Most Australians would struggle to name the country’s first novelist. But if you judge an author's place in a nation's conscious by the status of the suburban streets named after them, then this may come as no surprise.

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     Not for our literary pioneer the glory of Henry Lawson Drive, with its postcard-perfect views over Sydney Harbour from McMahon’s Point. Nor anything approaching the mass adulation and leafy avenues accorded a whole anthology of English poets to be found in Melbourne’s sleepy bayside 'burb of Elwood. 

     

     No, our hero’s place is cemented in history by an entirely nondescript street on the urban fringes of Canberra – and even this is a mere tributary of a larger road commemorating that more sentimental literary bloke, the poet C.J. Dennis. 

     

     At Point Cook in Victoria a tiny cul-de-sac bearing the maverick’s moniker pales into insignificance beside its more glamorously named neighbour, Miles Franklin Boulevard. But at least some history-savvy surveyor appears to have had the wit to call this little dead-end a court, a place in which our unhappy first novelist spent much time. 

 

     So perhaps when I say the name Henry Savery and am met with an apathetic gaze I should sheet the blame home to those who have chosen to shunt his fame into the outer suburbs of memory. But that is possibly unfair. The street-namers have simply reflected a pattern of indifference shown Henry since his novel was first published in Hobart in 1830. 

     

     Even the book itself didn’t bear its author’s name. For a transported death row convict who had completed his work in Hobart gaol while at the pleasure of the despot governor George Arthur, anonymity was the safest refuge. To confuse matters further, it wasn’t really a novel, but a thinly disguised autobiography in which Henry the antihero took cover under the less than catchy nom-de-plume of Quintus Servinton. 

 

     The reviews weren’t kind either. London’s leading literary periodical declared the third volume – commencing with Henry’s death sentence -  the only one worth reading. Even that, it said, might have been infinitely better. A fashionable women’s magazine declared the quality of the paper and the respectability of the type more attractive than the story itself. No second edition was forthcoming and Henry never published another book. 

 

     On this evidence, you might think Henry’s sparse representation on Google Maps entirely justified. After all, simply being the first to do something doesn’t necessarily render it noteworthy or guarantee glorification.  Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of his Natural Life was hardly the first novel to draw on the convict experience but it is certainly the book that many Australians would consider the pioneer of the genre today. 

 

     But there is more to Savery than a quick flick through a street directory – or any Australian history book for that matter - would have you believe. His novel may not have appealed to the literary fashionista of the day (or of any day after) yet his true life story contained more tragedy, farce and dramatic tension than the most sensationalist Gothic novel.  

 

     As I know most contemporary readers are about as likely to labour through the purple prose of Quintus Servinton as to tackle Virgil in the original Latin, here’s a handy cheat sheet:  

Henry, a self-seeking young blueblood reaping the profits of the slave-stained Caribbean sugar trade, commits forgery, a hanging offence. He panics and attempts to flee London for New York but a fateful chance encounter between his wife and his business partner results in his detection before leaving port. 

Henry attempts to do himself in by leaping from the ship and taking the somewhat bizarre course of repeatedly smashing his head against its hull, but fails. Next he is convinced by corrupt magistrates to plead guilty to the forgery charges on the assurance that the ploy will save him from the noose. The naïve Henry follows their advice but is sentenced to hang.

 

     Months pass on death row until finally, on execution eve, Henry is reprieved and his sentence commuted to transportation to Australia. Only days after arrival in Hobart Town he discovers that his privileged treatment as an educated convict has made him the patsy in a feud between Governor Arthur and the fledgling local press. As his rivals mount Henry successfully applies for his wife and child to join him in the colony. After they nearly perish in a storm before leaving the English Channel, Eliza Savery arrives in the company of Algernon Montagu, a young and eccentric Casanova who also happens to be the incoming Attorney-general. 

 

     Rumours of a shipboard affair between Montagu and Eliza sweep through the drawing rooms of Hobart Town. Wracked by despair Henry unsuccessfully attempts suicide once more. Eliza retreats with his son to England and Henry is chucked into the town slammer for debt. 

 

    Here Henry writes Quintus Servinton, along with satirical columns for the local press deftly mocking the personages of Hobart published in the name of The Hermit in Van Diemen’s Land. On release from gaol Henry attempts to cultivate a new a life as a tenant farmer and sometime newspaper editor, all the while being pursued by enemies and hauled into court for libel and debt. Broke and broken he eventually resorts once more to forgery. And once more is caught. 

 

     Henry is brought before the court only to find that cruel fate has dictated his judge to be his wife’s seducer, Algernon Montagu. Montagu dispatches Henry to Port Arthur where he finally succeeds in taking his own life, his exhausted fifty year old body rowed to its resting place on the Isle of the Dead in February 1842. 

 

     That’s it. A tragic tale of folly compounded by fate that resulted in the writing of our first published novel. If it weren’t for the publication of Quintus Servinton little might be known of Henry other than a few well publicised spats with George Arthur and the fiercely independent press of Van Diemen’s Land. 

Henry’s lack of success or prominence as a writer meant that there were no detailed studies of his work during, or after, his lifetime. What I did discover however was that nearly every important aspect of Quintus Servinton (subtitled A Tale Founded Upon Incidents of Real Occurrence) could actually be verified in fact. 

Henry routinely changed the names of people and places, not so much to protect the innocent as to save his own skin.

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     Yet in every case he left just enough clues to allow identification even through this distant lens. 

A previous critic had warned of the dangers of taking the book too literally, but the deeper I dug the more I discovered that Henry’s novel - Australia’s first published novel - was virtually no novel at all. It was a coded diary of events cocooned within a long, desperate mea culpa to his adulterous wife. The providential discovery of his family’s petitions and letters in a backstreet of the National Archives in England revealed that he had recorded many of their words and emotions in scrupulous detail. 

 

     The most transparently fictional sections of the book are those in which Henry’s wife Eliza is portrayed as an angel of such virtue that no heaven is fit to receive her. Likewise, George Arthur and Algernon Montagu are depicted as unswervingly kind and compassionate men – a disingenuous attempt by Savery to win back favour and escape the chains of debt and bondage.

 

     It is a book of great purpose, but that purpose does not appear to have been to charm its readers - more to resurrect the author’s social stature and win back his wife. And perhaps realising that the estranged and embittered Eliza would be unlikely to read more than a few pages, he provided a utopian vision of their happily ever after at the book’s very beginning. 

 

     So while Henry might be more accurately described as the author of Australia’s first published roman á clef, Quintus Servinton remains a fascinating window on early colonial times. The Hermit in Van Diemen’s Land has perhaps even greater claims to fame as Australia’s first extensive work of political satire. Both are now more valued by antiquarian book collectors than by any reading audience – an original copy of either would fetch an astronomical price today.

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     Yet even in 1880, Savery was already so undervalued that one avid Tasmanian book collector, William Walker, picked up a copy at a bookstore in Melbourne for a shilling and sixpence. Today only three copies of Quintus Servinton are known to exist.

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     The most determined attempt to revive Savery’s reputation came in 1984 when the NSW University Press re-issued Quintus Servinton under what it apparently considered to be a sexier title – The Bitter Bread of Banishment. A teaser emblazoned across the front announced it as ‘the novel Thomas Keneally wants back in print!’. On the back cover Keneally declared it to be ‘a vivacious book written by a man whose own story is as picaresque as anything inside the covers of the novel’.

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     But even Keneally’s hefty endorsement seems to have failed to improve Henry’s place in Australian history – or on Google Maps. Lawson and Franklin are entire suburbs, not only in Canberra, but also in the geography of Australian writing. Henry Savery, sadly, remains something of a dead end. Some early explorers of the convict experience like Marcus Clarke and James Tucker have become icons. Others like Henry seem doomed to remain ex-cons. 

 

     Visitors to Port Arthur are often astonished to find that the man celebrated as Australia’s first novelist on a memorial headstone on the Isle of The Dead has a name they have never once heard before. The problem is that once you have become obscure it can be terribly difficult to recapture the limelight. 

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Rod Howard

 

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