Geordie Williamson

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728 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2018 last heard 21 Aug

Geordie Williamson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.

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The Bookshelf · Anjet Daanje's extraordinary The Stork and the Dromedary + Liane Moriarty returns with Big Little Truths · 21 Aug 2026 podcast

I think it is the first great Australian novel and our national epic, so big.

Big bold claims.

My first is Joseph Furfe's Such is Life, also uh originally written by Tom Collins, same person, um, and published in 1903, although completed in uh 1897.

It took a long time to um reach publication.

But I'm I'm presenting it to the world because I think it is the first.

first great Australian novel and our national epic.

Big big bold claims for such his life.

Yeah, look, um uh smarter people than I have set out to try and explain what such his life is about and failed.

So I'll just say that um as the author himself um said, it's basically a tissue of lies based on kind of real events.

So a um an individual known as Tom Collins, um, and uh in that era, and we're talking about

Sort of the 1890s, Tom Collins was a mythical figure who was the source of all uh rumors, um, japes, um, kind of um bullshit um and nonsense that was possibly being promulgated out in the bush.

And because you couldn't say it was a particular person, you would give that honor to Tom Collins.

So the

author who um was basically wrote the was an old teamster.

He'd spent many years um uh uh uh taking bullocks out and and and uh delivering um foodstuffs and equipment across the northern riverina um uh had basically collected a lot of detail um about these empty days out on the road.

with his fellow bullockies and uh he uh claims this Tom Collins at the beginning of the um novel that all he's doing is taking a selection of dates from his diaries over um a single year in the eighteen eighties um where he's going to tell you what what happened then.

So it's all very casual, but it's actually

Incredibly clever and it's a structural feature of the novel that it's a series of episodes that are distinct in time and in place and yet contain a lot of the same characters.

And it takes place during an era where there is um uh terrible drought, where bullock is uh very pressed economically.

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