Anti-Colonialism
The prevailing theme of this most unusual of novels is the rejection of the romantic tradition which had defined Australian literature. That was the Australia of the British colonial period and as such the romantic fiction mirrored the literature of the empire. Along with Henry Lawson’s short stories and My Brilliant Career, Furphy’s novel is part of the literature of Australian independence; fiercely defining itself within the confines of Australian tradition as a rejection of colonial romance.
Unreliable Narrator
Really less an unreliable narrator than a misleading one. And even that isn’t quite accurate. The book purports to be extracts from the diary of Tom Collins. Tom Collins has become synonymous with both “rumormongering” and “tall tale.” Collins thus belongs to the tradition of narrators like Lemuel Gulliver who insists the stories they tell are true, but he is also a narrator who often misses the point of what he is writing about. As such, his “diary” contains what are often referred to as hidden stories; tales where he gets the facts right, but arrives at the wrong conclusion. His unreliability within this methodology is purposeful because the reader can arrive at the right conclusion using the very same factual information.
Ironic Disconnection
The book is a fantasia of ironic detachment between the characters being written about and the language being used to write about them. The people that the narrator writes about live close to the earth, engage in hard physical labor, live itinerant lifestyles and are uneducated. They are written about in some of the loftiest and perhaps over-educated prose imaginable:
“Priestley, a bullock driver…a decent sort of vulgarian, but altogether too industrious to get any further forward than the extreme tail-end of his profession. Some carriers never learn the great lesson, that to everything there is a time and a season—a time for work, and a time for repose—hence you find the industrious man's inveterately leg-weary set of frames in hopeless competition with the judiciously lazy man's string of daisies.”
