“She looked like a ladder with a dress on, and she didn't know a great A from a corner cupboard.”
Lawson begins his story “A Camp-Fire Yarn” with a character saying “This girl was about the ugliest girl I ever saw, except one, and I'll tell you about her directly.” Nothing much else happens in the story other than the unrolling of a couple of yarns men tell about women, but then the story isn’t the point. The point is the humor and of all the humorous lines in the story, the simile outlined here is the most memorable and a perfect example of the kind of writing that made Lawson so hugely popular amongst his Australian readers.
"He is an animated mummy, who used to fish on the Nile three thousand years ago, and catch nothing."
One of the great talents that made Lawson the quintessential Australian writer was his intimate knowledge of the land; he was a poet of the outback both figurative and literally. The Darling River is to Australia what the Mississippi River is to America and while Lawson is only passingly similar to Mark Twain, his ability to capture the character of the country’s third longest river and transform it into a setting of distinction is unparalleled. During a rumination on the nature of the men who fish the river in the story sharing the river’s name as it title, Lawson succinctly delineates the relationship between waterway and those making their livelihood off it.
“like a grey kangaroo bothered by a new wire fence, but unsuspicious of the presence of humans.”
What would a short story by an Australian writer be without a reference to a kangaroo at some point? In the story “The Iron-Bark Chip” this particular comparison to that unique marsupial from Down Under is made in reference to an inspector from the Government noted for showing up suddenly in the most unexpectedly isolated of places according a schedule all his own. References like these were part of Lawson's plan to create a national literature distinct to Australian life and which could never have taken place in England.
“his expression was such as a journalist might wear who is getting exciting copy.”
While everybody else is reacting to the title character in “That Pretty Girl in the Army” with the bewildered expressions of those who know something of import just happened, but who remain oblivious to the details, a character named Tom Hall carries the expression noted above. This is a simile with which Lawson would be quite familiar. Before becoming Australia’s most famous writer of fiction, he had previously spent many years working as a journalist always on the lookout for just such a revelation of newsworthiness.
“The rabbit has developed into something like a cross between a kangaroo and a possum, but the bush has not begun to develop the common cat.”
The story titled “Bush Cats” is all about the behavior of the domestic cat in the Australian bush and how it is that behavior which differentiates more than anything else from British felines. What is unique about the animal is that it represents an evolutionary hiccup; most other animals native to the island diverged not just in behavior, but in physical appearance as well - such as, for instance, the country’s strange hybrid form of rabbit.
