SOURCE: Mitchell, Adrian. “Fiction.” In The Oxford History of Australian Literature, edited by Leonie Kramer, pp. 27-172. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1981.

[In the following excerpt, Mitchell points to the major Australian fiction writers of the 1890s typically associated with the Bulletin—particularly Henry Lawson and Joseph Furphy.]

In most views of Australian literary history, the Bulletin is the exclusive forum for the new realism, the spawning ground for a new authentic Australian Literature. The antagonism of the realist towards romance was not just a formal objection, but a reflection of ardent nationalism that welled up as Australia moved towards federation. The novel of manners was not authentic because it recognised English conventions, both in social behaviour and literary accomplishment. The Bulletin above all required original writing; there was to be no imitation of the old Anglo-Australian conventions. What resulted was the substitution of one convention for another, the convention of bush realism for that of romance.

Yet it is misleading to suggest that one wholly replaced the other, just as it is misleading to credit the Bulletin alone with fostering the new realism. For the romances had increasingly acknowledged local colour, while the emergence of the currency lad to a dominant Australian type may be traced from Kingsley's ‘lean, sunburnt, cabbage-tree hatted lads’ and Boldrewood's Marston boys, native youth in hue and cry. On the other hand, despite Tom Collins's withering scorn of Kingsley and the romancers expressed in Such is Life, most of the fiction that subsequently takes up the bush ethic is itself patently romantic and sentimental—in Miles Franklin, Katharine Susannah Prichard and Frank Dalby Davison, for example. In this respect, the Bulletin merely confirmed tendencies already present. What changes is the narrative manner. In encouraging contributors to ‘boil it down’, the Bulletin accomplished a change from the enthusiasms of Kingsley and Boldrewood, and the clever self-possession of Catherine Helen Spence and ‘Tasma’, to (in the best of the contributors) the dry, laconic understatement of the anecdotal style, and the emergence of an Australian voice, in both the ballad and the short story. Clarke was close to that manner and approach in his Bullocktown stories, but with an edge of indolence, even self-indulgence, that distinguishes him from the Bulletin nationalists. His example suggest once more that the Bulletin was confirming rather than creating a tradition. It is heard again between the wars, when with the revived interest in the nineties, the legend was consolidated. One of the persistent features of the short stories of this period is that they are very often reminiscent. The life they celebrate belongs to the past, and the ideals they espouse (such as mateship) are based on the fondly remembered. For while Vance Palmer showed in The Legend of the Nineties (1954) that the period assumed the proportions of a founding myth for Australian culture, it is also clear that within the literature of that period was much appropriation of the near-mythical, for both humorous and serious effect. The short stories recall again and again the preceding generation, or a distant youthfulness and innocence. The sigh of fatalistic resignation, the ‘ah well’ of so many of Lawson's stories is endemic.

Henry Lawson was originally esteemed as a poet, though his verses have little to recommend them to the present day reader. He was regarded, it would seem, more for his sympathies than the poetry. He took the side of the down-trodden, the unfortunate, the dispossessed, and his compassion was from fellow feeling and not patronising, yet he sounded the rallying call in a now rather obviously declamatory fashion. Some of his verses catch brief glimpses of the old bush life, with the vantage point being that of the common man rather than the gentle reader.

His natural instinct was for the sketch and short story, for his verses tend to be mechanical. In his stories he mapped out an entire though limited world and whether that world is the real Australia or not is largely beside the point, for it is what Lawson accomplishes with this world of his own creating that matters. Lawson had grown up in the country. He was born on the Grenfell goldfields and grew up on a selection at Eurunderee, but in the middle 1880s went to Sydney. Despite the famous trek back of Bourke in 1892-93, and his other intermittent experience of the country, Lawson was for most of his writing life essentially a city-dweller; yet his stories are remembered for their image of the bush worker, his desolate country, oppressive circumstances and stubbornly enduring wry humour. The country around Bourke might understandably lend itself to such sardonic portraiture as ‘In a Dry Season’, especially since the 1892 expedition coincided with a drought, but Grenfell and Eurunderee are by no means the dreariest country in New South Wales. Lawson chooses to aggravate the conditions of bush experience, to generate a particular effect, sometimes a mood, sometimes an outer landscape to explain, or precipitate, an inner crisis. That is not to challenge his realism, but to point to the concealed skill which creates the illusion.

Some of Lawson's most accomplished stories are to be found in his first published volume, Short Stories in Prose and Verse (1894)—‘The Drover's Wife’, ‘The Union Buries its Dead’, ‘The Bush Undertaker’, and these together with the ‘Joe Wilson’ stories are the core of his achievement. Each of these early stories is a study of attitudes to experience, not of what happens to an individual but how he accommodates himself to it. And each situation is also seen as a sample of the kind of life the individual leads, and will continue to lead. The drover's wife, for example, keeps watch through the night for a snake; that is all the action amounts to. Yet by the morning we know what her life is, and we have some anticipation of what her life will be (Mrs. Spicer, in ‘Water Them Geraniums’, confirms it); and the prospect is depressing. There is an exact correspondence with the setting: ‘Bush all round—bush with no horizon, for the country is flat. No ranges in the distance … No undergrowth. Nothing to relieve the eye …’ Because everything is so concentrated upon the one action, it looms as enormous. The psychological pressure does not create any disproportion, and yet the situation discloses terrors that threaten to become inordinate (Alligator the dog ‘felt the original curse in common with mankind’). What Lawson offers is not the character of the wife, but the pattern of her existence. This technique repeated through the short stories provides more than a mere portrait of bush life. It is Lawson's conception of plot.

In most of the stories an ‘authorial’ voice intervenes between the reader and the narrative: ‘The Drover's Wife’, for example, although presented dramatically and in the present tense, has a barely discernible appraising commentary written into it, an unspecified presence which guides the reader to particular responses, or explains in a narrative aside, as it were, what the significance of some detail is. The watchful presence is not intrusive. Rather, it provides a larger dimension of understanding than the character can envisage.

In ‘The Union Buries its Dead’, the authorial stance becomes a little clearer, for it is identified with one of the ‘mourners’. The story is carefully patterned, taking the reader from a bland outer level of activity (or inactivity) to an increasingly direct personal intimation of the meaning of the experience. It stops short of an exact articulation of it, leaving just an enigmatic hint at the centre, and then returning to the initial torpor and evasive fatalism. It begins with the collective ‘we’, with the narrator accepting his common identity with the unionists; he is not distinguishable from them or their attitudes. At the graveside he steps back to a personal view of the proceedings, observing the behaviour of the other participants, and drawing attention to the emptiness of the ritual for him: ‘It didn't much matter—nothing does’. Yet his indifference seems to studied that we begin to notice the meaning of that meaninglessness for the bushman.

The characteristic Lawsonian twist follows, with the narrator suddenly emerging as story-teller rather than as participant: ‘I have left out the wattle … I have also neglected to mention the heartbroken old mate.’ In conducting this catalogue of stereotypes, and in noticing the possibilities for cliché (‘A stage priest might have said …’), Lawson extends his awareness from this particular burial to the customary manner of writing about the ‘death in the bush’ theme, and so draws attention to his own apparently more honest account—draws attention to it simultaneously as real and as contrived story. His narrative stance here resembles the participating chronicler, or the memorialist, one might call him, both in and out of the story he records, participant and creator, wryly acknowledging his own implication in the values he stands back from.

The tone is laconic, the manner casual, yet the presentation of this image of life, and death, works very much like the isolating pressures in ‘The Drover's Wife’. The town seems detached from any wider context, everything is deadened; the language is flattened, the unionists amble through the proprieties, and observe some of the formal procedures of burial but are not much interested in the deceased except that he is deceased. They have only the most casual idle curiosity about him. It doesn't matter who he was or what he was—‘it didn't matter much’. The comment has a particular as well as a general bearing. The dead-pan joke, the discovery that the man the union has buried was called James Tyson (Hungry Tyson was a famous pastoralist, and rumoured to be the richest man in Australia) takes the story away from the more sober ramifications of the episode, and returns it to the quiet farce of the narrative surface. It is a criticism of what happens to men in the outback that they seem so devoid of feeling, for what we discern in the narrator is not insensitivity but the pose of insensitivity, as though to guard himself against the impulse of true feeling.

The most effective of Lawson's stories are about fine shades of feeling, and not just what a man feels, but the difficulty he has in admitting his feelings to himself. The Mitchell yarns, assembled together, show Mitchell as a sentimentalist behind his sardonic exterior; indeed, it is basic to the legend of the nineties that the bushman has the right feelings, though there are very few occasions on which he can admit them. Lawson's bushman is not cauterised by his life in the bush, not made insensitive by his troubles. He is still compassionate, but he has learned to be guarded in his expression of compassion or concern, learned to pose as the sceptic or the stoic. When Lawson writes too admiringly of the battlers who have endured, the ever-present danger is that his story will collapse under the weight of sentimentalism.

The ‘Joe Wilson’ stories, which form a linked set and explore carefully and deliberately the changes in Joe Wilson's attitude to his marriage as a way of measuring changes in Joe himself, are unusually extensive by comparison with Lawson's customary manner. Joe is the narrator, and begins the series as an old man recollecting his courting of Mary. In the familiar comic pattern, he has to be converted from passive to active agent, but it is serious enough to Joe, both then and in the narrative present. Joe's advice to the young chaps is to make the most and best of their courting days ‘for they've got a lot of influence on your married life afterwards’. This has a special poignancy in view of Joe's behaviour in ‘Drifting Apart’; but Lawson's interest in the subsequent implications of an event marks a difference from his more characteristically abbreviated, documentary procedure. In the ‘Joe Wilson’ stories he is beginning to build up a personal history. Joe is a more self-conscious, less self-assured narrator, and the distance between the action narrated and the action of narrating allows for Joe's reflections and asides, sombre or gloomy or regretful and doubting.

In comparison with the rest of Lawson's stories, and in the context of the stories of the Bulletin school generally, Joe Wilson makes an important qualification of the ‘bush type’: ‘I reckon I was born for a poet by mistake, and grew up to be a bushman, and didn't know what was the matter with me—or the world,’ he says at the beginning of ‘Joe Wilson's Courtship’. Joe is not at ease with himself or his fellow men, as his mate Jack Barnes is, for example. It is only when he has had a few drinks that he can overcome his sense of constraint. Lawson has not previously come to terms with the separateness of his bush types, their alienation as distinct from their isolation.

Joe differentiates between himself and the typical bushman, Jack, in terms of personal attitudes: ‘I was sentimental about other people—more fool I!—whereas Jack was sentimental about himself.’ We discover soon enough that this is not quite true. Joe still has to work things out, still has not quite come to understand himself. The essential point, however, is not the exactness of the distinction, but the terms in which Joe feels the distinction ought to be made. For this is not a story about courtship, nor of what a bushman is, or whether Joe is a bushman or poet. It is about a man trying to come to terms with his feelings (the courtship serves to channel some of his confusion), and especially the feeling of difference, of not quite belonging, in a social tradition that put a premium on camaraderie and conformity.

In the ‘Joe Wilson’ stories, Lawson dramatizes a man in the process of getting to know himself, which includes getting to know his own dishonesties. For Joe is at times morally evasive; it is a measure of Lawson's seriousness in these stories that he does not display that evasion for comic effect (as in say the Steelman stories, where the interest lies in the confidence-trick), or for satire, but is both sympathetic and critical. Nothing he wrote afterwards had anything like the candour and subtlety of insight, or control of sentiment. This sequence of stories is the height of his accomplishment. Joe Wilson, chronicling his own history, acknowledging his many doubts and misgivings, and not seeking to excuse himself, is the most completely realized of his many bush studies. In these stories, Lawson set new standards for imaginative realism in Australian fiction.

It is not just Lawson's sympathetic insight, but the mastery of tone and the control of language that impresses. Lawson's is a peculiarly misleading style, for while he seems to be writing in the flat, wry, sardonic manner of the nineties school, and very often in the same simple unaffected yarning fashion, closer reading reveals the delicate shifts of tone, or alteration of perspective, or reverberant image that in part account for the subtle accuracy of his stories—in part, because at his best there is to be found a further fascinating, indefinable touch that issues from somewhere between language and vision.

The other writers of the Bulletin school do not fare so well in comparison with Lawson. The effect of Stephens's injunction to ‘boil it down’ was not simplification so much as reductivism; these stories tend toward farce or melodrama, with the most important ingredient being situational humour. They show little of Lawson's sensitivity, and their place in literary history is now to display the broadening of humour and coarsening of sensitivity that took place in the pages of the Bulletin (though to be fair, the Bulletin was also encouraging Victor Daley and Shaw Neilson).

‘Steele Rudd’ (Arthur Hoey Davis), writing sketches of life on the land, quickly discovered that misfortunes can be comic, and turned the woes of Dad and Dave and all the Rudds into sustained farce. At first the sketches managed to express a real affection for them, but they were soon portrayed merely as caricatures. Their actions begin to show them up as clowns. On Our Selection (1899) and Our New Selection (1903) contrive a loose co-ordination of the individual sketches to form books of reminiscences, written as though by one of the lesser Rudds. The stories became very popular, and the Rudd family began to appear on stage, in cartoons and cartoon strips, and even in the burgeoning Australian film industry, once it got under way. Steele Rudd's later work is more mechanical, the comedy becomes routine, the humour eventually monotonous. Rudd's talent was in the short sketch, the quick definitive action followed by an anti-climactic understatement, laconic or subversive, from one of the boys. His zest in describing Dad exasperated, choked with the overflow of powerful feelings, while the boys slily add a little innocent vinegar, is reminiscent of Norman Lindsay. Rudd and Lindsay have much the same adolescent humour.

Edward Dyson's short stories, of mining or of working life in the city, have little interest now except that they are not stories of bushmen. His attitude to writing was recalled by Norman Lindsay: ‘to hell with all that prissy preciousness over the way a man writes … What he writes is more important than how he writes it …’¹ What Dyson writes is variable, none of it is important. These are yarns told with a little elaboration, very simplified characterization, and dialogue in the vernacular (inclining to the demotic) for ‘authenticity’. However one might wish to approve his working-class sympathies, his short stories offer only a limited interest as fiction. Barbara Baynton is a much stronger writer, though she wrote only a few short stories and a rather poorly constructed yet vividly written novel, Human Toll (1903). Her Bush Studies (1902) is a brief but powerful collection, insisting relentlessly on the oppressive and antagonistic in bush life, and demonstrating the vulnerability of those that live in it. Her stories sustain a pressure of mounting uncertainty and dread; yet they are too natural, too alert to the humorous and to the possibilities of incidental satire to be gothic. The dread derives not from apprehensiveness of the bush, but from the sudden ugly attention of various threatening figures who inhabit the bush. She is completely unromantic about the bush itself, but there are frequent sentimental touches (e.g. mother and infant, ewe and lamb, cow and calf) to heighten the impending horror, and she does not always avoid the melodramatic. Yet melodrama can yield some very strong effects, and the intensity of her stories builds upon, rather than suffers adversely from that. Her stories seem to have had very little influence on subsequent writing, unless on some of Vance Palmer's earlier work.

William Astley (‘Price Warung’) writes a different kind of grotesque in his stories of the old convict days. Unlike Barbara Baynton, his ‘realism’ is based in historical fact, not imaginative conception. The Bulletin considered he was writing social history, not literature, and may have been more precisely discerning than was intended. Astley's stories—Tales of the Convict System (1892) Tales of the Early Days (1894), Tales of the Old Regime (1897) Tales of the Isle of Death (1898)—are, like Marcus Clarke's stories from the convict system, drawn from historical records, diaries and papers, and the editors of the Bulletin reassured their readers that however scandalous, each narrative was substantially true, even to the conversations, which paraphrase recorded testimony. ‘When our contributor has deviated from fact, he has done so in the interests of decency.’ But realism is not always well served by a reliance on documentary sources. The details may be true, but the effect is not the kind of truth, the truth of human experience, that we look for.

The kind of truth Astley projects is compelled by a fiercely maintained stance of moral outrage, which to the suspicious may seem a thin justification for sensationalism. Like Frank Hardy and Xavier Herbert, his righteous indignation is more political than moral; the convict material is something to use, to expose. He shows only a limited imaginative identification with it, and little historical perspective despite his information. His accounts are suffused with bitter irony, dictated by a radical contempt for Britain and British law. And the prose is guilty of lurid excesses (‘where the vivisectionist gluts the greed of his red-fanged science’). It is all too simply emotive, too fiercely denunciatory. The cruelty of the System is so patent as to pre-empt our responses, and so the tales become burdensome, onerous.

Astley's Riverina tales, collected as Half-Crown Bob and Tales of the Riverine (1898), are humorous or sentimental bush yarns, typical of the nineties school. Though these stories are not linked, in them he succeeds in creating a sense of the Riverina, and more particularly of the river-boat people, as an especially cohesive group. In the Bulletin manner, he assumes the reader's familiarity with the locale, and his interest in small matters of vocational detail. But that pretence may serve to misdirect the reader. These are Furphy's tactics, on a diminished scale. In one or two of the comic stories Astley approaches the manner, the pace, and the structure of Lawson's humorous stories. But his characteristic mistake is in elaborating the superficial or external aspects of his story, so that it is only an entertainment. Lawson knew what to leave out; Astley did not develop that instinct.

From the midst of a literary climate dominated by the short story, with its emphasis on objectivity and realism, social and political awareness, humour, directness of statement, and ‘Australianity’, emerged Joseph Furphy's Such is Life (1903). While it would of course be unwise to accept his suggestion that his novel is simply a loose federation of yarns, the art of story-telling is central to both its design and its meaning. Furphy had contributed several unremarkable short stories to the Bulletin, but for the most of the nineties he was writing and revising his version of ‘the vast and ageless volume of human insignificance’. When the novel appeared, pared down from the original massive manuscript, it was welcomed as a classic by a very few, and set aside by virtually everyone else as unreadable. Louis Esson complained ‘He writes in the usual style of the badly educated man who has taken as models the articles in the Rationalist press and the penny encyclopedia.’ His method is far from direct, and the intricacy of the novel's structure is still incompletely understood, but Furphy is now recognized as one of the important Australian novelists.

Furphy's novel, ‘being certain extracts from the diary of Tom Collins’, sets out to break with conventional forms, for in Tom's view the novel has become dominated by the need to furnish a plot, and such is not life. If, as he proposes, life is to be depicted as it really is, then the novelist must shun the conventions of fiction—which to Tom means the romantic novel—and find his own procedure for depicting the real. But the other fundamental problem is to decide what life is, or what its meaning is. Tom is bold to propose ‘a fair picture of Life, as that engaging problem has presented itself to me’. His terms are instructive. It is the problem, the eternal enigma of life that absorbs him, and the rich detail of his portrait of the bullockies and boundary riders, sundowners and squatters on the black-soil plains of Riverina proper, is of interest to him mainly as the source material for his metaphysical speculations. One of the sustaining ironies of the novel, however, is that Tom's tendency to abstraction is again and again undercut by the very realities from which he takes his point of departure. His philosophizing is a means of evading life.

Where Tom opposes the real to the romantic, life to art, Furphy considers what the relation might be between these. The effect is mostly comic, as when Tom, scathingly denouncing the patent clichés of romantic plot, unwittingly gets caught in one himself. Furphy's more serious concern attaches to Tom's role as narrator. Tom bases his claim to veracity on the use of his randomly selected diary entries, yet since these entries as quoted at the beginning of each chapter are compressed and cryptic in the extreme, Tom's recreation of events from those brief notes has to be taken on trust; in themselves they do not guarantee realism. What Furphy reveals is Tom Collins turning life into art, by writing it up from his diary.

When at the outset Tom announces his antipathy to the ways of the romancer, he presumes as a corollary

the more sterling, if less ornamental qualities of the chronicler. This fairly equitable compensation embraces, I have been told, three distinct attributes: an intuition which reads men like sign-boards; a limpid veracity: and a memory which habitually stereotypes all impressions except those relating to personal injuries.²

Tom's assumption is tacitly conceded, but events show that romance and chronicle are not in practice mutually exclusive; indeed, the either/or categorization does not hold good. Tom is an unreliable narrator. His limpid veracity is called into question (the name ‘Tom Collins’, meaning the unverifiable source of rumour, puts us on our guard); he misses the reality in front of him again and again, and most appropriately when his own romantic fantasies lead him on; while the stereotyping memory, limited by its fixity, inspires no confidence in Tom's ability to discern the whole truth of what he chronicles. Additionally, Tom provides a different kind of ornamentation, the ostentatious display of book-learning. But while Furphy does not wish to contradict Tom's position in the on-going argument the realists were conducting with the romance, he does indicate that Tom's literary theories largely determine how he sees life, and what he sees in life. Tom's realism is almost as artificial as the romancer's. His narrative is over-loaded with literary quotation, and his evidence for his several theories of life comes from literature too, rather than from the actual world.

Tom, then, is caught going both ways. His formal procedure—the random selection of diary entries so as to preclude ‘plot’, or the cause and effect explanations of fiction—is at odds with his many attempts to provide just that explanation of life through theories and hypotheses and conceptions, all based on an appeal to the authority of great literature. He attempts, ambitiously, an accounting for life rather than an account of life. Life, Tom's relation to the social world, is described, but almost despite him. Tom, ‘wisely lapt in philosophic torpor’, is very nearly left out of it. The terms in which Furphy first advised the Bulletin of his manuscript have become famous: ‘just finished a full-sized novel, title, Such is Life, scene, Riverina and Northern Vic.; temper, democratic; bias, offensively Australian.’ These phrases are carefully chosen to attract the interest of the Bulletin in the first instance, for its temper is democratic in a qualified sense, and its bias, though Australian, is comic wherever offensive, and in any case, subordinate to the concern with how best to present a fair picture of Life. Tom Collins's world consists of very finely observed hierarchies, determined by occupation and ‘usefulness’, and then various more subtle factors. The rigid caste system on the stations is spelled out by Tom, but among the wage-slaves and others is an equally carefully preserved gradation of bullock drivers, station hands, sheep drovers, fencers, boundary riders and so on, to the sorriest specimens of all, the down-and-out sundowners. Tom does not fit easily anywhere into this system. The bullock-drivers are suspicious of his friendliness with the squatters, and they in turn are uncertain which privileges should be extended to him.

But Tom is by temperament separate from his fellows too. Thompson sums him up: ‘He calls himself a philosopher … but his philosophy mostly consists in thinking he knows everything, and other people know nothing.’ There is a sting of truth in that. Tom does not have sufficient regard for others' knowledge, or wisdom. He is inattentive to what they can contribute to his understanding of the engaging problem of life. In Such is Life, as in Rigby's Romance (serialized in the Barrier Truth 1905-06, and not published in full until 1946), and The Buln-Buln and the Brolga (1948), Furphy allows his narrator to set himself apart from the main body of conversationalists. Tom is exceptional in the steady procession of memorialist narrators in Australian fiction: where their narrative reflects their subsidiary participation in public occasions, Tom is only nominally a chronicler of such events and is, instead, much busier extrapolating some quasi-determinist explanation of why events happen as they do (alternative theories are supplied by other characters). Although he is present at the various campfire conversations and riverside symposiums, meditative musing competes with conversation (often to comic effect); the reflective mode is at odds with the social. Tom is less affable than he thinks, and dangerously close at times to becoming like the anchorite who ‘lives to himself; and … is merely a person who evades his responsibilities.’

The social vision that Tom and the bullockies all apparently subscribe to, a kind of Christian socialism as Tom describes it, is tested in several other ways. The calm fellowship at eventide in Rigby's Romance is undercut by the recognition that each of the men gathering by the river is competing against the others to catch a huge (if Shandean) Murray cod, while in Such is Life, whenever one of the teamsters leaves the camp-fire, the others immediately fall into a precise and cutting commentary on the unfortunate's character. That does not deny the egalitarianism they all believe in but it does question the pretense of solidarity, just as Tom himself dispels the myth of homogeneity. Part of the compelling truth of Furphy's representation of Riverina life is its exact register of the many tensions and divisions that exist within its fabric, as well as the various speech patterns of the denizens.

In its local reference, Furphy's fiction explores the implications of the bush code, ranging from the political significance of a box of matches to the practical assistance readily given to the distressed. When Tom's account of the bush ethic is examined closely, however, it reduces to a travesty. For example, Tom's assistance to Warrigal Alf stops short of accepting any responsibility for him, and while his avoidance of Murdoch, the swagman, though fatal in its effect is well-intended, Tom's treatment of Andrew Glover is not just morally evasive but reprehensible. Tom is heartless about women; he can reverence Ouida's tawny-haired tigresses, but he is ungenerous about women in life. Indeed, Furphy is so determined to be unsentimental that he goes too far, and Tom's comments on the unfortunate Ida are in distinctly poor taste. And while Tom records many examples of mutual assistance, there is equally a persistent current in the novel of individuals helping themselves to whatever comes to hand—dogs, horses, saddles, bridles, bullocks. This steady trade is initiated by Pup, Tom's kangaroo dog (and he virtually ends it when he carries off the trophy, in Rigby's Romance). Everyone is an opportunist—and opportunism differs only in degree from the celebrated procedure of the squatter in taking up his land. Bush morality is simply that ‘in the Riverina of that period, it was considered much more disgraceful to be had by a scoundrel than to commit a felony yourself.’ But, being had, it is essential not to show any response, especially not surprise or chagrin. It is bush style to maintain a certain heroic impassivity—as the title of the novel suggests.

Rigby's Romance is reconstituted from one of the large sections deleted from the original manuscript of Such is Life, and while it must be regarded as operating in its own frame of reference, there is considerable carry-over from one book to the other. Like Such is Life, Rigby's Romance begins with Tom announcing his stance towards his narrative: ‘The fact is that I object to being regarded as a mere romancist, or even as a dead-head spectator, or dilettante reporter of the drama of life.’ Rather less is made of the stern veracity of the annalist, however. Tom flatters himself instead on his good fortune in being the ‘eyewitness and chronicler of a touching interlude’, a little heart history. There is rather more discussion in Rigby's Romance of the right way to tell a story, and given the essentially static nature of the occasion, a fairly sustained portrait of bush etiquette. And even more than Such is Life, and despite the apparent sociability of the gathering, Rigby's Romance is imbued with a sense of solitariness. The effect is more metaphysical than social (‘But though Rigby was now fairly started, he still failed to connect …’) and two factors largely account for it.

Tom Collins is much more subdued as narrator, and Rigby is permitted to dominate the conversation, so much so that the argument seems a monologue rather than a debate, though alternative views do manage to get an airing. Tom is much less inclined to interpose his views here; indeed, his admiration for Rigby's oratory is a little immoderate. (Furphy valued Rigby as voicing his ideas of Christian socialism.) He is somewhat like the memorialist of the occasion, the recording angel of a plenary session of delegates gathered to a symposium on the machinery of the moral universe, but lured actually by word of the thirty-pounder.

Jefferson Rigby is the obsessed philosopher in this novel, and the rest have not his single-minded infatuation with the ideal of State Socialism. Like Tom he is a comic figure, but as he observes, ‘comedy is tragedy, plucked unripe,’ and his commitment to ideas is all the more forlorn because it is at the expense of love deferred for twenty-five years. Rigby's notions of socialism, built upon a premise of mutual concern, are defeated by events; he forgets to keep his appointment with Kate. As so persistently in Furphy, man inevitably contradicts his own philosophical structures, and theories are most comically and most profoundly inadequate when they become a substitute for life. For all the broad comedy and multiple ironies, the final note is inescapable: ‘from that time forth an accession of sadness was observable in [Rigby's] bearing, with an abatement of the cynicism which had lent a kind of fascination to his homilies.’

The Buln-Buln and the Brolga is a simpler work again. In it, Furphy sidesteps the vexed question of providence and fate, and turns once more to the persistent theme of how fiction may best convey a truthful portrait of life. The particular terms of the issue this time are Memory and the Imagination. Tom still holds to ‘the impulse of reminiscence, fatally governed by an inveterate truthfulness’ that he had acknowledged in his introduction to Such is Life, and refuses to concede that the imagination offers an alternative mode of perceiving reality. Yet Fred Falkland-Pritchard (the buln-buln or lyre-bird of the title) and Barefooted Bob (the native companion, or brolga—the puns are characteristic of Tom Collins), together with the more conventionally romantic Mrs. Pritchard, in the course of an evening's conversation display such virtuosity in their verbal elaborations and imaginative transformations of the truth as to win his admiration. A lie, sufficiently well told, for all its re-structuring of the truth is nevertheless a version of the truth, and the kind of accommodation the three make to each other is seen to take into account a more important awareness of human factors than Tom's commitment to stern veracity recognizes. Tom is more mellow in this novel, more capable of sympathetic understanding of his fellows, yet the very act of understanding indicates a degree of difference, of separation from them. Typically, he fails to understand his own part in this scene, and his closing comment, that this has been merely ‘a glimpse … into the vast and ageless volume of human insignificance’, is as much a silent testimony to Tom's philosophical variant of the law of diminishing returns as it is an expression of Furphy's ironic realism.

Furphy is essentially a novelist of strategies. These are concealed within an overly elaborate narrative manner, for apart from the convincingly natural idiom of the bushmen's dialogue, Furphy's—or rather Tom's—style is a pastiche of literary reference, misapplied quotation, strained puns and, in Collins's, reveries, part facetious, part serious rhetorical pomposities. Furphy does not trivialize in this, for he is serious in his concern with the relation between literature and life, and between the attempts to systematize knowledge and the human divagation from that attempt. What we see in Furphy's fiction (or perhaps, in the light of Tom's particular theories, anti-fiction), is that men create their own realities, and while that does not disqualify his scorn for the contrivance of romantic novels, it does raise questions about the exclusive claims of Tom's brand of realism. Behind him, Furphy has constructed his own ingenious arrangements to show what life is like.

Although he appears to evolve from the surging nationalism of the nineties, a wholly indigenous writer, the extensiveness of his reading took him to Shakespeare and the Bible, Darwin and Dickens, Plato, Paine and Carlyle, and beyond to less familiar sources. He was highly literate, even if he did not always know what to do with his learning—a common enough dilemma for the writer in Australia. Furphy stands out from his Australian contemporaries by his awareness and exploitation of the possibilities of fiction. Conrad and James were at the time also experimenting with the use and the effect of multiple narrators, and diminishing the conventional importance of plot.

In terms of Australian literary history Furphy is not progressive. His fiction does not lead towards anything accomplished in the twentieth century, although recent Australian fiction is also inclined to dispense with continuity of plot. Like the Bulletin writers, Furphy deals with the immediate past, with the end of the era of opening up the country. The sedentary pace of his narrative, the reflective mode, the attitude to language and especially to the colourful vernacular, and Collins's and Rigby's love of erudition, all confirm the recent past as surely as the diary dates. Even Tom's reactionary criticism of colonial romantic fiction tends to be counter-productive. Furphy's very independence and originality bring him close to eccentricity. …

Notes

1. Norman Lindsay, Introduction to Edward Dyson, The Golden Shanty: Short Stories, Sydney, 1963, p. vii.

2. ‘Tom Collins’, Such is Life, Sydney, 1903, p. 1.