CHAPTER 1
The City and the Bush
When your money is low and your luck has gone down,
There’s no place so lone as the streets of a town;
There’s nothing but worry, and dread and unrest,
So we’ll over the ranges and into the West. [i]
The year was 1892. Henry Lawson – painter, poet and fervent Labour supporter – was finding it almost impossible to sustain a living in Sydney from his writing, and the few pounds he earned were quickly spent in the nearby bars of Lower George Street. He divided his time between the home of his Aunt Emma (his mother’s elder sister) at Dawes Point when he was broke, and cheap lodgings in the centre of the city when he had a pound or two to spare.
It was about this time that Lawson met fellow-journalist and poet Edwin J. Brady. Brady was the editor of the Workman, a Labour-influenced newspaper run under the sponsorship of the Sydney Trades and Labour Council. An energetic and inventive person who enjoyed observing the activities of the Sydney waterfront, Brady eventually began writing ballads of the sea and became, like Lawson, a contributor to J. F. Archibald’s Bulletin. Later he became Secretary of the Australian Socialists’ League.
Lawson and Brady met after Brady “lifted” one of Lawson’s poems, “The Cambaroora Star”, from the Brisbane Boomerang and reprinted it in the Workman without Lawson’s permission and, supposedly, without payment to the poet. Surprisingly this led to a great friendship between the two men. Brady later recalled the meeting:
I occupied a small, untidy cubicle adjacent to a more untidy composing den in the nether part of an arcade which opened onto George-street, Brickfield Hill. The editorial salary was ₤3 per week … but who thought of salaries in those glorious days! “The Cause” was the consideration.
The sub-editor was an old hand named Scissors, well-known in newspaper circles; and the chief-of-staff a person named Paste, who has stuck to the business since time immemorial. With the help of these two I had lifted a recent thing of Henry’s called “The Cambaroora Star” without author’s or publisher’s permission, and reprinted it bodily in the WORKMAN.
I was sitting in shirt sleeves one sunny morning meditating over a new Fabian essay of Bernard Shaw’s, which I intended to steal, when a lean, tall young man entered the cubicle, a lonesome-looking person about two years older than myself. He examined me with reflective brown eyes, and enquired with a curious lisp if I was the editor. After I had proudly acknowledged the fact he informed me that he had come to thank me for the honour I had paid him in stealing “The Cambaroora Star”for the official organ of Labour. [ii]
The two men went downstairs to a nearby pub and a friendship was formed over “long sleevers of colonial [beer] for threepence … broken ship’s biscuits and small squares of cheese”. They talked of politics and poetry and the Cause, and “Australia that starves its poets and erects statues to their memories”. According to Brady, a “friendship of a lifetime had been appropriately cemented. Thereafter we met frequently, according to the customs and conveniences of our day”.
Until this time, Lawson had been no further west than Bathurst. His writings on the bush had been based solely on his childhood experiences around Mudgee and Gulgong and he had only an artist’s impression of the real outback.
Banjo Paterson may have depicted the bush as “… the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended, and at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars” [iii]but Lawson suspected from his early days spent around the western district goldfields that the bush meant hardship and loneliness. He wanted to write about the real outback, about the heartbreak and poverty he knew he would find there.
J. F. Archibald, chief editor and proprietor of the Sydney Bulletin, believed in Lawson’s writing ability. He also knew that Lawson was not an imaginative writer and his work to date, if not strictly autobiographical in nature, loosely followed his life experiences. Lawson wrote of what he saw with little embellishment, and Archibald knew that Lawson needed new “copy” for his work.
Suspecting that Lawson was on the path to becoming a confirmed alcoholic, Archibald decided that a change of scenery might be in the poet’s best interest. Using Brady as an intermediary, he decided to remove Lawson from the city into the more challenging environment of the outback of the colony. Edwin Brady, in an article published in the Bulletin on 22 January 1925, takes credit for the next course of events in Lawson’s life.
[i] Henry Lawson, “Over the Ranges and Into the West”, Freeman’s Journal, 1890.
[ii] E. J. Brady, “Henry Lawson”, Bulletin, 22 January 1925.
[iii] A. B. Paterson, “Clancy of the Overflow”, Bulletin, 1889.