Australia: bullocks and aborigines

Press, 29 May 1982, Page 16

Australia: bullocks and aborigines

Joseph Furphy. Edited by John Barnes. University of Queensland, 1931. 439

pp. $16.45 (paperback). The Savage Crows. By Robert Drewe. Collins/Fontana, 1981. 264 pp. $4.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Stuart Perry)

My favourite opinion of the Furphy collection derives partly from the substantial oeuvre itself, but a great deal also from the efforts of-the introducer, John Barnes, a perspicacious and helpful cicerone for the explorer of unfamiliar territory. The University. of Queensland’s “Portable Australian Authors” series may have sacrificed somthing to portability. The type faces used in this book appear to have been determined by the type the Sydney ‘Bulletin” used in 1903 for the first edition of “Such is Life,” here reproduced in photo-facsimile. Wonderfully clear, it is still abnormally small and tiring to read for any length of time. But the book itself, “Such is Life,” is seductive and one persists with it, and there is minor work too to sample: further fiction, a number of letters, even a little verse. “Such is Life” is the principal element, and as A. G. Stephens said in recommending it for publication, it is “his one book — it is himself.”

If Furphy’s picture of life had been done in colour instead of with words, it would have been called a primitive. It recalls a type familiar enough a generation ago, less so today — the selfeducated man. Many went into politics; there was often, as with Furphy. a strong family background of the Bible and Shakespeare. Small wonder that the active mind, denied much in the way of formal education, reached out without preceptors to acquire a wider range of information and understanding. Born in Australia, Joseph Furphy came from an Irish peasant background. He tried various ways of earning a living, including prospecting for gold and farming an unproductive allotment, before he became a bullocky. Droving provided an appropriate background for the contemplation of life and the

untrammelled exercise of the imagination, and Furphy’s fiction, with Tom Collins as his autobiographical hero, took him in thought and conversation with his fellow bullockies far beyond the successive themes of his main narrative, though he embellished that with incident- too. Furphy himself loved language; Collins, his man out front, plays with words and enjoys their vagaries: he is, in fact, a vehicle — Furphy plus — and can even laugh at himself.

To the modern reader Furphy’s overcareful euphemisms for bad language (and bullockies were notorious for that), and painfully conscientious renderings of the various dialects Collins encountered, seemed laboured and unnecessary. This, though, was the work of a “Christian Socialist” with a strain of the preacher in him, a conscientious man and a man in a strict tradition. "Such is Life" has very little affinity with the modern novel: it is more of a Victorian documentary. Never a very popular writer in his lifetime, Furphy commanded attention after his death. His rambling reflections, strung into. a narrative perhaps in the evenings while his team grazed and he kept a wary eye out for the inhospitable squatter, were written down and organised much later, when he had left droving. They provide a picture of an aspect of Australian life and part of its society which might otherwise have been forgotten. The dominant recollection, of the book after finishing it, is of the campfire with several bullockies well met and spending the night together with their teams not too far off, polishing (heir wits on- one another and swapping truth and lies: an environment in which the stuff a man was made of was likely to betray itself in short order.

After this important period of his life Furphy spent a good ’ many years at Shepparton, Victoria, working for one of his brothers who had a foundry; then for the last period of his life, 1904-1912, he strove with his sons to establish a foundry himself, at Perth.

Maverick and all, Furphy in later life

did make a number of friends. One close friend was a young school teacher, enthusiastic but not, says Mr Barnes, Furphy’s intellectual equal’. This was Kate Bell, whom he met in 1887: 30 years later with Vance Palmer she was responsible for the new edition of “Such is Life.” Furphy had rewritten some significant parts of it before his death. These two, perhaps, rescued Furphy’s work from a permanent oblivion which would have been a good deal less than his due. (Although the text presented here is that of the first edition, Mr Barnes discusses the changes at some length.) Mr Drewe’s sympathetic and dramatic reconstruction of what might have happened in the early days of white settlement in Tasmania is a reissue too: it was originally published in 1976. The author has allowed himself a good deal of “freedom of imagination" in reconstructing some nineteenth-century events. Lest he should mislead anyone, he directs the reader to a factual account of the events he has covered.

The method is almost contrapuntal. The story of G. A. Robinson, the government representative given all the dirty work to do (against his original instructions) in making convenient disposition of the natives while venality and improper influence triumphed behind his back at Government House, are moving and pathetic. The principal native character, Truganini, emerges in the end almost in the round. There are only two native characters, says the author, who bear any resemblance to. their known personalities. Truganini and Wooraddy. The rest is interpretation. But there is a recurrent modern echo, an interwoven narrative of the time when the last living representative bf Tasmania’s native race had finally died and been measured by the anthropologists. The ancient picture is depressing and sad enough, but the comparison with modern times is devastating.

Robinson’s character illuminates the earlier story, and the native woman 'Truganini brings the native group to something like human life. Very primitive and. hard to realise as individuals, the native generated in Robinson little' affection for themselves as individuals — nor even, as in the case of the insubordinate native man, Wooraddy, much impatience. Robinson’s concern was with the disease which was decimating the tribesmen; his masters’ concern was to get them conveniently isolated in one place. The modern story, apart from an epilogue chapter rounding up comparisons, ends in 1976 with the death and burial of the old woman Truganini, who has come to life in the author’s hands as a person with feelings and an identity. It ends, too, with the implicit reflection that the characters chosen to represent modern Tasmanian life as a result of the white man’s coming are, perhaps, with all their advantages, no more admirable than the aborigines they had begun to displace nearly a century and half before. The power to write muscular, wellorganised fiction can no doubt be acquired by hard work. The ability to appeal to the • reader's compassion is a natural gift, and Mr Drewe has that too.