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Joseph Furphy

Australian writer (1843-1912)

Joseph Furphy (Irish: Seosamh Ó Foirbhithe; 26 September 1843 – 13 September 1912) was an Australian author and poet who is widely regarded as the father of the Australian novel. He mostly wrote under the pseudonym Tom Collins and is best known for his novel Such Is Life (1903), regarded as an Australian classic.

Bias, offensively Australian.

Quotes

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Our virgin continent! how long has she tarried her bridal day!
 
Comedy is tragedy, plucked unripe.
  • Our virgin continent! how long has she tarried her bridal day!
  • The successful pioneer is the man who never spared others; the forgotten pioneer is the man who never spared himself, but, being a fool, built houses for wise men to live in, and omitted to gather moss. The former is the early bird; the latter is the early worm.
  • I compare tracking to reading a letter written in a good business hand. You must'nt look at what's under your eye; you must see a lot at once, and keep a general grasp of what's on ahead, besides spotting each track you pass.
  • The two greatest supra-physical pleasures of life are antithetical in operation. One is to have something to do, and to know that you are doing it deftly and honestly. The other is to have nothing to do, and to know that you are carrying out your blank programme like a good and faithful menial.
  • Farce is the grimmest of all tragedy; it is the blind jollity of an Irish wake, with the silent guest none the less present because unassertive.
  • ... I noticed both women's eyes fixed on my face, with a disconcerting interest in the casual gossip. It is humiliating when you feel yourself expected to say something good, and a swift reconnaissance of the subject shows you no opening for anything beyond what a nobleman might drivel. Moreover, I was fresh from the pastoral regions, where etiquette demands frank, unsolicited, and copious comment on the merits or demerits of some absent person ...
  • ... each man, be he king or beggar, is a little world of his own. If he be swayed by a female, as kings and beggars frequently are, he is an extremely little world.
  • Age cannot limit him, nor use exhaust his infinite mendacity.
    • The Buln-Buln and the Brolga (wr. from 1905; pub. 1946)
    • Parodying Antony and Cleopatra, II, ii, 276–7
  • His arrogance was not without grounds. He more than once unbent himself to confide to my own dad that he (the deponent, not my good old plebeian dad, for heaven's sake!) was the illegitimate son of an illegitimate son of George IV.
    • The Buln-Buln and the Brolga (wr. from 1905; pub. 1946)
  • The gods will give us some faults to make us men; therefore no man is up to the husband-ideal of a loving woman. The bachelor may reach this standard-for why shouldn't he be magnanimous, and mettlesome, and debonair; prepared to do all that may become a man, and sometimes even things that don't? And if he should fall a trifle short of the real Mackay-a contingency that you may safely count upon-he is in no way compelled to flaunt his own worthlessness before the feminine eye.
    • The Buln-Buln and the Brolga (wr. from 1905; pub. 1946)
  • Pritchard senior died of some unpronounceable scientific term signifying internal haemorrhage of irascibility and malevolence.
    • The Buln-Buln and the Brolga (wr. from 1905; pub. 1946)
  • Why is Hamlet never a favourite with the woman-student? Merely because she sees him morally vivisected, and illustrated (so to speak) with coloured plates. Ophelia loved him as the glass of fashion, and so forth; but when he groaned he was no longer a god; when he raised his arabesqued wings, he disclosed the segmented and woolly body common to the Lepidoptera—and all was over.
    • The Buln-Buln and the Brolga (wr. from 1905; pub. 1946)
  • Ah me! the husband once found out has no remedy that I can think of.
    • The Buln-Buln and the Brolga (wr. from 1905; pub. 1946)
  • His one positive quality was mendacity. ... He could lie. His style was ornate, yet reposeful; microscopically exact, yet large and sublime. You could sit down and rest in the cool shade of one of his fabrications.
    • The Buln-Buln and the Brolga (wr. from 1905; pub. 1946)
  • Now, I have a theory that women do not love their husbands ... I hold that married life is a long-drawn ordeal, which no man short of a Chevalier Bayard has any business to face ...
    • The Buln-Buln and the Brolga (wr. from 1905; pub. 1946)
  • ... the married man must wear his rue (rue is good) with a difference. ... he will, in a general way, become sordid, and thrifty, and domesticated; he will learn to glory more in buying articles cheap at sales than in carrying off trophies from his compeers; he will become particular over his tucker, and cautious about getting his feet wet; he will become prudent, and circumspect, and churchwardenlike, and befittingly frightened in the presence of anything lawless, from a crash of thunder to a scrub-bred steer. And, gentle lady, there goes your ideal. Confess it, ye devil! Let us all ring Fancy's knell.
    • The Buln-Buln and the Brolga (wr. from 1905; pub. 1946)
  • We find it so much easier, you will observe, to forgive our own shortcomings than the imperfections of our ladye-loves. This 'tis to be married; this 'tis to have linen and buck-baskets. Ay de mi!
    • The Buln-Buln and the Brolga (wr. from 1905; pub. 1946)
  • Ten thousand women revered and idolized John Wesley; but there was one woman to whom he was small spuds, and few in a hill; one woman who used to put out her tongue at him when he was preaching, and who, in the seclusion of domestic life, cursed and cuffed him, and set him utterly at naught. That was the dear lady Disdain who had studied the demi-god's close-cropped, wigless cranium; who had watched him shaving, and had marked him snore o' nights; who was familiar with all his jokes, and who knew exactly how much truth there was in his yarns; who had heard the demi-god's voice saying: "D——n the boots! and the (adj.) snob that made them!"—or words to that effect.
    • The Buln-Buln and the Brolga (wr. from 1905; pub. 1946)
  • Better we were cold and still, with our famous Jim and Bill,
      Beneath the interdicted wattle-bough,
    For the angels made our date five-and-twenty years too late,
      And there is no Up the Country for us now.
    • "The Gumsucker's Dirge", st. 11, in Poems (1916)

See also

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Wikipedia
Wikipedia has an article about:
  • "Quotes", josephfurphy.com.au (Mediart Solutions, 2013)
  • John Barnes, ed. Joseph Furphy (University of Queensland Press, 1981)
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