Rites of Passage

In the early nineteenth century, Edmund Talbot boards an ageing former warship carrying emigrants from England to Australia, where his influential godfather has secured him a colonial appointment. Talbot keeps a journal for his patron and observes the crowded vessel with the assurance of a privileged young gentleman. Officers, sailors, soldiers, servants and passengers are judged according to his assumptions about rank, education and respectability.

The arrival of the awkward Reverend Robert James Colley exposes the cruelty sustained by this shipboard society. Colley is humiliated by Captain Anderson, excluded by the passengers and drawn into a disastrous attempt to gain acceptance among the sailors. Talbot initially treats the clergyman as a comic nuisance, but Colley’s death and the discovery of his own journal force him to recognise how shame, sexual transgression and abuse of authority have been concealed beneath the language of discipline and good order.