Such Is Life

What is Such Is Life about?

Such Is Life: Being Certain Extracts from the Diary of Tom Collins (1903) by Joseph Furphy is a sprawling, philosophically rich novel drawn from the author’s decades of experience in the Australian bush. Presented as diary entries by the fictional narrator Tom Collins, the novel follows Collins’s encounters with bullock drivers, swagmen, boundary riders, and other bush characters across the Riverina district of New South Wales in the 1880s. Collins’s seemingly casual, digressive narrative conceals a carefully structured work in which themes of fate, free will, and the unreliability of perception are woven through entertaining yarns and vivid character portraits. Furphy’s prose is uniquely Australian—democratic, ironic, and laced with literary allusions from Shakespeare to Marcus Aurelius—creating a voice that refuses to sentimentalize bush life while celebrating its inhabitants’ resourcefulness and humor. The novel’s narrative complexity, including hidden plot connections and deliberate misdirection, was not fully appreciated until scholarly analysis decades later revealed the sophistication beneath its conversational surface.