Such is Life

Joseph Furphy (1843-1912) was an Australian novelist. Born in Yering, Victoria, he was raised in a family of Irish emigrants from County Armagh. Educated by his mother, he read mostly Shakespeare and the Bible in his youth before moving to Kangaroo Ground, where a school was opened by the local parents. As a teenager, he began working on his father’s farm, later marrying Leonie Germain and taking over her family plot. Forced to switch from farming to animal husbandry due to a period of financial loss, he continued his literary interests as a published poet and short story writer and later fictionalized his agricultural experience in Such is Life (1903), a novel of rural Australia he wrote under the pseudonym “Tom Collins.” Largely ignored upon publication, Such is Life is now considered a classic work of Australian literature and perhaps one of the first novels written in an Australian English dialect.