Such is life is a shrug at something that cannot be changed. It is plain English, in print by 1750, and far older than its Australian fame: Ned Kelly’s reported use of it on the gallows in 1880 is disputed. The Cambridge Dictionary glosses the idiom as one “used to refer to an event that has happened and that you must accept”.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘Such is life’?
The early uses of this phrase date from the mid 18th century; for example, Joseph Baretti’s A Grammar of the Italian Language, 1762, translates “Cosi va’l mondo!” as “Such is life” and continues:
“Such is life, that whatever is proposed, it is much easier to find reasons for rejecting than embracing.”
‘Such is life’, of course, mirrors the French ‘C’est la vie’, which equates to the English ‘that’s life’, or ‘life’s like that’. Modern variants are ‘that’s the way it goes’, ‘that’s the way the ball bounces’, ‘that’s the way the cookie crumbles’ etc.
The sentence Baretti prints was not his own. It is Samuel Johnson’s, and it had already appeared twelve years earlier in The Rambler No. 39, dated Tuesday 31 July 1750: “Yet such is life, that whatever is proposed, it is much easier to find reasons for rejecting than embracing.” Johnson uses the words much as anyone would use them now, to concede a difficulty that is not going to be solved. The scan of the 1762 grammar shows the sentence set in the long s of the period, opening “Such is life, that whatever is propofed it is much eafier to find reafons for”.
By 1842 the phrase could be dropped into comedy as an everyday shrug. Charles Dickens has it in American Notes, 1842, in a passage on the pigs that then roamed the streets of New York. A pig passes a butcher’s door-post hung with the carcase of a slaughtered friend, “grunts out ‘Such is life: all flesh is pork!’ buries his nose in the mire again”, and waddles off down the gutter.
The Australian association came later, and it is thinner than it looks. The Australian Dictionary of Biography, in its entry on Edward (Ned) Kelly, records that Kelly was hanged at the Melbourne gaol on 11 November 1880 and that “His last words were ‘Ah well, I suppose it has come to this’, later rendered by a journalist as ‘Such is life’.” On that account the famous version is a reporter’s tidying rather than a transcript, and the words themselves had been in English print for well over a century by the time Kelly stood on the drop.
Joseph Furphy took the phrase for the title of the novel he finished in March 1897 and published in Sydney through the Bulletin in 1903, writing as Tom Collins. It is the book’s last line as well as its title: “Such is life, my fellow-mummers”, the narrator signs off, “just like a poor player, that bluffs and feints his hour upon the stage, and then cheapens down to mere nonentity.”
In temper the phrase sits between ‘Life goes on’, which looks forward, and ‘Keep a stiff upper lip’, which asks for composure. ‘Such is life’ asks for neither. It closes the subject.