Marcus Clarke (1846-1881) was an Australian novelist, journalist, poet, and librarian. Born in London, Clarke was educated at Highgate School, where he was a classmate of poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. Orphaned in 1862, Clarke emigrated to Australia the following year. After toiling as a bank clerk in Melbourne, he moved to a remote station along the Wimmera River and learned the art of farming. In 1867, having published several stories for the Australian Magazine, Clarke found steady work with The Argus and The Australasian back in Melbourne, gaining a reputation as a popular journalist of urban life. In 1870, after taking a trip to Tasmania to report on the status of the nation's penal colonies, Clarke began publishing his novel For the Term of His Natural Life (1874) in serial installments in The Australian Journal. The work was quickly recognized as a classic of Australian literature, earning its author comparisons to such literary titans as Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Towards the end of his life, Clarke worked as an assistant librarian at the Melbourne Public Library-now the State Library Victoria-where many of his manuscripts, notebooks, letters, and diaries are held today.

Falsely implicated in his father's murder, Richard Devine is transported to the brutal penal colonies of Van Diemen's Land. At the far end of the world, he changes his name to Rufus Dawes, is blamed for a failed mutiny, and suffers solitary confinement on a small, forsaken island. For the Term of His Natural Life is a novel by Marcus Clarke.