Many have sought to imitate Lawson’s simplicity of style, but no other Australian writer has managed so well to create that effect of natural, unaffected Australian speech, which is Lawson’s hallmark. A few years of elementary education in ‘the old bark school’, taught by a teacher whose weak points were ‘spelling, English grammar and singing’, may not seem much of a preparation for a writing career; and Lawson was always rather defensive on the point, easily hurt by the criticisms of his ‘cultured critics’. But though his spelling was always shaky and he suffered from feelings of inferiority, Lawson’s very lack of education meant that his style was largely formed on the speech of the people amongst whom he lived. He had learnt to read from Robinson Crusoe, and Defoe’s plain style undoubtedly had some influence on the formation of his own. Lawson read little throughout his life and took little from what he did read. The absence of pretension, and of self-conscious literariness, enabled Lawson to write in a genuinely simple style. He had confidence in the vernacular as literary language (most other Australian writers have thought it suitable only for humorous effects) because he knew no other. His prose at its best shows him acutely aware of tone and inflection as registers of feeling in the voice. His deafness may have shut out a great deal in his adult life, while preserving uncorrupted the memory of voices heard in childhood.

Asked by an aspiring writer what was the best early training for a writer, Hemingway replied, ‘an unhappy childhood’. Lawson might well have given the same answer. More important than the vivid memories of places and people was the intense loneliness he felt. He was the eldest child of a foreign father and an Australian-born mother. His father was Nils Larsen, a Norwegian sailor who had left his ship to join the gold rushes in 1855. His mother, Louisa, who changed the family name when registering her son’s birth in 1867, was the dominant parent in the marriage: a remarkable woman of great determination, she had literary talent and encouraged her son to write. Lawson’s parents were the models for the couple in ‘A Child in the Dark, and a Foreign Father’, though it would be a mistake to take the story as straight autobiography. In his ‘Fragment of Autobiography’, a meandering and patchy account of his early years, Lawson touched on the misery of his childhood, but shied away from looking closely at the family situation:

Home life, I might as well say here, was miserably unhappy, but it was fate – there was no one to blame. It was the result of one of those utterly impossible matches so common in Australia. I remember a child who, after a violent and painful scene, used to slip out in the dark and crouch down behind the pig-stye and sob as if his heart would break.

A weak, dreamy boy, whose aunts always said that he should have been a girl, and whom town boys called ‘Barmy Harry’, Lawson knew periods when he seemed to live on his own: ‘when Mother and brothers, but not so often Father, seemed to go completely out of my life’. Later in the autobiography he remarks: ‘As I grew the feeling of loneliness and the desire to be alone increased’. The partial deafness which afflicted him from the age of nine added to his isolation. ‘I wasn’t a healthy-minded, average boy’, says Joe Wilson (in ‘Joe Wilson’s Courtship’), and there is no doubt that he speaks for Lawson.

The Lawson family was broken up in 1883 when the parents separated. Henry and the other children went with their mother to Sydney, where she became a prominent advocate of women’s rights, founding Dawn, the first Australian feminist journal in 1888, and publishing her son’s first book, Short Stories in Prose and Verse, in 1894. Lawson’s early years had been spent in the countryside around Mudgee in New South Wales, where his father had variously been a prospector, selector, and carpenter, but from 1883 onward Sydney became his home base. Lawson’s life was never settled for very long, but it was always to Sydney that he returned after his various trips – to back o’ Bourke, to Western Australia (twice), to New Zealand (twice), and to England. These journeys brought him fresh ‘copy’ (Lawson favoured the journalist’s term though he did not have the journalist’s approach to writing) in the shape of new impressions, but they did not fundamentally alter his vision of things. The impulse to write grew out of the keenness of his youthful feeling. Looking back late in his life, Lawson knew that he had lost the power he had possessed when he began to write as ‘the lonely boy who felt things deeply and wrote with his heart’s blood’.

The Bulletin, begun in Sydney in 1880, invited contributions of verse and prose from its readers, and it was here that Lawson was first published, in 1887. The editor and part-founder, J. F. Archibald, was an important figure in Lawson’s life – the first, and perhaps the most decisive of the father-figures on whom Lawson depended.