Henry Lawson. His Life and Work

35 Pages·2013·2.295 MB·English

by  Margaret McPhee

The Australian Character
Henry Lawson: His Life and His
Work
by Margaret McPhee
ISBN 978 086427 297 3
Published in electronic format by
Trocadero Publishing
GPO Box 1546
Sydney NSW 2001
Australia
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[email protected]
www.trocadero.com.au
Created and produced in Australia
Copyright © 2013 S and L Brodie
The information in this eBook was
current at the time of writing
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THE AUSTRALIAN CHARACTER
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* Please check www.trocadero.com.au for publication date
Immigrants Who Changed Australia
n
the australian character
HENRY
o
LAWSON
s
margaret mcphee
w
the people’s poet 2
formative years 4
awkward bush boy 6
city streets 8
the bulletin 10
republican and nationalist 12
L
battle of the balladists 14
a
on the track 16
mateship 18
in new zealand 20
a troubled life 22
women in lawson’s life 24
influences 26
short stories 28
lawson’s legacy 30
references 32
index 32
the poems
the teams 3 freedom on the wallaby 13 the men we might have been 23
the roaring days 5 the city bushman 15 the free-selector’s daughter 25
the old bark school 7 out back 17 scots of the riverina 27
faces in the street 9 a mate can do no wrong 19 the drover’s wife 29
andy’s gone with cattle 11 waratah and wattle 21 past carin’ 31
Edited by Lynn Brodie
ISBN 978 086427 297 3
This edition Copyright © 2013 S and L Brodie All rights reserved Originally published 2004
Published by Trocadero Publishing GPO Box 1546 Sydney NSW 2001 Australia
www.trocadero.com.au
2
Henry Lawson wrote about
the ordinary Australians he
grew up with in ‘the bush’
and later lived among in the city.
His work shows great sympathy
for those who struggle to survive.
Although most of his adult
life was spent in the city, Lawson
is best known for his poems and
short stories about the bush. His
vivid and realistic descriptions of
rural life, with its hardships and
occasional humour, are based on
his boyhood in the Mudgee
region of central New South
Henry Lawson was born at a time
Wales, and on nine months spent
when the prospect of fabulous
wealth from gold had gripped the in the drought-stricken ‘Outback’,
imagination of the Australian public
around Bourke, when he was
twenty-five years old.
bush language
Young Henry Lawson
green-hide goad, green-hide plait — a whip made experienced the end of the gold
from untanned cattle skin
rushes, lived through the last of
johnny cakes — small flat cakes made from bread
the Cobb & Co. coaching days,
and water and cooked in the ashes of a campfire
and saw the opening of the
on the wallaby — travelling as a swagman
selector — a farmer railway through rural Australia.
shanty — a place where alcoholic drink was sold, Scattered through his works are
usually without a licence
word pictures of Mudgee’s blue
swag — a bundle containing bedding and
hills, reedy rivers, dusty tracks
personal belongings carried by a swagman on
and dismal, worn-out goldfields.
his back
swagman — a man with his belongings in a swag The drovers, bullock drivers and
and travelling on foot, looking for occasional innkeepers he knew, and the
jobs or handouts of food
stories they told, come alive
up country — inland, away from the coast
3
The Teams
A cloud of dust on the long white road,
And the teams go creeping on
Inch by inch with the weary load;
And by the power of the green-hide goad
The distant goal is won.
With eyes half-shut to the blinding dust,
And necks to the yoke bent low,
The beasts are pulling as bullocks must;
And the shining tyres might almost rust
While the spokes are turning slow.
With face half-hid by a broad-brimmed hat
That shades from the heat’s white waves,
And shouldered whip with its green-hide plait,
The driver plods with a gait like that
Of his weary, patient slaves.
He wipes his brow, for the day is hot,
And spits to the left with spite;
He shouts at Bally, and flicks at Scot,
And raises dust from the back of Spot,
And spits to the dusty right.
again in his writing. Some
He’ll sometimes pause as a thing of form
experts see his poem ‘The Teams’ In front of a settler’s door,
as the finest description of a And ask for a drink, and remark, ‘It’s warm,’
bullock team in Australian Or say, ‘There’s signs of a thunderstorm’;
But he seldom utters more.
literature. There are also
memories of the farmers who But the rains are heavy on roads like these,
struggled to make a living, and of And, fronting his lonely home,
For weeks together the settler sees
the women who battled on alone
The wagons bogged down to the axletrees,
when their men had to find work
Or ploughing the sodden loam.
away from home.
And then when the roads are at their worst,
In 1892–93 Lawson spent
The bushman’s children hear
time in the Bourke region of far-
The cruel blows of the whips reversed
western New South Wales. There While the bullocks pull as their hearts would burst,
he gained firsthand experience of And bellow with pain and fear.
the hardships faced by ‘travellers’
And thus — with glimpses of home and rest —
(swagmen) looking for work and Are the long, long journeys done;
handouts, and of the difficulties And thus — ’tis a cruel thankless life at the best —
Is Distance fought in the mighty West,
of trying to keep a farm going
And the lonely battles won.
during a drought.
4
FORMATIVE YEARS
Henry Lawson’s father was a
Norwegian sailor turned
gold fossicker called Niels
Larsen. His mother, Louisa
Albury, was the daughter of an
innkeeper in the Mudgee area of
central New South Wales. Louisa
wrote poetry at school and
dreamed of marriage as a way to
escape from life in the bush,
which she hated. When Larsen
proposed, he promised to build
Louisa a house. Instead, the
newly-weds joined a gold rush to
Grenfell, about 300 kilometres
The Lawson home at New Pipeclay,
south-west of Mudgee, and lived
the area now known as Eurunderee
in a tent on the goldfields. The
first of their five children was
unhappy childhood
born there on 17 June 1867. He
was registered as Henry Lawson.
From his childhood Lawson remembered
disappointment, loneliness and insecurity: When Henry was six
months old, the family returned
Home life was unspeakably wretched … in our
case the curse was from a bad match which was to the dusty gold diggings of
ever too common in the Bush. I remember, as a Mudgee. There Niels Larsen
child, slipping around in the dark behind the
(known now as Peter) finally
pig-stye, or anywhere, to cry my heart out, and
built Louisa her house — a slab
old Pedro, the dog, would come round with
and bark hut not far from her
sympathetic nose and tail, and I’d put my arms
around his neck and bury my face in his rough father’s shanty. In 1871, hearing
hair, and have my cry out. Yes, Pipeclay was a of new gold discoveries at
miserable little hell to me to the bitter end, and a
Gulgong, the family moved again.
trip to Grannie’s at Wallerawang was the only
They dismantled the hut, packed
glimpse of heaven my childhood ever knew.
it on a dray, and took it with
A Fragment of Autobiography
5
The Roaring Days
The night too quickly passes
And we are growing old,
So let us fill our glasses
And toast the Days of Gold;
When finds of wondrous treasure
Set all the South ablaze,
And you and I were faithful mates
All through the Roaring Days!
O, who would paint a goldfield,
And paint the picture right,
As we have often seen it
In early morning’s light?
The yellow mounds of mullock
With spots of red and white,
The scattered quartz that glistened
them. When that gold rush ran
Like diamonds in light.
out, they carried their belongings
The azure line of ridges,
along the track to settle at New The bush of darkest green,
Pipeclay (today called The little homes of calico
Eurunderee), just outside That dotted all the scene.
The flat straw hats, with ribands,
Mudgee. There Henry’s father
That old engravings show:
built a two-roomed sawn-timber
The dress that still reminds us
house with a large kitchen at one Of sailors, long ago.
end. Henry later used it as the I hear the fall of timber
model for dwellings in many of From distant flats and fells,
his stories. It was the home he The pealing of the anvils
As clear as little bells,
described in ‘The Drover’s Wife’.
The rattle of the cradle,
The chimney built by Henry’s
The clack of windlass-boles,
father still stands. The flutter of the crimson flags
The family lived a life of Above the golden holes.
poverty. The marriage was not Ah, then their hearts were bolder,
And if Dame Fortune frowned
happy, and Henry and the
Their swags they’d lightly shoulder
younger children witnessed
And tramp to other ground.
frequent arguments between
O they were lion-hearted
their parents. Henry believed his Who gave our country birth:
family was cursed. He later Stout sons, of stoutest fathers born
From all the lands on earth!
remembered his father as
But golden days are vanished,
‘domestic, methodical and
And altered is the scene;
practical’; and ‘one of the hardest
The diggings are deserted,
working, kindest hearted men I
The camping-grounds are green;
ever knew’. He described his The flaunting flag of progress
mother as ‘very highly strung’ Is in the West unfurled,
The mighty Bush with iron rails
and ‘dark, mysterious, moody,
Is tethered to the world.
and a bit of a dreamer’.
6
that Robinson Crusoe taught him
to read. If his mother left off at a
thrilling place, ‘we’d get the book
and try to spell our way ahead.
By the time Robinson Crusoe was
finished we could go back and
read the book through from
beginning to end.’ Through the
pages of the novel young Henry
was able to escape into the world
of fantasy. In the book’s kindly
German hero he found a model
for his gentle foreign father.
Going to school was not
compulsory when Henry was a
The Prince of Wales Opera House at
boy. His formal education began
Gulgong, where Lawson spent part
of his young life in 1876, at the age of ten, in a
lawson as a young man
bark schoolhouse. The school was
later rebuilt by his father, who
I was painfully shy and extremely sensitive,
sensitive about my deafness, my lack of worked as a carpenter after
education, my surroundings, my clothes, abandoning his search for gold.
slimness and paleness, my ‘h’s’, handwriting,
Henry did not enjoy his school
grammar, pronunciation (made worse by
days. Although ‘my composition
deafness) — everything almost.
was always good’, he was ‘slow at
A Fragment of Autobiography
arithmetic’ and had ‘wretched,
Louisa read to her children, stiff and cramped handwriting’.
introducing them to Robinson At school he kept to himself. One
Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, the of his schoolmates remembered
works of Charles Dickens and the that he ‘did not mix well with the
poems of Edgar Allan Poe, all of other boys, he was quiet and shy;
which had a great influence on and though he played games with
young Henry. He later claimed the rest and went swimming in
7
The Old Bark School
It was built of bark and poles, and the floor was
full of holes
Where each leak in rainy weather made a pool;
And the walls were mostly cracks lined with calico
and sacks —
There was little need for windows in the school.
Then we rode to school and back by the rugged
gully-track,
On the old grey horse that carried three or four;
the creek, he did not seem to be And he looked so very wise that he lit the
a happy boy’. master’s eyes
Every time he put his head in at the door.
At the age of nine Henry
Lawson suffered an illness that He had run with Cobb and Co. — ‘That grey
left him slightly deaf. His poor leader, let him go!’
There were men ‘as knowed the brand
hearing caused other children to
upon his hide,’
tease him and call him ‘Barmy
And ‘as knowed it on the course’. Funeral service:
Harry’, making him feel even ‘Good old horse!’
more isolated and alone. His When we burnt him in the gully where he died.
hearing became worse, and by
And the master thought the same. ’Twas from
the age of fourteen he was almost Ireland that he came,
totally deaf. He later wrote that Where the tanks are full all summer, and the feed
is simply grand;
his deafness was ‘to cloud my
And the joker then in vogue said his
whole life, to drive me into
lessons wid a brogue —
myself, and to be, perhaps, in a
’Twas unconscious imitation, let the
great measure, responsible for reader understand.
my writing’. After his hearing
And we learnt the world in scraps from some
became worse, Henry left school
ancient dingy maps
and went to work with his father Long discarded by the public-schools in town;
on building sites. He had spent And as nearly every book dated back to
Captain Cook
only four years at school.
Our geography was somewhat upside-down.