For the Term of His Natural Life is a 1927 Australian film directed, produced and co-written by Norman Dawn. It is based on the 1874 novel by Marcus Clarke, and was the most expensive Australian silent film ever made. It remains one of the most famous Australian films of the silent era. John Laws, in the trailer above, calls it “the grandest of them all, the climax of Australia’s silent cinema.” Amazingly, it was the third attempt to film the story, starting in 1908 with the film version of a stage play of the book,  and then in 1911 another filmed stage adaptation, The Life of Rufus Dawes.

It’s the story of a gentleman (in the traditional sense of that obsolete term) who is wrongly convicted and transported to Australia for “the term of his natural life.” This was a fairly common trope in Victorian novels (no one wanted to read about real criminals), and was recreated by Tim Burton when he made Sweeney Todd into a returned convict in his version of the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. As a convict, he changes his name to Rufus Dawes, and the rest of the story tells of the brutality of life as a convict at Macquarie Harbour in Tasmania and his eventual escape to claim his innocence. And, in the American version of the film, a happy ending (the book and the British version saw the hero and his true love come to a watery end).

The bit that interests devotees of Cannibal Studies in this story is the escape of a group of men led by a particularly evil-looking convict named Matt Gabbett (played by Arthur McLaglen in the 1927 film).

Being a silent movie, even the narrator gets an intertitle card:

After nine days with no food, Gabbett points out that there are only two choices— starvation, or eating one of the followers, who has fortuitously become lame. We see him taking an axe to a fellow escapee, while the others cringe, as we suppose semi-civilised folk would.

Gabbett tells them:

The cannibalism subplot was one of the most controversial aspects of the film. Gabbett is based on the true story of Alexander Pearce, who escaped from Macquarie Harbour in 1822 with seven other prisoners. Once recaptured, Pearce confessed that he had eaten his companions, but the magistrate in Hobart refused to believe him. A year later, Pearce escaped again and this time he was recaptured with the flesh of another man still in his pockets. He was taken to Hobart and hanged.

The story languished somewhat until revived in a six hour mini-series in 1983. In 2008-09, a number of Australian films were made that referenced Pearce – The Last Confession of Alexander Pearce (2008), directed by Michael James Rowland; Dying Breed (2008 – about his supposed offspring who are still eating people in the 21^st century), directed by Jody Dwyer; and Van Dieman’s Land (2009), directed by Jonathan auf der Heide, which cut the crap and concentrated on the cannibalism story. We’ll get to revue this one, dear reader, one of these days.

The controversy over Norman Dawn’s 1927 version was driven partly by Tasmanian sensitivities about the unwholesome revelation of the island’s history. Marcus Clarke’s book was one thing; a big international motion picture, intended for a mass audience overseas, was quite another. Certainly, the film does sensationalise the cannibalism, shifting the focus away from the book’s message, which was to advocate prison reform. Prisoners like Gabbett (played by the brother of well-known British actor Victor McLaglen) seemed more likely to offer justification of capital punishment.

Australia is sorely lacking in cannibal stories, so even though Alexander Pearce was Irish (as were a large percentage of convicts), we claim him as our own. He did, after all, eat people and get hanged here, and if he hadn’t, no one would even remember he ever existed.

The film is currently available on YouTube.