Such is Life - The life and times Australian writer and bush poet Joseph Furphy

People and History

Oct 31

Joseph Furphy (26 September 1843 – 13 September 1912) was an Australian author and bush poet who is widely regarded as the "Father of the Australian novel". He mostly wrote under the pseudonym Tom Collins and is best known for his novel Such Is Life published in 1903, which was later regarded as an Australian classic.

Furphy lived in the Hay region while working on his novel, working a team of bullocks across the Hay Plains and Lachlan River floodplains.

He died in Western Australia in 1912.

***Hay’s own connection to the Australian classic ‘Such is Life’***

**By Krista Schade**
Joseph Furphy was born on September 26, 1843 at Yering, near Yarra Glen, Victoria, the son of Samuel Furphy, and his wife Judith, immigrants from Northern Ireland. He had an elder brother, John.
Judith Furphy raised her sons and educated them herself, using the Bible and Shakespeare to introduce them to literature and storytelling.
The family lived and worked in regional Victoria until Joseph met and married his 16-year-old sweetheart Leonie Selina Germain in Daylesford in 1867.
In that same year the Kyneton Literary Society had awarded him the first prize for some verses on the death of American President Lincoln.
The young couple purchased a farm near Colbinabbin and for the next six years toiled on the unproductive land, until Joseph admitted defeat. In 1873 he sold the farm and purchased a bullock team, and established himself as a reliable carter of goods; a ‘bullocky.’

Joseph’s business covered the Riverina region of NSW and in 1880 he settled in Hay, where he was known as a cheery, reliable man, and an eternal optimist.

His letters back home to his mother were long, humorous tales of life on the Hay Plains and the Lachlan region and it is believed that during this time spent around Hay that the idea of his novel blossomed.

Joseph Furphy was very disciplined, in his work and in his life – a devout non-drinker who preferred to read and write by the light of a candle in his tent, rather than indulge in wild drinking bouts with his fellow bullocky’s and bushmen.

His friends said of him “…a kinder-hearted man never aimed a hammer at an anvil, or thrust a pen at an ink-bottle.”

The years in the Riverina, when he tramped beside his team, taking supplies from the railhead at Hay out to the sheep and cattle stations and returning with wool, left an indelible mark on him.

Often alone for days on end, separated from his wife and children back in Hay, he carried pocket editions of Shakespeare for reading by camp fire at night. Meetings with other bullockies and travellers on the plains were occasions for the exchange of ideas as well as news.

A shearer who camped with him one night remembered him as ‘the most learned bushman that I have ever met, a real bushman’; but went on to reflect that ‘Joseph Furphy was of us, but not one of us’.

The drought of 1883 abruptly ended his work with the bullock team and he moved to Shepparton to work with his brother John at his iron foundry, as he continued to work on his manuscript.

On the advice of publishers and agents he laboured over edits, removing great chunks of work, using a shed at the rear of his home in Shepparton to finalise “Such is Life.”

In 1903 the first iteration of the novel was published, to critical acclaim, although the general public did not agree and sales were disappointingly low. It was published under the pseudonym ‘Tom Collins.’

The year after the publication of ‘Such is Life’ Furphy and his wife joined their two sons at Claremont in Western Australia.

Survived by his wife, sons and a daughter, he died there in 1912.

After his death, good friend and supporter Kate Baker collected, edited and published a tome of Joseph’s poetry “The Poetry of Joseph Furphy” in 1916.

Determined to cement Joseph’s place in Australian literary history, she collaborated with the famed Miles Franklin to publish “Joseph Furphy: The Legend of a man and his book” in 1944.