期刊名称：Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature
印刷版ISSN：1447-8986
电子版ISSN：1833-6027
出版年度：2007
卷号：SP
页码：77-93
出版社：Association for the Study of Australian Literature
摘要：Tracks, navigating and mapping are fundamental in Joseph Furphy¡¯s turn-ofthe-
century text Such is Life. The diary entries, which provide the reader with
guidelines for following each chapter, commence with references to time
(dates), company (people) and space (site[s]), which set up a sense of place.1
The opening of the novel, after the preamble and first date entry, involves
a description of the environment and then a positioning, more or less, of
the narrator, Tom Collins, in space: ¡°Overhead, the sun blazing wastefully
and thanklessly through a rarefied atmosphere; underfoot the hot, black clay,
thirsting for spring rain . . . between sky and earth, a solitary wayfarer, wisely
lapt in philosophic torpor¡± (2). This navigation is explicitly and repeatedly
conflated with the track of narrative itself: Such is Life is a narrative about
narrative. The way that place guides the somewhat discursive opening is not
incidental, but central. The passage of Collins through the Riverina is the
track of the story. This intersection between narrative and place is made
most explicit in chapter five, where the lost child stories are narrations about
reading and writing; reading the marks left on the ground and environment,
and tracing the story of the child, which is legible to the trackers.
