The Penguin Henry Lawson Short Stories

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THE PENGUIN HENRY LAWSON

HENRY LAWSON (1867–1922) was born at Grenfell, New South Wales, where his father, a Norwegian sailor (originally Larsen), was unsuccessfully prospecting for gold. Partially deaf from the age of nine, he had little formal education, and was an apprentice in Sydney when he began to write verse and short stories. His first published work was in 1887 in the Bulletin, an influential weekly with which he was associated for the rest of his life. His reputation as a short story writer was established with the publication of While the Billy Boils in 1896. During two years (1900–02) that he spent in England, he enjoyed the friendship and critical support of Edward Garnett, and wrote some of his best stories, which were collected in Joe Wilson and His Mates in 1901. After his return to Australia his work showed a marked decline, and the rest of his life was darkened by alcoholism and the bitterness generated by the breakdown of his marriage. A national figure, identified strongly with Australian values, he died in poverty in Sydney, where he was given a State funeral.

JOHN BARNES retired as Professor of English at La Trobe University in 1996. He was the founder-editor of Meridian: The La Trobe University English Review, and is now the editor of The La Trobe Journal, which is published by the State Library of Victoria Foundation. He has published widely on Australian Literature, his works including a biography of Joseph Furphy, critical studies on a variety of authors, and The Writer in Australia: A Collection of Literary Documents. He is currently writing a biography of the socialist publisher and bookseller, Henry Hyde Champion.

THE PENGUIN HENRY LAWSON

SHORT STORIES

edited with an introduction by John Barnes

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Published by the Penguin Group

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(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England

First published by Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 1986

Introduction copyright © John Barnes 1986

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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ISBN: 978-1-74228-428-6

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I

THE DROVER’S WIFE

THE BUSH UNDERTAKER

II

IN A DRY SEASON

THE UNION BURIES ITS DEAD

HUNGERFORD

III

‘RATS’

AN OLD MATE OF YOUR FATHER’S

MITCHELL: A CHARACTER SKETCH

ON THE EDGE OF A PLAIN

‘SOME DAY’

SHOOTING THE MOON

OUR PIPES

BILL, THE VENTRILOQUIAL ROOSTER

IV

THE GEOLOGICAL SPIELER

THE IRON-BARK CHIP

THE LOADED DOG

V

BRIGHTEN’S SISTER-IN-LAW

A DOUBLE BUGGY AT LAHEY’S CREEK

‘WATER THEM GERANIUMS’

JOE WILSON’S COURTSHIP

TELLING MRS BAKER

VI

A CHILD IN THE DARK, AND A FOREIGN FATHER

NOTES AND SOURCES

GLOSSARY

INTRODUCTION

STORY-TELLING is an ancient art, but the idea of the short story as a distinct literary form is comparatively recent. Today the term ‘short story’ covers a range of possibilities, and we are less likely than the readers of a century ago to regard the short story as the poor relation of the novel. There perhaps still lingers a suspicion that the fiction writer without a novel to his credit has, so to speak, failed to measure up to the real test of creativity, no matter how fine that writer’s short fiction may impress us as being. And in our assessment of the achievements of a short-story writer, we incline perhaps to regard most highly those stories which best bear comparison with novels. It is certainly true that critical discussion of Henry Lawson’s prose writing has been coloured by the assumption – sometimes unconscious – that in being ‘only a short-story writer’ he was less than if he had been a novelist. That is an assumption challenged in this selection, which aims to show Lawson as an original and distinctive artist whose prose fiction is only now receiving the right kind of recognition.

In Lawson’s lifetime a combination of factors tended to cloud perception of what was distinctive about his writing. There was the general expectation that as he matured he would write a novel (or a sequence of connected stories), a ‘big’ work, no matter how commonplace, being regarded as of a higher order of creation than a piece of short fiction. The prevailing taste was for short stories with a strong narrative interest – ‘story’ in the simplest sense – and Lawson was most highly praised by local critics for those works in which he came nearest to the conventional. But probably the most influential factor was Lawson’s standing as a national figure. ‘Henry Lawson is the voice of the bush, and the bush is the heart of Australia’, proclaimed A. G. Stephens of the Bulletin, when reviewing his first book, Short Stories in Prose and Verse, in 1895, and that view of his uniquely representative status is still potent, at least for older readers. For some of us, our responses to Lawson’s writing still tend to get mixed up with feelings about ‘the real, the true Australia’. Manning Clark’s recent In Search of Henry Lawson (which he describes as ‘a hymn of praise to a man who was great of heart’) states the basic proposition on which the ‘Lawson legend’ rests: ‘Australia is Lawson writ large’. Clark’s book shows just how strong the romantic conception of the ‘national voice’ remains, at least where Lawson is concerned.

The historical function of Lawson’s writing is undeniable. At a time of burgeoning nationalism, he was stimulated by a notion of ‘Australianness’, and was himself a source of stimulus to others. In his stories where he writes as one of the bush people he describes, Lawson impressed his contemporaries as a reporter and observer, opening their eyes to the reality around them. Reviewing While the Billy Boils in 1896, Price Warung clearly had reservations about the literary quality of the stories, but no doubt about their documentary value. ‘We do not yet, we Australians, know our country’, he wrote, going on to praise Lawson’s knowledge and concluding, ‘Whatever else may be said of it, certain it is that this book must make Australians know their Australia better’. Another reviewer – like Price Warung, inclined to devalue Lawson’s stories as being no more than ‘photographs’ – thought that they would help ‘to correct false and create fresh impressions of Australian life among all who are amiably or earnestly interested in learning what our National Characteristics are and towards what they may be tending’.