Jocoserious 'Ignorance Shifting' or 'Aestho-Psycho-Eugenics'?: Interrogating Joseph Furphy's Bulletin 'apprenticeship'

On first sending the uncut manuscript to Archibald, and later to his agent, AGS, Furphy's tone is modest and undemanding: I cannot even myself look over the MS. without noticing countless opportunities for correction, interpolation, and elimination... (to Archibald, 2 May 1897, Letters 28) And: If you can find a victim, I would suggest that you re-read MS., ruthlessly drawing your blue pencil across every sentence, par. or page which offends your literary judgment, and re-mail to me. (to AGS, 30 May 1897 Letters 30) Even when it was clear that publication would probably happen, Furphy nonetheless continued to express self-doubt, and complied readily with AGS's directives. Despite the heavy artillery and adversarialism on display here, Furphy's tone is light and provisional: 'Schwartzkoff''s claim that the high moral tone party is on the whole averse to fighting (he concedes a few exceptions) is, according to Furphy, puffing not evil but 'naughtiness'. [...]it was much cheaper for the squatter, keeping costs down by increasing competition between workers at the station gate. What astonishes is how many of the verbal quirks, strategies and dispositions of Such is Life and the other novels are already in place in 'The Mythical Sundowner': the inversion of norms for the sake of humour but also to make a point; the apparently casual deployment of quotation, which is then subtly altered and indigenised; the lordly polysyllabic tendentiousness which suggests a quotation but disappoints long searching; the use of lists of synonyms, sometimes with elegant variations over several paragraphs or pages; and the commitment to telling rural life in Australia as it is, and to puncturing class-ist, imperial and foreign assumptions in the process.