Selected Poems Of Henry Lawson

[Brandi Wendelberger]

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Henry (Archibald Hertzberg) Lawson is the most famous and influential Australian literary figure of the nineteenth century. From poor rural beginnings he achieved a popular, ongoing nationwide reputation that is unlikely ever to be equaled. A poet, short-story writer, and sometime journalist, Lawson lived on his writing and whatever odd jobs came his way. Personal, social, and marital problems exacerbated his later decline into alcoholism, and his literary reputation largely rests on the short stories produced in the decade that led up to the federation of the Australian colonies in 1901. His popular bush ballads have provided an accessible form for the historical dissemination of Australia's pioneering rural heritage, however, and they continue to reach a wide popular audience and to inspire contemporary imitators. Years after his impoverished death he remains a national icon.

Born in the goldfield town of Grenfell in central New South Wales on 17 June 1867, Henry Archibald Lawson was the son of a Norwegian immigrant, Niels Herzberg Larsen (who anglicized his name to Peter Lawson), and his colonial-born wife, Louisa (ne Albury). After six months prospecting for gold, the infant's parents retraced their steps northwest a few hundred miles to Eurunderee, a small settlement outside the town of Mudgee, where Louisa Lawson's family resided. Lawson was to spend most of his unhappy childhood there, except for a two-year period from 1871 to 1873 when his father followed another rush to the nearby town of Gulgong. Neils Larsen was a quiet and industrious man who farmed, prospected, and picked up odd jobs in the building industry, while his wife kept the small local post office, wrote poetry, and dreamed of a more fulfilling outlet for her talents. Louisa has an insufficiently substantiated reputation as a poor housekeeper and an unaffectionate mother, but she was a talented, resourceful, and ambitious woman who understood the progressive potential of literature and the press. From an early age she introduced her son Henry to the works of Charles Dickens, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Kendall, and Adam Lindsay Gordon, and, to her pragmatic husband's disgust, cultivated the lonely, introspective boy's literary abilities. The profound sense of social isolation that was to characterize her son all his life was exacerbated when an illness left him partially deaf at the age of nine. Trips for treatment to Sydney in 1880 and Melbourne in 1887 failed to improve his hearing, and from the age of fourteen he was almost completely deaf. His schooling took place at a rudimentary bush school not far from the family selection (ranch), apart from a brief sojourn at the Catholic school in Mudgee, and later he studied unsuccessfully for the matriculation exams at night school in Sydney. This scanty education weighed heavily upon the aspiring writer and significantly affected the development of his attitude toward art and culture and his relationship with his audience and the critics.

The shy teenager worked with his father on building contracts in the Blue Mountains between 1881 and 1883, before Louisa Lawson took her three sons and daughter to Sydney. There Henry was apprenticed as a painter to a coach-building firm, and during the two years that followed he alternated between companies in Newcastle and Sydney. During this time his early-morning and late-night commuting to and from work and night school revealed to him the plight of the urban poor and stimulated an interest in social justice that became a major preoccupation of his writing career.

Louisa Lawson's own career was also developing, and her house became a meeting place for spiritualists, freethinkers, republicans, and social reformers. Together with William Keep, George Black, and her son Henry she brought out a short-lived democratic newspaper, The Republican (1887-1888), which served as a stepping-stone for her far more important publication, The Dawn, which she produced from 1888 until 1905. Associations with Sydney's radical political circles and a growing sense of youthful outrage at social injustice and class privilege provided Henry with the inspiration for his first publication, "A Song of the Republic," which appeared in Australia's most significant literary periodical of the period, the radical nationalist weekly newspaper The Bulletin (Sydney), on 1 October 1887:

More radical political verse--such as the "Hymn of the Reformers," "Flag of the Southern Cross," "The Army of the Rear," and the much anthologized "Faces in the Street," first published in The Bulletin (July 1888) and collected in In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses (1896)--followed. Lawson quickly began to expand his subjects by venturing some occasional verse, rural ballads, and nostalgic gold rush poems. He also began to try his hand at the short story, and on 22 December 1888 "His Father's Mate" was published in the Christmas number of The Bulletin. Revised and collected in While the Billy Boils (1896), the story reworked a tale of his maternal grandfather about the death of a prospector's child in a mining accident. The tense combination of the author's pessimistic fatalism with the sentimental note characteristic of nineteenth-century periodical fiction became a controversial feature of Lawson's style, but he made only occasional use of the condensed novel form he had adapted from Bret Harte .

In 1890 Lawson accompanied his brother to newly discovered goldfields in Western Australia, where he contributed a series of journalistic sketches on colonization to The Albany Observer. Toward the end of the year he was back in Sydney, and for almost a year he alternated between the Blue Mountains and Sydney, picking up itinerant work as a housepainter. In 1891 he was offered a staff position on The Boomerang (Brisbane), an antiestablishment newspaper with strong affinities with the labor movement. Lawson's political idealism continued to be fired by a series of epic confrontations between labor and capital in the Maritime Strike of 1890 and the Shearers' Strikes of 1891. While in Brisbane he came to the notice of William Lane, an influential union intellectual who had recently left The Boomerang to edit The Worker (Brisbane). In the wake of the union defeats in the great strikes, the Labor movement established a political party that soon achieved significant success in the New South Wales elections. Lane chose another course of action, however, and left the country soon after to establish a socialist utopia known as New Australia in Paraguay.

The declining fortunes of The Boomerang forced Lawson to return to Sydney, where he lived off his writing by contributing antiestablishment verse to The Bulletin, The Freeman's Journal, and Truth. The erratic mood swings, which his biographer Colin Roderick attributes to a bipolar disorder, now surfaced in his verse, which alternates between triumphant and infallible prophecy, and a fatalistic pessimism. Lawson had little faith in the efficacy of the parliamentary efforts of the Labor movement and began to use the short story as the vehicle for his growing interest in urban lowlife. A return to bush subjects inspired by family stories familiar from his childhood in Mudgee quickly followed, but he retained his concern for the plight of the working class.

Lawson's interest in social reform was circumscribed by an anti-intellectual skepticism toward social theory and organized politics, and a preference for personal experience and emotive appeal was to become both an enabling and a limiting hallmark of his work. A concocted verse debate with A. B. "Banjo" Paterson in The Bulletin (between 9 July and 1 October 1892) on the respective merits of Australian rural and urban life provided Lawson with an opportunity to develop his understanding of the social function of literary realism. The lack of regular employment, his bohemian contacts, and his weakness for alcohol, however, began to cause Lawson's literary patrons some concern. J. F. Archibald, the editor of The Bulletin, arranged to send him to the western township of Bourke to report on the industrial and electoral tensions between the unions and the pastoralists, and to collect literary "copy" with a rural interest.

Lawson arrived in Bourke in September of 1892 and was soon writing poems in support of the union cause in one of the two local newspapers. He made lifelong friends of many of the union leaders, who helped organize casual work for him during the shearing season on Toorale, one of the largest sheep stations in the area. Within a few short weeks on Toorale, Lawson acquired the knowledge of shearers and roustabouts that enabled him to become a key figure in the propagation of Australia's pervasive rural myths and legends. The wool season finished prior to Christmas, and after returning on foot to Bourke, Lawson agreed with friends to "carry his swag" (trek) to the town of Hungerford some two hundred miles north on the Queensland border. The seasonal nature of rural industry caused a substantial number of men to wrap their belongings in a blanket and a piece of canvas (swag), and walk from station to station in search of work. During the 1890s depression, many urban men were also forced to adopt the practice. Distances between the sheep stations were often substantial, and the landscape was dry and barren, so most stations accepted the custom of supplying work or enough provisions to carry the swagman to the next property. Lawson's trek provided him with the experiences he used to create the sentimentally cynical bush philosopher Jack Mitchell, now recognized as the definitive Australian swagman.

Lawson returned to Bourke in early February, where he again picked up some work as a painter, renewed his friendship with local unionists, yarned with the passing bushmen in the Carrier's Arms hotel, and began to produce a series of rural sketches and poems for the Sydney newspapers.

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