Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office and is available on-line. Rod Howard has published a useful biography of Savery, A Forger's Tale : The Extraordinary Story of Henry Savery, Australia's First Novelist (Melbourne: Arcade, 2011).

See also the AustLit Entry on Henry Savery.

Another prison writer, Jorgen Jorgensen (1780-1841) was sentenced to transportation to Van Diemen’s Land in 1826 after various adventures at sea, which included being at the first settlements in Van Diemen’s Land in 1803 and 1804, and in a later island venture of 1809, involvement in a coup against the English governor of Iceland and a two-month period as the self-proclaimed ‘Protector of Iceland.’ Jorgenson’s life is characterised by wild swings between buccaneering adventure and a range of minor criminal behaviours.

In Van Diemen’s Land he was a convicted swindler, a pastoral company employee and a police constable. But he was also a talented writer and observer of the colonial situation, becoming interested in Aboriginal Tasmanians after his early expeditions to the north-west of the island. Jorgenson published 'A Shred of Autobiography' in two installments, in 1835 in James Ross’ Hobart Town Almanack (pp. 115-80) and in 1838 in William Gore Elliston’s Hobart Town Almanack and Van Diemen’s Land Annual (pp. 35-155). This autobiography was republished in 1891 in London, under the much more enticing title of The Convict King: Being the Life and Adventures of Jorgen Jorgenson, Monarch of Iceland, Naval Captain, Revolutionist, British Diplomatic Agent, Author, Dramatist, Preacher, Political Prisoner, Gambler, Hospital Dispenser, Continental Traveller, Explorer, Editor, Expatriate Exile, and Colonial Constable. This version was translated into Danish in 1892, as Brudstykker af en selvbiografi, re-edited in 1973 and re-translated into Danish in 2006.

Jorgenson kept journals of his expeditions in Van Diemen’s Land in the late 1820s and also wrote a history of the Van Diemen’s Land Company which included ‘the first record of the way of life of the Aborigines under the stresses of European settlement, by one who had seen them in their natural surroundings and pursuing, to some extent at least, their natural activities’ (Plomley 32). Jorgenson was involved in the beginning of the Black Wars in 1824, with the arrival of Arthur, and with the organisation of the ‘Roving Parties’ for the protection of white settlers and the capture and removal of Aboriginals. He was also a chief organiser of the Black Line in the Oatlands district in 1830. A book by Jorgenson about the ‘Habits, Manners, and Customs of the Aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land’ was advertised in Hobart in 1837 but never appeared. His study of the ‘Aboriginal Languages of Tasmania’ was published posthumously in the Tasmanian Journal of Natural Science in 1842 (1.4, pp. 308-18). N. J. B. Plomley retrieved the manuscript of Jorgenson’s ‘A Narrative of the Habits, Manners, and Customs of the Aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land’ from the Braim papers in the Mitchell Library, NSW and edited it in a volume entitled Jorgen Jorgenson and the Aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land (1991). This narrative is of comparable importance to George Augustus Robinson’s journals. The historian James Bonwick knew and used Jorgenson’s treatise. Jorgenson is the subject of a biography by Dan Sprod, The Usurper: Jorgen Jorgenson and his turbulent life in Iceland and Van Diemen's Land 1780-1841 (2001) and has a walk-on part in numerous narratives of convict Tasmania, including recent fiction by Richard Flanagan and Rohan Wilson, and is the subject of a well-reviewed biography by Sarah Bakewell, The English Dane : A Life of Jorgen Jorgenson (2005). The Danish literary historian Svend Erik Larsen reads Jorgenson as a notable trans-hemispherical and bi-lingual instance of a world author, one of that company of European traveller-explorer-writers that includes Ludwig Leichhardt, Stefan von Kotze and Carl Lumholtz (see Larsen).

See also the AustLit entry on Jorgen Jorgensen.

The critical tradition is beginning to take into account more recent productions in this field like Leslie Greener’s posthumous Tea for a Stranger (Hobart: Cat & Fiddle, 1975), Daniel Farson, Swansdowne (1986), Richard Flanagan, Wanting (2008), Rohan Wilson, The Roving Party (2011); To Name Those Lost (2014) and the Hobart-born crime writer Lenny Bartulin, Infamy (2013) who continue to expand the scope and form of ‘convict fiction’ in both popular and literary modes. Reviewing Rohan Wilson’s second novel of convict Tasmania, To Name Those Lost, Geordie Williamson shows how the very traditional perception of convict history as defining national origins, and therefore of Tasmania as micro-nation, continues to have currency:

The more contemporary Tasmanian literature you read, the clearer it becomes that Australia’s most geographically removed state has become the repository of our collective historical imagination. From Richard Flanagan’s colonial-era Wanting to Christopher Koch’s elegiac 19th-century finale Lost Voices, Tassie is the place to go if you want a sense of who we are as a country, the grit and the grotesquerie of our coming into being. Tasmania is, by virtue of its size and its severance from the mainland, a kind of socio­political concentrate: the hard-boiled version of elements that made us who we are. (Australian 27 Sept, 2014)

See also the AustLit 'Convict Narratives' subset.