The Furphy Anthology 2021 contains an incredible eclectic mix of sixteen stories that show Australian storytelling is alive and kicking. This collection includes stories from writers such as Thomas Alan, Verity Borthwick, Chris Fontana, Lee Frank, Keren Heenan, Michelle Prak and Andrew Roff.

All the authors take you on journeys to places you know, or think you know. But more than that, they take you by surprise.

The enormously talented authors in this anthology delve into many things: the surety of an old Holden anchored in weeds, food as it might be in the future, surfers facing the elements, a teacher caught in the crosshairs, things that are found but lost, and a town ‘big enough to be bigoted – too small to know it – too tired to care’.

The locations are quintessentially Australian – beaches, rural properties, dense bushland, deserts, and towns, large and small – as are the characters that inhabit them. But the themes are universal in scope: love, fear, tolerance, death, life, rejection, truth and protection, among others.

These stories capture us in all of our beauty and with all of our faults. Or do they?

There might be a furphy or two…