Henry Lawson

Henry's mother, Louisa, was an activist for women's rights and published the feminist newspaper "The Dawn" for many years.

In Henry's early years, the family lived on a poor selection in the Mudgee district. Lawson suffered from deafness and was often teased as a result.

His parents separated in 1883, and it was then that Louisa went to Sydney and began publishing "The Dawn".

Simply put, Henry Lawson was a troubled man. Colin Roderick , who recently published a biography of Lawson: "Henry Lawson: a life" suggests that Lawson was manic depressive, and sought refuge from his mood swings in alcohol.

Henry married Bertha Bredt in 1896, and they had two children, but it was not a happy relationship and they separated in 1903. Henry was also in and out of institutions for his alcoholism, and in and out of gaol for failing to support his family. He died on 2 September, 1922, in Sydney.

The light in Henry's life, and the focus of our attention, is not his unhappy personal life, but his importance as an Australian writer.

Henry Lawson and the Australian short story

The first flowering of the short story in Australia, of which Henry was a master, occurred in the 1880s and 1890s. Much of Lawson's work was set in the Australian bush, or was about bush life.

Although even in the 19th century most Australians lived in cities and towns, it was the bush that somehow grabbed the imagination - perhaps because of the stark contrast between it and the more gentle and controlled environment of Europe - from where most non-indigenous Australians had come.

It's also worth remembering that this is a time before Federation, and Australians' allegiance was not to Australia - because it did not exist as an entity. It was to the colony people owed loyalty - New South Wales or Victoria and so on - and beyond that, loyalty was owed to England, the King or Queen of England, the British Empire.

By the 1890s Australia had been settled for a little more than 100 years and Lawson was arguably the first Australian-born writer who really looked at Australia with Australian eyes, not influenced by his knowledge of other landscapes. He was the first perhaps to give voice to interpretations of an "Australian" character.

He was also from the bush, had lived on a selection, had been brought up in bush poverty, had suffered hardship and unemployment, and knew of the characters and lifestyles he talked about. His work reflected Australian experience with an integrity readers recognised.

Lawson and The Bulletin

Lawson was first published in The Bulletin in 1887 with the poem "Song of Australia". The Bulletin was an influential publication which promoted a particular set of views - egalitarianism, unionism, and Australianism. It was also white and male.

Lawson was a regular contributor, as was Banjo Paterson. A series of verses and other writers were published where Lawson and Paterson debated their different perspectives on the Australian bush - Lawson claiming Paterson was a romantic, and Paterson claiming Lawson was full of doom and gloom.

Tony Moore, in his 1997 paper about bohemian culture, says "The bohemian traits revered by The Bulletin writers are almost a caricature of the Australian national type propagated by the journal: mateship and blokey bonding to the exclusion of family life; hostility to religion, personified by the Protestant wowser; ironic humour; a fondness for alcohol, pubs and gambling; pre-occupation with a free-wheeling Australian identity (overlaid with francophilia and Irish nationalism) invariably opposed to a conservative Englishness; and an occasional flirtation with political causes such as socialism and republicanism. The identification of the bohemian with male mateship remains a strong thread in the Australian tradition, but one contested by women like Mary Gilmore in the 1890s, Dulcie Deamer in the 1920s, Joy Hester in the 1940s and Germaine Greer in the 1960s".

A British reviewer in the 1890s claimed, "The delusion these writers [of The Bulletin school] labour under is trying to be too exclusively Australian, by which they come merely provincial. That a man's lot should be cast in the wilds of Australia is no reason that his whole inner life should be taken up with the glorification of shearers or the ridicule of jackaroos. And a genuine Australian poetry can only arise when such matters fall into their true place and assume their relatively small artistic importance".