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ARTS AND CULTURE

Of bullocks and bulldust

  • 26 June 2006

Joseph Furphy’s classic novel, Such Is Life, was published in Sydney on 1 August 1903. My love affair with it began nearly 50 years later. Strangely, this happened in Beijing in the early days of Mao Zedong’s China.

One of a dozen idealistic young hopefuls selected to study communist theory in China for three years under Chinese and Soviet lecturers, my smartest move in preparation was to buy great works of fiction of which I had read virtually nothing. Such Is Life accompanied multiple volumes of Tolstoy, Balzac and Dickens. These made my suitcase heavy but became a significant part of our spare-time reading during the icy winter nights and the annual long hot seaside vacations each summer.

One evening early in 1952, many months after our arrival, Eric Aarons handed me my own 1945 edition of Such Is Life—which I hadn’t read. He had it open at page 342. ‘Read these next few pages,’ he urged. It was Jack the Shellback’s yarn about the man-o-war hawk, the hungriest thing on earth. I became hooked for life.

Most of our group read the book. The man-o-war hawk, tawny-haired tigresses with slumberous dark eyes, the doings of Pup and other snippets of Such Is Life rivalled Dickens’ Pecksniff and Mrs Gamp, Mr Micawber and Uriah Heep in our everyday talk throughout three long years in China.

Such Is Life has never achieved a wide readership. It’s been ignored or put aside. Nevertheless, it has remained in print for a century, and fine judges rate it as one of Australia’s greatest novels. Stephen Murray-Smith wrote: ‘I revere Lawson and Richardson but Such Is Life is a book I should like to be buried or burnt with me …’ A.D. Hope regarded Furphy’s work highly: ‘For all his limitations Furphy is about the best prose writer the country has produced.’

In Marion Halligan’s Storykeepers, Rodney Hall argues that the wholesale neglect of Such Is Life is ‘the greatest oddity in Australian literary history’. He refers to it as a ‘gloriously inconsequential, learned and earthy masterpiece’ with an absolute Australianness and a ‘compassionately mocking tone that never lets up’.

Others, like Manning Clark, complain that no-one has been able to establish clearly what Such Is Life is about. These worries remind me of stories concerning such disparate writers as Virginia Woolf and Frank Dalby Davison. To The Lighthouse is interpreted by many academics and students, yet in a letter to

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