Henry Lawson- Australia’s Poet of the Bush

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Henry Lawson was an Australian writer and bush poet. Along with his contemporary Banjo Paterson, Lawson is among the best-known Australian poets and fiction writers of the colonial period and is often called Australia’s “greatest short story writer”.

A vocal nationalist and republican, Lawson regularly contributed to The Bulletin, and many of his works helped popularise the Australian vernacular in fiction.

Lawson was born in 1867- the son of a Norwegian miner who had migrated to Australia in search of a better life and was trying to carve out a living on a small piece of land in rural New South Wales . Diagnosed as deaf from a young age Lawton’s turbulent , restless but colourful and bohemian life included a failed marriage , and two short lived and ultimately unfulfilled stints in New Zealand, where he worked as a telegraph linesman and a teacher at an isolated Māori settlement on the South Island . He went in search of gold to Western Australia and literary acceptance in London after string interest from publishers there .

Moving to Sydney , funded by a publisher and with £5 and a rail ticket to Bourke, he set out in September 1892 on what was to be one of the most important journeys of his life.

Much of what Lawson saw in the drought-blasted west of New South Wales during succeeding months appalled him. ‘You can have no idea of the horrors of the country out here’, he wrote to his aunt, ‘men tramp and beg and live like dogs’. Nevertheless, the experience at Bourke itself and in surrounding districts through which he carried his swag absolutely overwhelmed him. By the time he returned to civilisation, he was armed with memories and experiences—some of them comic but many shattering—that would furnish his writing for years. ‘The Bush Undertaker’, ‘snd The Union Buries its Dead’ were among the work he produced soon after his return. But While the Billy Boils (1896) was Lawson’s first major short-story collection. It remains one of the great classics of Australian literature.

Lawson was something of a legendary figure in his lifetime. Not surprisingly, as dignitaries and others gathered for his state funeral , that legend was already beginning to flourish in various exotic ways. Lawson’s reputation must rest on his stories and on a relatively small group of them: While the Billy Boils, the Joe Wilson quartet of linked, longer stories and certain others lying outside these (among them, ‘The Loaded Dog’, ‘Telling Mrs Baker’ and ‘The Geological Spieler’). In these he shows himself not only a master of short fiction but also a writer of peculiarly modern tendency. The prose is spare, cut to the bone, the plot is either slight or non-existent. Skilfully modulated reticence makes even the barest and shortest sketches seem excitingly full of possibility, alive with options and potential insights. A stunning example is ‘On the Edge of a Plain’ but almost any sketch from While the Billy Boils exemplifies these qualities. Though not a symbolist writer, Lawson had the capacity to endow accurately observed documentary detail with a significance beyond its physical reality: the drover’s wife burning the snake; the black goanna dying ‘in violent convulsions on the ground’ (‘The Bush Undertaker’); the ‘hard dry Darling River clods’ clattering on to the coffin of the unknown drover (‘The Union Buries its Dead’) are seemingly artless yet powerful Lawsonian moments which, in context, transform simple surface realism into intimations about the mysteries, the desperations and the tragedies of ordinary and anonymous lives.
Lawson failed fully to assimilate one of the most vital inspirations of his writing life—his experience in the western outback. It was the source of most of his best work, but he returned to it again and again, coming close to Hemingway-like self-parody as he sought to gain creative renewal from a seam already thoroughly mined

He wrote prolifically into the 1890s, after which his output declined, in part due to struggles with alcoholism and mental illness. At times destitute, he spent periods in Sydney Gail’s and psychiatric institutions. After he died in 1922 following a cerebral haemorrhage, Lawson became the first Australian writer to be granted a state funeral.

His grave can be found at Sydney’s picturesque seaside cemetery at Waverley where many famous Australians from the Victorian era are buried.