Results tagged “Joseph Furphy”

Unveiled at Yarra Glen

YARRA GLEN, Sunday--An Interesting ceremony took place at Yarra Glen yesterday afternoon, when a memorial plaque to Joseph Furphy ("Tom Collins"), Australian poet and author, was unveiled. The ceremony, which was attended by more than 200 persons, took place at the Yarra Glen State school, on the site on which Joseph Furphy was born in 1843. Furphy's only surviving sister (Mrs Stewart) was present. Mr J W Lawrey, chairman of the memorial committee, welcomed the visitors, and expressed pride that such an author had been born in Yarra Glen. The speakers included the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly (Mr Everard), the director of education (Mr J. McRae), Messrs G. M. Wallace, R. H. Croll, F. T. Macartney, Sullivan, Nettie Palmer, and Dr Huebener. The unveiling of the bronze plaque was performed by Mr Vance Palmer, who spoke on the value of Joseph Furphy's works to Australia's literature.

Mr. McRae spoke of the courage expressed by Joseph Furphy in his works, and of the very real picture of Australian life given in his book "Such Is Life." Mrs. N. S. Allen sang Furphy's Christmas Hymn, and Miss Joan Brunt recited his poem "Breaking the News." 

Tribute was paid to Miss Kate Baker, East Melbourne, who suggested the memorial. 

First published in The Argus, 1 October 1934

[Thanks to the National Library of Australia's newspaper digitisation project for this piece.]

Note: Joseph Furphy was born on 26 September 1843 and died on 13 September 1912. 

The subject matter of "Are You the Cove?" by Joseph Furphy is probably about as slight as you can get.  The poem relates the encounter between a swagman and a squatter, and centres around a conversation in which the swaggie tries to figure out if the squatter is the right person to speak to regarding a place to sleep for the night.

It's not one that I could relate to at all until I looked up the meaning of the word "cove" in The Macquarie Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms (1984).  The word is defined there as "1. a man; 2. a boss, especially the manager of a sheep station", the second definition of which I had never come across before.  So the swagman is attempting to ascertain if the squatter is the station manager; presumably he might then be able to ask permission to "doss" for the night.  If you wanted to stretch the point you could argue that the poem details the strained and suspicious relationship between squatters and men of the road, but it still comes across as a bit thin to me.

Joseph Furphy is a strange choice for a collection of this sort.  He is mainly known as the author of Such is Life under the pseudonym of "Tom Collins".  His poetry career was rather short and Austlit only lists some 28 poems under his name, which leads me to thhink this might be a favourite of the editor's.

Text: "Are You the Cove?" by Joseph Furphy ("Tom Collins")

Author bio: Australian Dictionary of Biography 

There are also a number of posts on this weblog regarding Furphy, his poetry and his life, which can be found here.

Publishing history:  First published in The Poems of Joseph Furphy (1916) which was edited by Kate Baker and included a foreword by Bernard O'Dowd.  The volume, containing only 26 works in 56 pp, appeared four years after the writer's death in 1912.  If it was published during Furphy's lifetime I can find no record of it.

Next five poems in the book:

"How McDougal Topped the Score" by Thomas E. Spencer

"The Wail of the Waiter" by Marcus Clarke

"Where the Pelican Builds" by Mary Hannay Foott

"Catching the Coach" by Alfred T. Chandler ("Spinifex")

"Narcissus and Some Tadpoles" by Victor Daley

Note: this post forms part of my series on the poems contained in the anthology 100 Australian Poems You Need to Know edited by Jamie Grant.  You can read the other posts in this series here.

Full, Authoritative Biography of an Australian Classic

The famous recommendation to publish Joseph Furphy's Such Is Life, by Tom Collins, was written by that first-class critic, A. G. Stephens, publications adviser to the Bulletin: "This book contains all the wit and wisdom gathered in Furphy's lifetime: it is his one book -- it is himself. It is thoroughly Australian -- a classic of our country. The interest is diffused and slow, and the sale would be slow. It is a book for intelligent bushmen, and for those city men who can appreciate it. It is solid, yet never dull, and the author is a man with brains and a sense of style."

Apart from Such Is Life -- and the story excised from it before publication and printed later as "Rigby's Romance" - little has been known of Furphy by the ordinary reader, although two pamphlets on him were brought out in recent years, Joseph Furphy: the Legend of a Man and His Book, by Miles Franklin, in association with Kate Baker (Sydney:Angus and Robertson, for the Commonwealth Literary Fund), is therefore important. It is not a "legend," it is the first complete authentic account of Furphy and his work.

The main events of Furphy's life can be told briefly. He was born at Yering, Vic, in 1843, one of the five children of hard-working, intelligent parents. He went to small country schools. He worked for about 20 years around the country on harvesting and mining machinery, on pioneering a selection and other hard labour, and for seven or eight years carrying in Riverina with his own bullock-team. He had many friends, good health, no vices. He never attempted to save time or money. So about 1890 he was glad of a job in his brother's iron foundry at Shepparton. With regular hours for the first time in his life, he wrote stories and verse for papers and magazines, and by 1897 had finished Such Is Life. After delays, doubts, and cutting, it was published in 1903.

The book was widely reviewed in Australia, on the whole intelligently and favourably. The London Athenoeum gave it a long notice, appreciative but critical. One of the best reviews is by Furphy himself, in two long instalments, for the Bulletin.

The book sold very slowly, until in 1917 Miss Baker - "that gallant standard-bearer for Furphy," Stephens called her - bought the remaining sheets from the Bulletin for £50, collected £20 to pay for binding, and sold them to a small but growing public. Everyone concerned had lost money by the classic.

The year after Such Is Life came out, Furphy followed his grown-up family to Perth, WA. There he helped his sons set up their homes and business. He read tremendously, wrote little or nothing. While preparing to harness a hired horse to a cartload of castings he had a heart attack and died in a few minutes, in 1913.

A number of poems were published in 1916. Such Is Life was published in an abridged English edition in 1937, and is to be republished for the Literary Fund in full this year.

Furphy's wide reading, his political, moral, and religious views are well to the fore throughout his writings. Here are some typical remarks: "One aspires to know human history from the time we left the treetops down to the present year, so that it all appears like a personal recollection." He was unmusical and had little knowledge of art.

"I didn't want a church that prohibited actual vice - for I am not vicious - but I wanted one that would expel me with contumely for having two coats while another bloke had none. At present I belong to a church which has only one member: There were two of us, but the other got fired out on his ear for being an Imperialist during the South African War."

"The successful man is the pioneer who never spared others; the forgotten pioneer is the man who never spared himself, but, being a fool, built houses for wise men to live in, and omitted to gather moss. The former is the early bird; the latter is the early worm."

His ideal Christian was Dr Charles Strong; his ideal democrat was Bernard O'Dowd. He called himself a "State Socialist," i.e., a Socialist, as distinct from an anarchist.

Miss Franklin's biography is a first rate contribution to our understanding of Furphy, but it has two noticeable defects. The events of Furphy's early life are told without order, and as if the fortunes of Miss Baker were of first concern; and the last chapter, where Furphy is compared with James, Proust, Joyce, and Huxley, is just inept. Whatever the criteria for Furphy, and they are high, they are not these.

First published in The Argus, 27 January 1945

[Thanks to the National Library of Australia's newspaper digitisation project for this piece.]

The inscription here reads: In Memory of Joseph Furphy "Tom Collins" Born Chateau Yering 1843 Died Western Australia 1912 Author of SUCH IS LIFE RIGBY'S ROMANCE THE POEMS For Australia

Grave of Joseph Furphy, Karrakata Cemetery, Perth.

I'll admit I was a bit over the top the other day, comparing Tom Collins in Such is Life with John Fowles and The French Lieutenant's Woman. Put it down to over-exuberance.

There's a lot to admire about the author's framing mechanism here: he originally intends to extract a week's worth of diary entries until the checks the second day and finds it won't fit his purposes, so he changes tack and decides to pick the same day in subsequent months instead. He follows that schema until the last chapter, when it changes it yet again. There's no pretention about it. And he's quite happy for you to see the gears moving and the grease being applied. For what is, surprisingly, a debut novel, this is a most assured technique. It could have fallen flat on its face, it could have ruined the rest of the novel, but it doesn't. It's a pity that Furphy only wrote one further novel, he was certainly a formidable talent.

The next four works in this Classic Year:
"The Sick Stockrider" by Adam Lindsay Gordon (1869)
His Natural Life by Marcus Clarke (1872)
"The Chosen Vessel" by Barbara Baynton (1896)
"The Man from Snowy River" by A.B. "Banjo" Paterson (1890)

Two poems, a novel and a short story.

"Tom Collins" was the pseudonym of Joseph Furphy (1843-1912) who was born near Yarra Glen, Port Phillip District (later the state of Victoria). After the family moved to Kangaroo Ground and then Kyneton, Furphy leased a farm in the Kyneton district until his marriage to Leonie Selina German in 1867. After his marriage Furphy bought a farm in the district of Colbinabbin. By 1873 he had decided the land was not worth farming and had purchased a bullock team and taken up business as a carter in the Riverina district of New South Wales - an experience which directly influenced his later novel, Such is Life. The major drought of 1883 ended his career as a bullock driver and Furphy returned south to work with his brother at his iron foundry in Shepparton. While there he worked on the manuscript which was, finally, to be published as his major work, Such is Life in 1903. A year later Furphy moved with his family to Claremont in Western Australia where he died on 13 September 1912. Apart from the novel under discussion, Furphy also wrote Rigby's Romance: A Made in Australia Novel, and had a collection, The Poems of Joseph Furphy, published in 1916.

Australian Dictionary of Biography entry
Photo of Joseph Furphy statue in Shepparton

Such is Life Tom Collins 1903

It may seem as if I'm getting fixated with opening novel sequences after quoting extensively from the first page of Robbery Under Arms last week, yet here I am again with this week's selection. I make no apologies.

Unemployed at last!

Scientifically, such a contingency can never have befallen of itself. According to one theory of the Universe, the momentum of Original Impress has been tending toward this far-off, divine event ever since a scrap of fire-mist flew from the solar centre to form our planet. Not this event alone, of course; but every occurrence, past and present, from the fall of captured Troy to the fall of a captured insect. According to another theory, I hold an independent diploma as one of the architects of our Social System, with a commission to use my own judgment, and take my own risks, like any other unit of humanity. This theory, unlike the first, entails frequent hitches and cross-purposes; and to some malign operation of these I should owe my present holiday.

Submitting, then, to the constitutional interdict already glanced at, and availing myself of the implied license to utilise that homely talent of which I am the bailee, I purpose taking certain entries from my diary, and amplifying these to the minutest detail of occurrence or conversation. This will afford to the observant reader a fair picture of Life, as that engaging problem has presented itself to me.

Twenty-two consecutive editions of Lett's Pocket Diary, with one week in each opening, lie on the table before me; all filled up, and in a decent state of preservation. I think I shall undertake the annotation of a week's record. A man might, if he were of a fearful heart, stagger in this attempt; but I shut my eyes, and take up one of the little volumes. It proves to be the edition of 1883. Again I shut my eyes while I open the book at random. It is the week beginning with Sunday, the 9th of September.

Think on this for a while. If I were to tell you it came from a modern literary novel I doubt you would be at all surprised. The fact that this material was written in the 1890s and published in the early 1900s is quite astounding. There is the sense that the author is in total control of his material, and that he has no problem imposing himself into the structure of the novel - I'm thinking here of author John Fowles sitting in a railway carriage contemplating his own main character in The French Lieutenant's Woman.

Such is Life is a novel about bullock drovers, squatters and itinerant workers in the backblocks of Victoria and New South Wales in the 1880s. At times it can be hard to read, with a lot of dialog written in direct vernacular, but it is worthwhile persisting for the humor and the good-natured banter of men working in sometimes very hostile conditions.

You can read more about the author on Wikipedia.
And you can read the full text of the book on Project Gutenburg.

Tell me not in future numbers
   That our thought becomes inane,
That our metre halts and lumbers,
   When the Wattle blooms again.

Time may change this loyal jernal
   From religious to profane;
But a rhythmic law eternal
   Makes the Wattle bloom again.

Trust no Flossie, howe'er pleasant;
   Sweeps are treacherous; totes are vain;
Banks and scrip are evanescent --
   But the Wattle blooms again.

Cultivate no fair ideal;
   Own no country seat in Spain;
All these things must go to Sheol,
   Whilst the Wattle blooms again.

This, you see, austere and lonely,
   Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
One great fact is certain only --
   That the Wattle blooms again.

First published in The Bulletin, 27 August 1898

Statue of Joseph Furphy in Shepparton, Victoria.

Joseph Furphy (1843 - 1912)

Unemployed at last!

Scientifically, such a contingency can never have befallen of itself. According to one theory of the Universe, the momentum of Original Impress has been tending toward this far-off, divine event ever since a scrap of fire-mist flew from the solar centre to form our planet. Not this event alone, of course; but every occurrence, past and present, from the fall of captured Troy to the fall of a captured insect. According to another theory, I hold an independent diploma as one of the architects of our Social System, with a commission to use my own judgment, and take my own risks, like any other unit of humanity. This theory, unlike the first, entails frequent hitches and cross-purposes; and to some malign operation of these I should owe my present holiday.

Orthodoxly, we are reduced to one assumption: namely, that my indomitable old Adversary has suddenly called to mind Dr. Watts's friendly hint respecting the easy enlistment of idle hands. Good. If either of the first two hypotheses be correct, my enforced furlough tacitly conveys the responsibility of extending a ray of information, however narrow and feeble, across the path of such fellow-pilgrims as have led lives more sedentary than my own -- particularly as I have enough money to frank myself in a frugal way for some weeks, as well as to purchase the few requisites of authorship.

From Such is Life by Tom Collins (Joseph Furphy), 1903

Joseph Furphy, author of the Australian classic Such is Life, is being commemorated in the Victorian country town of Shepparton with the unveiling of a statue in his honour. In addition, a collected set of his works is due for publication from Halstead Classics, as is the biography of the writer by Miles Franklin. It would appear that Furphy is in for a long-overdue re-appraisal of his works. And a good thing too.