Henry Lawson set a specific agenda for his short stories beyond mere entertainment of readers. Written during the emotionally charged era in which Australia was moving away from being a colonial gem in the British Empire and establishing itself as an independent country (which it would officially become on the first day of the 20th century, January 1, 1901) Lawson’s aim was high: to create a national literature for a country even before there was a country.
Lawson published his first short story in 1880; 1913 witnessed the last collection of stories published during his lifetime. As a result, his fiction bridges the period from the very origin of the Federation movement through the first decade of Australia’s existence as a sovereign nation. Lawson was a committed nationalist from those early days on and though not exactly a voracious reader himself, he was truly a visionary in at least one way. He saw that literature was a powerful way to create a national myth and knew exactly where Australia’s myth was located: the bush.
As a journalist working for a radical newspaper interested in human stories to support their ideology, Lawson got to know the people who called the bush their home and like any journalist worth their salt he recognized a front-page story when he saw one. Equally gifted as a poet—he was widely referred to the Poet of the People—Lawson trained his journalist eye on bringing to the people calling the Australian bush home and used his poetic sensibilities to transform fact into memorable fiction.
Lawson designed his stories to help create a national character for Australia. Recognizing that a nation going through gestation, birth and infancy hardly has the time to develop unique stories, he focuses instead on those literary elements best adapted to making narratives short on plot stand out. The result are stories featuring a characters that are close to stereotypes, but distinctive from each other. This strategy allowed Australian readers to closely identify them which is, of course, elemental to the process of creating a literature that speaks widely to a cultural mindset. The heavy but not overburdening use of colloquial dialogue and Aussie slang is effective not just for centering the stories strongly within the Australian zeitgeist, but also in exploiting Lawson’s natural gift for conversational writing. So gifted is Lawson in relating a story so that reading it quickly becomes as comfortable as if you were listening to someone tell it to you that his technique is overlooked and underrated. The short, breezy, conversational style was clearly better suited to his purpose of producing short stories that could not be confused with the writing of someone from Boston or Cornwall or Dublin. And yet within this canon can be found stories that show reveal a distinctively different set of strategies and demonstrate a versatility of technique.
Consider, for instance, how two different stories with similar titles almost seem to be work of two different writers.
From “The Drover’s Wife”
Near midnight. The children are all asleep and she sits there still, sewing and reading by turns. From time to time she glances round the floor and wall-plate, and, whenever she hears a noise, she reaches for the stick. The thunderstorm comes on, and the wind, rushing through the cracks in the slab wall, threatens to blow out her candle. She places it on a sheltered part of the dresser and fixes up a newspaper to protect it. At every flash of lightning, the cracks between the slabs gleam like polished silver. The thunder rolls, and the rain comes down in torrents.
From “A Droving Yarn”
There was silence for some time after Dave had finished. The chaps made no comment on the yarn, either one way or the other, but sat smoking thoughtfully, and in a vague atmosphere as of sadness—as if they’d just heard of their mother’s death and had not been listening to an allegedly humorous yarn.
Then the voice of old Peter, the station-hand, was heard to growl from the darkness at the end of the hut, where he sat on a three-bushel bag on the ground with his back to the slabs.
“What’s old Peter growlin’ about?” someone asked.
“He wants to know where Dave got that word,” someone else replied.
“What word?”
“Quint-essents.”
There was a chuckle.
Lawson occasionally seemed to need a break from writing stories with a purpose and the result were stories revealing a greater complexity, a more serious tone and multiple levels of meaning. On the rarest of occasions he managed to combine the two, creating masterfully deceptive tales that on the surface appear to belong primarily to Australian identity works while subtly revealing a writer every bit as much in control of technique as Charles Chesnutt or D.H. Lawrence. This apex of this accomplishment is a masterpiece that on the surface hardly seems like more than the genre to which Lawson was most drawn: the “sketch story” or “yarn.”
“On the Edge of a Plain” seems like the work of a word hoarder who only wants to expend as few of them as it takes to tell his story. Working within this striking economy of language, Lawson tells yet another story about his recurring alter-ego Jack Mitchell; in this instance, how he returns home after being away for eight years the very day after a fellow wanderer like himself had mistakenly informed his family he was dead. Most of the succeeding 500 words are comprised of an account of his homecoming being related at a later date to an unidentified companion. Lawson uses those 500 words to craft a story that seems ridiculously simple and sparse, but in fact engages sophisticated literary devices like dual narrative perspective, commentary on gender issues on the Australian bush, the conflict between external pressures to domesticate and internal drives against conformity all wrapped up in a kind of allegorical tale of a prison break.
Lawson’s legacy has for more than a century been that of a great storyteller who was instrumental in creating an identity of what it means to be Australian that persists even now. The price he paid for that high esteem has so far been a scandalous lack of appreciation for Henry Lawson as one of the great masters of literary technique among all English-language authors writing around the turn of the 20th century.
