14. Good, better, best/Never let it rest. Till your good is better/And your better best.

On the farm where I grew up, we had a furphy.  That was the name for a cylindrical water tank, sitting on wheels, with shafts so that it could be pulled by a horse.  These tanks were made by Furphy Brothers of Shepparton, Victoria, and in a dry land they were ubiquitous.  The once-famous doggerel could be found on the bulging ends, in English caps and in what I was told was shorthand.  As a child, I was fascinated; the well-known lines were not exactly optimistic but they leaned in that direction, something rare in the world of farmers.

Joseph Furphy, who wrote as Tom Collins, was one of the brothers who produced these tanks.  John Barnes and Miles Franklin speak of his hours spent in a room he added to his cottage near the Goulburn River, a place of much recall and conversation, I have no doubt.  In his room he could turn his unremarkable life into a great deal, even, perhaps, a book that would outlast the way of life he chronicled – it’s his word – as a bringing to literary birth of the age of wool.  Many years ago, on a visit to Paris, I was asked to explain to an American woman the meaning, the context, of a picture she had on her wall which both puzzled and interested her.  It was George Lambert’s ‘Across the Black Soil Plains’, and it was later than Furphy’s account because the wagon was being pulled by horses, not bullocks, but those huge bales of wool were as I had known them in my childhood, when they were moved by trucks, not animals any more.  A tradition had moved on. [read more]