Furphy the water cart and the world
John Barnes and Andrew Furphy
Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd
142 pages, $39.95
Volume 11, No. 41, April 20, 2006

IT’S no Furphy that there’s a new book about Furphies. Furphy – The Water Cart and The World explores the recent history of a family name that came to prominence in Australia firstly as a Shepparton-based family producing inventive farm machinery (and most famously the water cart), to its more readily identified place in the Australian vernacular after being adopted by World War I soldiers as a colloquialism for rumour.

Much of the family history won’t be of great interest, but the chapters on the appropriation of the word furphy, and it’s links to soldiers on the battlefields will.

The book tells how Furphy water carts were used at training camps in World War I, and there’s also some interesting quotes from C.E.W. Bean’s The Anzac Book which credited “nearly all the camp rumours had their origin in these groups near the rubbish carts”. Bean also considered the drivers of these carts as being a great source of rumour-mongering.

– Cpl Damian Shovell.

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