Essay Questions

What is the great paradox of Henry Lawson’s characterizations?

Lawson writes entertaining stories peopled with memorable characters, but the affection one feels for his characters often disguises the fact that they are generally little more developed than stereotypes. Lawson is clearly too talented to be accused of the kind of absence of creativity or imagination that generally is associated with writers relying heavily on stereotype. Another word for stereotype—one typically reserved for thin characterizations done purposely—is mythic. Lawson is at heart a creator of myth; the intent of his story writing was to help create a national mythic literature for a newly created country. It is a testament to Lawson’s literary mastery that even despite peopling the overwhelming bulk of his canon with individuals that would likely earn him only an average grade in a creative writing class teaching how to create fully developed characters, he still managed to make vibrant and distinctive and even memorable.

Organized religion is either notably absent or presented within a somewhat negative circumstance in Lawson’s stories, but the Christian tenets are not. Under what circumstances is Christianity presented in the bush?

References are made to religion and religious practices in such stories as “The Union Buries it Dead.” The “army” of “That Pretty Girl in the Army” is actually the Salvation Army. Various parsons and preachers come and go, but the foundation of Christian ideals practiced in the bush in Lawson’s stories are manifested in the concept of “mateship.” Of the important of mateship, Lawson writes that an “Australian bushman is born with a mate who sticks to him through life— like a mole.” Elsewhere he directly lends mateship the kind of idealism associated with religious doctrine, suggesting that as a concept it is “jealous at times; and, if any jealousy can be unselfish, free from vindictiveness, and even noble, this can be.” In “A Stranger’s Friend” Lawson perhaps comes closest to directly implicating mateship as a certifiable replacement for Christianity among those calling the bush home: “A man need only be sick, or a stranger in distress, to be a “mate” in this case.”

What latter-20th century literary movement typified by writers as diverse as Raymond Carver and Samuel Beckett can Lawson be rightly be termed not just a progenitor, but one of its aesthetic godfathers?

Lawson excelled in a genre variously known as “yarns” or “sketch stories.” Of this stripped down, bare-bones approach to short-short story writing, Lawson observed "the sketch story is best of all.” Lawson was writing at a time when English-language short stories were dominated by the lush, densely written works by writers ranging from Joseph Conrad to Henry James to Arthur Conan Doyle. This was an era of intricately plotted, thematically rich stories experimenting with narrative within the confines of expectations. Lawson, by contrast, was writing sketches which often completely jettisoned plot, depended upon his mythically thin characters and might often be barely long enough to partially considered one theme. Not surprisingly, many literary critics of the time derided Lawson’s embrace of the sketch and even his publisher pressured him to adopt the more conventional approach to the short story. By 1933, however, Lawson’s precise control of language and ability to pack more into a “sketch” than at first appears was being praised in print by noted literary critic Edward Garnett who asserted that he “gets even more feeling observation and atmosphere into a page than does Hemingway.” Lawson’s unwavering confidence in the status of “sketch story” proved prescient as it eventually gave birth to the enormously popular minimalist literary movement adopted by later short story masters from Robert Coover to Anne Beattie.