Association for the Study of Australian Literature
Abstract
This paper is an attempt to read the original 1897 Such is Life from what remains in accessible printed form. It is argued that the 1897 version differs markedly from the 1903 version in three ways: location, argument, and the character of Tom Collins. The conclusion is that it was neither a ‘bush epic’ nor a ‘proto-modernist text’, but closer to a nineteenth-century urban comedy of manners
