Joseph Furphy (1843-1912) was an Australian writer whose reputation rests on "Such Is Life," a major novel that gives accurate representations of the emerging national character and customs in colonial Australia's "age of gusto," the 1890s.

Joseph Furphy was born at Yering, a rural district outside Melbourne, on Sept. 26, 1843. He was educated at home, mainly by his mother, with the Bible and Shakespeare as his first readers. At 23 Furphy bought a threshing machine and at harvesttime took it through wheat areas. He became a homesteader in 1868 but after 5 years of hard times became a wool carrier. This occupation took him deep into the main pastoral areas, about which he was later to write so knowledgably. In slack times he tried his hand at gold mining. In his late 30s he joined his brother at Shepparton, in central Victoria, a rural town in which he spent the 1880s and...