A gifted journalist, his attitude towards writing was summed up in the phrase he regularly used: ‘Boil it down’. For his part, Lawson had no guiding notions of ‘style’, and although the influence of Dickens, Bret Harte, and later Mark Twain, is there in some of his stories, he was not apprenticed to any literary master. Archibald encouraged his own natural instinct as a writer, with advice which Lawson remembered as follows:

Every man has at least one story; some more. Never write until you have something to write about; then write. Write and re-write. Cut out every word from your copy that you can possibly do without. Never strain after effect; and, above all, always avoid anti-climax.

Lawson’s comment was ‘I think I did all that naturally from the first’, and there is no reason to doubt him. In the same passage, Lawson offers a rare insight into his thinking on form:

Archibald in those days, preferred the short story to the short sketch. I thought the short story was a lazy man’s game, second to ‘free’ verse, compared with the sketch. The sketch, to be really good, must be good in every line. But the sketch-story is best of all. (‘Three or Four Archibalds and the Writer’)

In modern usage the term ‘short story’ embraces what Lawson and his contemporaries called ‘the sketch’. During the twentieth century writers have greatly extended the range of the short story to the point where the ‘story’ has become inessential. Lawson’s preference for the ‘sketch-story’ aligns him with those modern writers since Chekhov who have aimed at suggestiveness rather than explicitness. Introducing a collection of short stories, Capajon, in 1933, Edward Garnett praised Hemingway’s ‘amazing power of suggesting more in three pregnant words than other authors do in ten’, but shrewdly observed in passing that ‘Lawson gets even more feeling observation and atmosphere into a page than does Hemingway’.

Apart from Garnett, however, the critics of Lawson’s time failed almost completely to appreciate the artistic worth of his sketches. Worse than that, Stephens in his Bulletin review of While the Billy Boils was dismissive of the ‘fragmentary impressions’ which he thought could have been written as ‘a single plotted, climaxed story which would make a permanent mark’. It was a line of criticism which disturbed Lawson and continued to worry him over the years. Stephens was right in judging the collection to be very uneven – the same point could be made about all the collections of Lawson’s stories – but his review, in effect, advised Lawson to write against the grain of his talent. Though Lawson responded by telling his publisher, George Robertson, ‘My line is writing short stories and sketches in prose and verse. I’m not a novelist’, and asking, ‘If you were a builder, would you set the painters to do the carpentering?’, the criticism shook his self-confidence and discouraged him from experimenting further with sketches or sketch-stories. Over the next six years Lawson several times persuaded himself that he was capable of writing a novel, and his failures added to the depression and despair that finally broke him.

The stories in this selection are roughly in chronological order – the exact date of composition is not always known – and grouped to highlight themes and preoccupations. In Lawson’s writing life two journeys mark important stages: the first was to Bourke and Hungerford in 1892, returning to Sydney in the following year, and the second was to England in 1900, returning in 1902.

Of the stories written before Lawson went out to Bourke, only two are included here, but they are among his most admired works. ‘The Drover’s Wife’, written when he was only twenty-five, was the first in which he found an individual voice. It is more of a sketch than a story (in Lawson’s terms), the anecdote of the snake being used to provide a framework within which he evokes the woman’s life. What could have been exploited for its external interest, and presented as sensational or farcical (as it would have been by other Bulletin writers of the day), becomes typical of the daily threat to existence. Much discussion of the story has concentrated on the ending, which many readers have thought sentimental. Phillips implicitly defends Lawson against the charge in the course of demonstrating his art, asking what naive writer would have resisted the temptation to put an epithet before ‘bush’ in the final sentence. The point is well made. The writing is firm, restrained, economical; and the two adjectives which are used in that final sentence – the woman’s breast is ‘worn-out’ and the daylight is ‘sickly’ – show a considerable literary tact. Far from laying it on thick, Lawson attempts to establish the emotional significance of the moment with minimal effects.