The End of the Road: Joseph Furphy and Tom Collins in Western Australia

Abstract

Joseph Furphy spent the last seven years of his life in and around Fremantle and the suburbs of Perth in WA. When he died suddenly, aged 69, his literary reputation was unknown there. In fact, his death went unremarked apart from a mean-spirited paragraph in the Bulletin; his occupation on his death certificate was recorded as ‘Mechanic’, and the only possession of value he left was his typewriter. During those WA years Furphy was increasingly isolated from the few literary contacts he had made while Such Is Life was being published, and even his correspondence with Kate Baker dwindled. Increasingly frustrated with the little time he had for writing, he described his harsh and often unrewarding daily life in a letter to his mother (August 1906): ‘I have deteriorated. The change in conditions of life, with irregular hours, have broken me off literary work; and I have become a grafter, pure and simple’. (364 Barnes) Yet decades after his almost anonymous death Joseph Furphy’s reputation was recovered in the name of Tom Collins in the West, where it is of lasting influence. I want to trace that history, together with some illustrations of Tom Collins House as it is known, which has been preserved as the home of the West Australian branch of the Fellowship of Australian Writers since 1949, and of the valuable collection of Australian paintings which make up part of the Tom Collins Bequest to the University of Western Australia.