Roger Osborne

‘Such is life’ is a common phrase in Australian popular culture – it has even been tattooed on bodies – but Joseph Furphy’s novel of the same name, published in 1903, is often forgotten. Ned Kelly mythology suggests that he uttered this phrase just before being hanged in 1880, though some historians argue that what he actually said was, ‘Ah well, I suppose’. Long before Furphy (1843–1912) wrote his magnum opus, the stoic phrase was perhaps wrongly associated with a cult hero’s execution.

While working in the London advertising world in the late 1960s, Peter Carey sent his stories to a leading New York literary magazine, Evergreen Review, only to be unimpressed by another rejection ...

Through the significant cultural presence of Heart of Darkness, I am regularly confronted with the work of Joseph Conrad in my everyday life: an elephant in Disney’s Tarzan exclaims ‘the horror’ at the sight of a human camp; a young man reads the novella on a ship bound for Skull Island in the latest King Kong; and, during the fortnight while I am writing this review, Radio National is broadcasting a serialised reading of the novella each afternoon. In Postcolonial Conrad: Paradoxes of Empire, Terry Collits wonders ‘how … we may read and understand Conrad nowadays’. With so many cultural claims to just one Conradian text, such a question is timely.