Yet another found ‘the genuine Australia’ in While the Billy Boils and (in the rhetoric to which Lawson’s admirers were prone) wrote: ‘Of this Australia Henry Lawson is the poet, the prophet, the singer, and the portal-keeper of its temple’. By the end of his life, the belief that Lawson was ‘the poet prophet of Australia’ (in the words of his aristocratic benefactor, Earl Beauchamp) had taken firm root, and more and more in the years that followed it affected how he was read.

The ‘Lawson legend’ was not groundless – legends seldom are – but it was a partial and distorting view of a writer of individual gifts, and it fostered an uncritical attitude which discouraged intelligent scrutiny of what he had written. Lawson’s writing did strike his contemporaries with the effect of a revelation. What he offered, though, was not an inclusive transcript of bush life but an intense and narrow personal vision. His famed knowledge of the bush was comparatively limited, his direct experience of the Outback being confined to that one soul-searing trip to Bourke and Hungerford which lasted in all less than a year. The precision of detail and the feeling of intimacy with which life in the countryside was portrayed in his writing led some of the early readers to think of him as primarily concerned with describing various phases of Australian life. Very soon, though, there were objections that his work did not portray the whole truth about the bush or about Australia in general. The argument was really beside the point. As Frank Sargeson – himself a fine short-story writer who learnt from Lawson – once pointed out, Lawson was not a realist, in the usual sense of the word: ‘He looked at the desolation of the Australian inland, and he saw his own interior desolation’. Lawson, he went on to say, ‘uses naturalistic phenomena to express his inward-looking vision’.

This ‘inward-looking vision’ was very different from the ‘gospel of mateship’ with which Lawson has been identified, on the basis of a selective reading of his work. True, mateship was a phenomenon of the bush life, and Lawson writes about it often. True also, the impulse to idealise the facts of mateship, and to sentimentalise relationships between men, is there from the beginning (his very first story – of a father and son – is entitled ‘His Father’s Mate’). But the insistence on the value of mateship as the most important human relationship is an aspect of Lawson’s decline. Children of the Bush, which appeared in 1902, marks the turning point in Lawson’s artistic life. It contains a number of stories in which mateship is celebrated, stories like ‘Send Round the Hat’, which are heart-warming and quite lacking in the hard-edged authenticity of the best stories in While the Billy Boils. The bush life which Lawson now lovingly evokes is a touched-up ‘photograph’, in which sentiment predominates over emotion. Lawson himself, one might say, could not face reality as he had once done, and retreated into sentimental re-writing of his own achievement. Indeed, one could say that his early collapse contributed to falsification of what he had done in the short creative period of his life.

To those who saluted Lawson as ‘the voice of Australia’, literary considerations were of secondary importance, and the struggling artist was hardly discernible in the almost mystically conceived National Writer. A most common formulation in the obituary articles was that Lawson was the ‘Poet of Australia’, a kind of antipodean Burns, whose writings were a treasure house of Australianness. When half a century later Colin Roderick collected Lawson’s verse in three substantial volumes, it was apparent how little of it could be considered poetry. The essential criticism had been made as long ago as 1902 by Edward Garnett, the most perceptive critic Lawson encountered, when he wrote: ‘Like a voice speaking to you through a bad telephone, the poems convey the speaker’s meaning, but all the shades of original tone are muffled, lost or hidden’. There would be general agreement now that Lawson’s verse is marginal to his achievement, thus reversing the preference of his own day.

However, although we may now claim that we are no longer blinkered in our view of Lawson – at least, not to the extent that previous generations were – we can hardly claim to have seen him steadily, and certainly not whole. Anyone looking over the quite extensive body of critical comment on Lawson must be struck by the almost patronising way in which his work – especially his prose work – was discussed, even by his admirers, before A. A. Phillips’s essay in 1948 argued the case for Lawson as a craftsman. Although Phillips’s own acceptance of the essential outline of the Lawson legend did close off lines of speculation that he might profitably have followed, his perception that Lawson was a conscious innovator – aiming at a minimum of ‘plot’ – directed attention to the previously neglected formal aspects of the stories. Brian Matthews effected a further reorientation of Lawson studies when in the first full-length critical study of the stories, The Receding Wave (1972), he argued that Lawson’s decline was not mainly the result of personal circumstances but had its origin in the very nature of his talent. Odd though it may seem, considering how much has been written about Lawson, it is only since Matthews’s book that the stories have begun to receive sustained critical attention. Scholarly study has now revealed aspects of the man and his writing that hitherto were hidden or ignored. There is as yet no adequate biography, but biographical accounts have now got beyond anecdote and admiration, and an illuminating Freudian study by French academic Xavier Pons has identified psychological issues with which Lawson’s eventual biographer will have to deal.

‘I don’t know about the merit or value of my work’, wrote Lawson in ‘ “Pursuing Literature” in Australia’, a bitter apologia in the Bulletin in 1899, ‘all I know is that I started a shy, ignorant lad from the bush, under every disadvantage arising from poverty and lack of education, and with the extra disadvantage of partial deafness thrown in.’ He did not exaggerate the disadvantages, but they can be seen in another light as not being disadvantages at all, as far as the writer was concerned.