Joseph Furphy

“ She knew the dwelling-place of every loved companion; and, by necessity, she had her own names for them all—since her explorations were carried out on Rory's shoulders, or on his saddle, and technicalities never troubled him. To her it was a new world, and she saw that it was good. All those impressions which endear the memory of early scenes to the careworn heart were hers in their vivid present, intensified by the strong ideality of her nature, and undisturbed by other companionship, save that of her father. ”

“ It is not the Celtic element that makes the Irish people a bundle of inconsistencies—clannish, yet disjunctive; ardent, yet unstable; faithful, yet perfidious; exceeding loveable for its own impulsive love, yet a broken reed to lean upon. It is not the Celt who has made Irish history an unexampled record of patience and insubordination, of devotion and treachery. The Celt, though fiery, is shrewd, sensible, and practical. It has been truly said that Western Britain is more Celtic than Eastern Ireland. ”

“ For this recordless land—this land of our lawful solicitude and imperative responsibility—is exempt from many a bane of territorial rather than racial impress. She is committed to no usages of petrified injustice; she is clogged by no fealty to shadowy idols, enshrined by Ignorance, and upheld by misplaced homage alone; she is cursed by no memories of fanaticism and persecution; she is innocent of hereditary national jealousy, and free from the envy of sister states.
Then think how immeasurably higher are the possibilities of a Future than the memories of any Past since history began. ”

“ Each undertaking, great or small, of our lives has one controlling alternative, and no more. To illustrate this from the play of Hamlet: You will notice that, up to a certain point of time, the Prince governs his own destiny—at least, as far as the Ghost's commission is concerned, and this covers the whole drama. He is master and umpire of his circumstances, so that when two or more lines of action, or a line of action and a line of inaction, appear equally efficacious, he can select the one which appears to be of least resistance. ”

“ A major-alternative may create and enclose all the secondary alternatives of after life. A minor-alternative may exhaust itself in one minute, or less, leaving its indelible, though imperceptible, scar on the experimenter, and, through him, on the world in which he lives. ”

“ By comparison, the Past, though glozed beyond all semblance of truth, is a clinging heritage of canonised ignorance, brutality and baseness; a drag rather than a stimulus. And as day by day, year by year, our own fluid Present congeals into a fixed Past, we shall do well to take heed that, in time to come, our own memory may not be justly held accursed. ”

“ To me this wayward diversity of spontaneous plant life bespeaks an unconfined, ungauged potentiality of resource; it unveils an ideographic prophecy, painted by Nature in her Impressionist mood, to be deciphered aright only by those willing to discern through the crudeness of dawn a promise of majestic day. ”

“ Another junction flashes into sight, and again your choice is made; negligently enough, perhaps, but still with a view to what you consider the greatest good, present or prospective. One line may lead through the Slough of Despond, and the other across the Delectable Mountains, but you don't know whether the section will prove rough or smooth, or whether it ends in a junction or a terminus, till the cloven mists of the Future melt into a manifest Present. We know what we are, but we know not what we shall be. ”

“ The interest of the play centres on the poise of incentive between action and non-action, and the absolute free-will of election. But that election once made, we see—and the hero himself acknowledges—a practical inevitableness in all succeeding atrocities which mark his career as king.
Such momentous alternatives are simply the voluntary rough-hewing of our own ends. Whether there's a Divinity that afterwards shapes them, is a question which each inquirer may decide for himself. ”

“ In what other way can this anomalous variety of the human race be accounted for? Ay, and beyond the earliest era noted by ethnography, this original Brito-Irish race must have differentiated itself from the unknown archetype, and, by mere genealogical succession, must have fixed its characteristics so tenaciously as to persist through the random admixture of conquests and colonisations during countless generations. "God is eternal," says a fine French apothegm, "but man is very old."
And very new. Mary O'Halloran was perfect Young-Australian. ”

“ A young man has reached an absolute poise of incentive. He tosses a shekel. "Head—I go and see life; tail—I stay at home. Head it is." The alternative is accepted; whereupon Destiny puts in her spoke, bringing such vicissitudes as are inevitable on the initial option. In due time, another alternative presents itself, and the poise of incentive recurs. ”

“ A stately beefwood, sixty feet high, with swarthy column furrowed a hand-breadth deep, and heavy tufts of foliage like bundles of long leeks in colour and configuration—the first beefwood I had seen since leaving the homestead—stood close to the water, making a fine landmark; but Dan’s sense of proportion had selected the adjacent bit of yarran; and—as I told the breakfast-party—he had never concerned himself to know the difference between yarran and mallee. ”

“ Often the shunting seems a mere trifle; but, in reality, the switch is that wizard-wand which brings into evidence such corollaries of life as felicity or misery, peace or tribulation, honour or ignominy, found on the permanent way. ”

“ A long term of self-communion in the back country will never leave a man as it found him. Outside his daily avocation, he becomes a fool or a philosopher; and, in Rory's case, the latter seemed to have been superimposed on the former. ”

“ Instead of remaining a self-sufficient lord of creation, whose house is thatched when his hat is on, you have become one of a Committee of Ways and Means—a committee of two, with power to add to your number. Dan O'Connell, for instance, had negotiated this alternative, and, in the opinion of the barracks, had made his election in a remiss and casual way. ”

“ Men, thinking and acting in mass, do not (according to the accepted meaning of the phrase) follow the line of least resistance. The myriad-headed monster adopts the alternative which appears to promise such a line, but Its previsions are more often wrong than right; and, in such cases, the irresistible momentum of the Destiny called into being by Its short-sighted choice drives It helplessly along a line of the greatest conceivable resistance. Is n't history a mere record of blundering option, followed by iron servitude to the irremediable suffering thereby entailed? ”

“ He knew that his own contumacy in this respect would land his soul in perdition, and he deliberately let it go at that. Brave old Rory! Never does erratic man appear to such advantage as when his own intuitive moral sense rigorously overbears a conscientiousness warped by some fallacy which he still accepts as truth. ”

“ If he had been as strange to that gilgie as you were, and had got the same directions he gave you, he would have found it first shot. When a certain class of bushman says ‘mallee’, he means any sort of scrub except lignum; and when he says ‘mulga’, he means any tree except pine or currajong. Same mental slovenliness in women. A woman will tell a yarn that no man can make head or tail of, but it’s as clear as day to any other woman. And if you tell a woman a yarn, as it ought to be told, she’ll think she understands it, and you’ll think so too, if she says nothing. ”

“ Yet the mother loved the child in her own hard, puritanical way. And, in any case, you are not competent to judge her, unless you have to work for your living, instead of finding somebody eager to support you in luxury for the pleasure of your society; unless, instead of marrying some squatter, or bank clerk, or Member of Parliament, you have inadvertently coupled yourself to a Catholic boundary man, named nothing short of Rory O'Halloran.
The embittered woman retired early, and without phrases. ”

“ Likely he had heard the cocks crowing at your place before daylight, and was making for the sound, only that the light beat him, and he gave it best five minutes too soon."
"Ah! we're poor, helpless craythurs, Tammas! But A s'pose A betther see Misther Spanker at wanst?"
"No," I replied; "you stay and do what you can. I'll ride back, and see Mr. Spanker. How far is it to where that swag is on the fence?"
"About—well, about seven mile, as the crow flies."
"Better have it here. Now we'll catch the horses. Come on, Mary! Take her on your back, Rory; we must hurry up now." ”

“ A fixed resolution to avoid the very appearance of digression in these annals prevents my referring to various sporadic Irish combinations of the 18th century—Whiteboys, Steelboys, Oakboys, Peep-o'-day Boys, Defenders—some Catholic, some Protestant, some mixed; but each representing an inarticulate protest against agrarian or ecclesiastical aggression. Notice, however, that the customary dragging in of these irrelevancies, to confuse the main issue, is not to be wondered at, seeing that Orangeism itself is based, in a large, general way, on the Bible. ”

“ And, by the way, if there's anything in the inspiration of Art—if the Artist soars to truth by the path which no fowl knoweth—your theory may find some support in the fact that it was a usage of the Renaissance to represent the skull of Adam at the foot of the cross. ”

“ We don't know much of the non-political history of Ireland during the 18th century, and indeed there is not much to be known. An Irish Parliament, consisting solely of landlords and their nominees, legislated as men do when the personal equation is allowed to pass unchecked. ”

“ In any case, each alternative brings into immediate play a flash of Free-will, pure and simple, which instantly gives place—as far as that particular section of life is concerned—to the dominion of what we call Destiny. The two should never be confounded. "Who can control his fate?" asks the ruined Othello. No one, indeed. But every one controls his option, chooses his alternative. Othello himself had independently evolved the decision which fixed his fate, recognising it as such an alternative. Thus ”

“ It may be worth while, before we go any farther, to inquire into the nature and origin of this gulf—not merely for the sake of information, but because it is a question which affects the moral health of our community.
When Australia was first colonised, any sensible man might have foreboded sorrel, cockspur, Scotch thistle, &c., as unwelcome, but unavoidable, adjuncts of settlement. A many-wintered sage might have predicted predicted that some colonist, in a fit of criminal folly, would scourge the country with a legacy of foxes, rabbits, sparrows, &c. ”

“ However, we are concerned only with Ulster, where the native element of population, oblivious to Thrift, and instinctively loyal to anything in the shape of supremacy, had become alloyed with an ingredient derived from the most contumacious brood at that time in Western Europe, namely, the so-called Anglo-Saxon—a people unpleasantly apt in drawing a limit-line to aggression on its pocket, and by no means likely to content itself with an appeal to the Saints or the Muses. ”

“ There are no more divergent roads; if he desires to leave the one he has chosen, he must break blindly through a hedge of moral antagonisms. His alternatives have become so lopsided that practically there is only one course open. ”

“ But even wild cattle can no more scent water than we can, though they make better use of such faculties as they possess. I have tested the supposition deliberately and exhaustively, time after time; and this instance is cited, not controversially, but because it has to do with the present memoir.
However, next morning—after verifying the tracks of the thirsty bullocks so near the gilgie that it seemed a wonder they hadn’t walked into it—I looked for the clump of mallee. ”

“ The profound cunning of a propertied class, operating with sinister purpose on the inevitable flunkeyism of a dependent class, per medium of that moral kink in human nature which makes sectarian persecution an act of worship, generated an accordant monster. ”