Such Is Life

“Unemployed at last!” Tom Collins greets his sudden freedom with theories of the universe—and a diary opened at random, sending him into the blistering heat of the Australian plains.

In 1880s Riverina, the road runs through black-soil plains and scattered pine ridges, where bullock teams pause for cold mutton and tea. Tom, travelling with a horse, a packhorse and a muzzled kangaroo dog, falls in with drivers, a former whaler and other wayfarers. He means to turn a week of diary notes into a picture of life, and calls himself a truthful chronicler—though his memory, he admits, is especially good at keeping personal injuries fresh. Around the campfire, where conversation can be as revealing as it is unreliable, what will his record make of the people he meets?

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