Geordie Williamson
speaker
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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Well, I mean, uh, Kate, I think the reason that um it's been compared with Moby Dick, um, quite aside from the fact that um uh the the author, Joseph Furfee, had this extraordinary um kind of autodidacts mind.
He'd read the Greeks, he'd read Wordsworth, Shakespeare and the Bible.
He was an incredibly learned man, but he lived in the back blocks of nowhere, had no one to talk.
To except for this wonderful school teacher named Kate Baker, who his greatest booster and and really was the woman who made this book happen.
But once he sent the manuscript, and he didn't start the novel till he was fifty.
Um, he sent the manuscript to the bulletin and um and A.
G.
Stevens said, Well, I th I I think this may be a classic.
Um, and they printed a pile of copies, and I think that years after publication, um, two-thirds had still not been sold.
So it was a really, yes, it was a long tail, slow burn exercise.
I think that Australian
Readers were very much um they loved to import their novels.
And what local novels they had were more in the the Rolf Boulderwood uh style.
They were novels of excitement, of bush rangers, of event.
Um, and such is life.
It does have wonderful event, but it's much stranger and and and more intellectual, I guess.
And so it took a little while for people to get the memo, but once they did, the 20th century is the history of um various sort of Australian uh scholars or writers, from Miles Franklin herself, who was one of the great early boosters um of Saty's life.
She thought that was the archetypal Australian novel.
It's the Ur novel from which all other novels were.
Would grow to um, you know, kind of a more recent present where figures like um Peter Carey uh or Murray Bale really draw on the kind of bush modernism that um that that Furfe espouses and said, this is our tradition and this is the one that we're riding out of.
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