These stories, seemingly insubstantial, suggest much more than they state – and so much more than can be stated. They are all implication. To do anything like justice to the delicate precision of their art one would have to explore them in more detail than is possible here. The appropriate comparison is with a poem rather than with a conventional story. Lawson works on a small scale, and the very brevity of the work is essential to its effect. To add and elaborate would be to destroy the effect. The stories I have selected here show, as Edward Garnett said, that Lawson ‘has the faculty of bringing life to a focus, of making it typical.’

An important element in Lawson’s success with these slight stories is his use of Mitchell, the shrewd, kindly, and philosophical swagman. A version of Lawson, a persona rather than a fully developed character, he replaces the author as narrator or teller of yarns in a number of stories, allowing the author to create perspective. Mitchell is on the track, a man on his own except when he finds a mate to travel with; one could suggest that as a literary creation he is related to the Romantic outcast figure of the Wanderer. Mitchell’s stories give glimpses of his past, but the manner of telling and the related small actions that are described work together to have the teller reveal more than he realises. Mitchell is not so much a character to be explored in connected stories as an instrument by which Lawson can create states of feeling and so define his sense of being human. ‘On the Edge of a Plain’ is, in this respect, a perfect story. To a modern reader of Chekhov, the art of this little story is quickly recognised, but the originality of what Lawson was doing on his own went unremarked when While the Billy Boils was published in 1896.

Most critics would now agree that Lawson is at his strongest in While the Billy Boils and Joe Wilson and His Mates, and that view is reflected in this selection which aims to represent Lawson’s characteristic strengths. Joe Wilson and His Mates was the product of his first year in England. Lawson’s decision to leave Australia grew out of his conviction that if he were to succeed as a writer he had to get away. Although While the Billy Boils and In the Days When the World was Wide had won acclaim in Australia, his life had become increasingly desperate: he had married in 1896 but by 1900 there were strains in the marriage; his alcoholism had become so bad that he had voluntarily entered an inebriates’ home; his writing did not earn him a sufficient income; he was depressed and distracted by the constant need to earn money, and he was tormented by the sense that he could not do himself justice working under the conditions that prevailed in Australia. The encouragement of English editors and publishers led him to decide to try to survive as a full-time writer in London. The ordeal that he underwent during the two-year stay in England (his wife became mentally unstable and had to be hospitalised for long periods, and he was responsible for the care as well as the support of two infants) has only recently been told. By the time he returned to Australia in mid-1902 his marriage was virtually over, he was exhausted, and there had been a marked decline in his writing. Before the end of that year he had attempted suicide. He never recovered from the crisis of that time, and although he continued to write over the next twenty years – he was writing the night he died in September 1922 – after 1902 there are only occasional flickers of the imaginative power he had previously shown. As a writer his life was tragically short: the work on which his current reputation rests was all done between 1892 and 1902.

In this selection I have printed the Joe Wilson stories in the order in which they were written, not as they were arranged in Joe Wilson and His Mates. I have done this to encourage readers to consider each story individually. To read the group of four stories as if they constitute ‘a single plotted, climaxed story’ (the model Stephens had recommended) is to put the emphasis in the wrong place and, incidentally, to pass over quite significant inconsistencies between the stories as a result of changes in conception from one to the other. ‘Brighten’s Sister-in-law’, the first story Lawson wrote after his arrival in England, was the longest he had ever written up to that time. Lawson was aiming at writing a short story rather than his preferred story-sketch, and seeking to respond to the voices that urged on him the superiority of the extended narrative. It is a leisurely story, in which he exploits the freedom allowed by the autobiographical mode of narration, but the core of its meaning is located in the narrator’s perception of the woman as a suffering soul. The source of her tragedy is not stated directly, nor does Joe Wilson reflect on what he sees, the woman’s behaviour towards the father and son being in itself a form of revelation to the reader. In the final form of the story the link between the lonely woman without husband or child and the Wilsons is delicately suggested: her fate could be theirs.

‘Brighten’s Sister-in-law’ had been an important advance for Lawson, in that he had preserved the essence of the ‘sketch-story’, with its focus on the moment of awareness, within an extended narrative, such as he had never managed before. His next Joe Wilson story attempted less and was a more even performance.