Henry Lawson and me - and the contradictions

By John

The garden has been dormant over the summer, but in the last couple of weeks, I've been turning it over, and today I put in two large beds of broad beans from the seed saved from last winter's crop. Surprisingly, some artichokes I thought had completely died off over summer have come to life again, with some lush, fervent growth. That's always a buzz. As autumn is taking hold, there's a new rush of bird life, ranging from robins, black-faced cuckoo shrikes, through to black-shouldered kites.

Have been working on my introduction to the Penguin Henry Lawson Selected Short Stories. I think that Lawson is a master of the short form, especially the sketch, and I can genuinely relate to his equivocal and ambiguous views of the bush, though I think I have a far more inherent love of the land and the bush than he did. His portrait of bushwomen (of "white settler stock") has been increasingly underrated by critics over the years, but I think it is phenomenal in its admiration and respect as well as insight into how this portraiture does and doesn't segue with the blokesy world of the bush.

However, I am really struggling with his racism, for which there is no excuse. There are occasions when his very brief portraits of non-whites show some empathy, sympathy, or recognition of something outside subalternity; but largely this is not so. I don't really know how in the end one can respect even the most astute writing of place as any more than a surface gesture where this is the case. Especially given he's writing about an Australia that is constructed out of the destruction and dispossession of the traditional owners of the land.

I've also been reading Manning Clark's Henry Lawson: The Man and the Legend, and aside from finding it a ridiculously digressive book, I think he gets his readings of Lawson's stories quite wrong at times. He states that Lawson doesn't see the bush itself, that is, its flora and fauna, with a close eye, but there are numerous descriptions that I think contradict this. It is a mistake to think that Lawson's descriptions are generic; rather, they capture the bush-person's interaction with place, producing a different kind of description.

It is easy to admire Lawson's acute sensitivity to "mateship", that even swagmen up-country seemingly wandering without purpose can find moments of deep connection through anecdote, humour or recollection. However, Lawson's vision is ultimately a negative one, in which as he writes more of the country, a darker vision, a loss and lack of purpose overwhelms. Manning Clark is good at recognising this. Still, a figure like Joe Wilson with his poetic spirit and grim determination is always going to be admirable. To one, like myself, who has a shearer for a brother, the anecdotes of the bush that Lawson creates almost as refrains are entirely recognisable and transferable from generation to generation.

My brother says that humour in the shearing shed works as the escape valve on the pressure cooker. For Lawson, for whom humour was so definitive in characterising the ordinary Australian bush-person (white!), it was more than a release, it was an entire world-view, an acceptance of grimness and hardship that ultimately could not be overcome. It had to be cherished because it was the actuality.

Lawson feared that the old ways of the bush would give way to technology, but in many ways they are the same, including the inherited bigotries of the invader/settler culture. Lawson's parents, the feminist and later publisher Louisa Lawson, and the Norwegian prospector Niels (Peter) Larsen, had a notoriously difficult marriage that eventually resulted in their separation, and a kind of split view of the world in their son. The mother's moral rigour, and the father's belief in the outdoor outback world, really do create a tension and a fusion in Lawson.

Working with my five-year-old son in the garden today, it struck me that it is possible for the masculine and feminine comfortably to coexist within the one gender. Timmy likes being a little "bloke" but doesn't see that as excluding his mother or sister. I find this fascinating. Lawson's portrait of women often fuses elements of the masculine and feminine, and it's really in his portrait of sexual relations between men and women that the distance is created. Without consciousness of sexual difference, it is easy for a child of either gender to embody characteristics of both and not create a hierarchy.

I have been keeping Lawson, and my experiences on our block as well as in the district, in mind with my own short-story writing, which is such a slow process for me. As I use "description" so intensely in my poetry, I want to use some other way of seeing place and space in my short fiction. I have much to learn from this apparent "inadequacy" of Lawson's, technically, I think. I have certainly been looking at our place in a different light, having been reading Lawson so closely.

I am looking at description of the land through an empathy with the people "working" it. Of course, I take to this my politics and deconstructive sense of what that land has become through dispossession, so it could never be the same as Lawson.

Interestingly, Lawson came to Western Australia on a couple of occasions, but generally stayed around the city, even camping in East Perth. He also visited Albany, writing for the local newspaper, but loathed it, as he did Perth!