Review Henry Lawson, a Life by Colin Roderick, The Order of Things: A Life of Joseph Furphy by John Barnes, and The Life and Opinions of Tom Collins: A Study of the Works of Joseph Furphy by Julian Croft

Abstract

Lawson and Furphy are quite heterogeneous writers, yoked together by nationalists. They are worth discussing as a pair because they are so different and complementary. Their lives and writing help us to get some purchase on the slippery ambiguities of their culture, and on the tensions and dichotomies (bush and city, masculine and feminine, socialist and capitalist—there are many others) that are generally used to construct that culture historically. Roderick and Barnes have written important, gradually brewed, durable (I'm not saying 'definitive') biographies which both aspire, despite their differing voices, towards an assiduous empiricism in plain prose. Each Life deflects some light on the other.