UNEMPLOYED at last!
Scientifically, such a contingency can never have befallen of itself.
Stella Miles Franklin, author of My Brilliant Career, famously identified Such Is Life as Australia’s equivalent of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Not that it is about the obsessive hunt for a great white whale, but in terms of scope, length, and identification with the national character. Also, it has a terrific opening. While the above may not be exactly equivalent to “Call me Ishmael” in the broader perspective of fantastic opening lines, there is equivalence in its quality of introduction. Mystery is situated in the opening line and poetry in the second.
Submitting, then, to the constitutional interdict already glanced at, and availing myself of the implied license to utilise that homely talent of which I am the bailee, I purpose taking certain entries from my diary, and amplifying these to the minutest detail of occurrence or conversation. This will afford to the observant reader a fair picture of Life, as that engaging problem has presented itself to me.
The conceit of the novel is that it is composed of extracts from the diary of a certain Tom Collins. Collins, of course, is merely the non-de-plume of the author, but the form and function of the novel is tangentially in diary form. Just tangentially, however. It hardly reads like a diary, despite best efforts to make it so.
The back-country man, though saturnine, is very rarely quarrelsome, and almost never a pugilist; nevertheless, his foot on his native salt-bush, it is not advisable to assault him with any feebler weapon than rifle-and-bayonet. There is a radical difference, without a verbal distinction, between his and the Englishman's notions of fair-play.
It is a novel about establishing the Australian character. Published shortly after Australia’s independence, Such Is Life is obsessively about revealing the qualities of the Australian especially in comparison to the British. If the novel is revelatory about monomania a la Captain Ahab, then the mania is a search for the great white whale of what it means to be Australian; the essence of Australian-ness.
Such is life.
More than a title; a philosophical punctuation mark. This phrase appears nearly thirty times in the novel, not including the title. (Including the title, it appears nearly thirty-one times.) In every case but two, “such is life” is part of the final line of a paragraph; usually they are the concluding lines. It is a Stoically philosophical shrug of the shoulders in literary form:
“...in all probability they're gone to heaven. Such is life, boys.”
“Drastic, but such is life.”
“But such is life, and such is death.”
“Ignorance again; but such is life.”
