By now Lawson was thinking of a Joe Wilson series, but in the next story he had obvious difficulty in controlling the direction of the narrative, and what was intended as the story of how the Wilsons settled on the land became the story of Mrs Spicer (the drover’s wife writ large, as Brian Matthews says). This story has some very fine passages, including the initial episode in which Joe Wilson hears Mrs Spicer summon Annie to ‘water them geraniums’. The description of the pathetic flower patch outside the Spicer hut is an outstanding example of how deftly and subtly Lawson could suggest the symbolic dimension of an experience.

There were more attempts at Joe Wilson stories, but the only other one Lawson chose to include in Joe Wilson and His Mates was ‘Joe Wilson’s Courtship’, which is set earlier in time than the envisaged sequence and narrated in a gently reminiscent manner. Like the earlier monologue, ‘An Old Mate of Your Father’s’, this story has all the charm of tender recollection without losing a sense of the real. The ending – with Joe Wilson asking Black for permission to marry Mary – is another of those short episodes in which Lawson was so effective: it is virtually a ‘story-sketch’ in itself.

‘Telling Mrs Baker’ and ‘The Loaded Dog’ were both written in England in the same period as the Joe Wilson stories. In the first Lawson displays a confident control of narrative, and it is only after one has started to reflect upon the view of character that it offers that one realises the unexamined emotionalism on which the whole situation is based. The idealising of the bushmen (‘They are grand men – they are noble’) contrasts with the realistic observation of earlier stories, and signals Lawson’s turning away from the painfully real into a consoling dreamworld of the bush, in which the gospel of mateship is lived out.

I have grouped ‘The Loaded Dog’ with two earlier stories to illustrate Lawson’s success as a humorous writer. The term ‘humorous writer’ is, in itself, a limiting one, and I would agree with the view that, though he wrote many enjoyable comic sketches and stories, Lawson’s individual distinction is not to be found there. ‘The Geological Spieler’, the best of several stories in which Steelman and Smith appear, shows Lawson’s characteristic use of ironic reversal, but the story does remain within the conventions of frontier humour which Mark Twain popularised. ‘The Iron-bark Chip’, which similarly relies upon a sudden twist, has more of the feel of local experience about it. The hilarious farce of ‘The Loaded Dog’ centres on the action of the dog, but Lawson raises the story above the level of stock farce by making what happens the result of Dave Regan’s bright idea; with a few strokes at the end, Lawson puts the episode into perspective as a Dave Regan yarn, part of the communal memory of the bush. Of the humorous stories in this selection, though, the Mitchell yarn, ‘Bill, the Ventriloquial Rooster’, is the most successful in giving the flavour of bush humour.

There is no hint of humour in the final story of this selection. I have included ‘A Child in the Dark, and a Foreign Father’ because it is of very great biographical interest, and also because it so clearly marks the end of Lawson’s creative period. In his autobiography Lawson quotes a friend’s advice to him on a projected book about bush people: ‘Treated ruthlessly, Rousseaulike, without regard to your own or others’ feelings, what a notable book yours would be!’ ‘A Child in the Dark, and a Foreign Father’ may well have been begun under the influence of such advice. According to Lawson, he had intended to write a novel, and had begun work in England. The story was finished after his return to Australia in 1902 and before his suicide attempt that same year. In this version of what were obviously distressing childhood memories, there is an impersonality of tone that is quite uncharacteristic, and an absence of those evocative impressionistic descriptions which carry so much emotional force in his best work. Like ‘The Drover’s Wife’ this story deals with the relationship of parent and child, but it is the work of a man who has lost the power to see into the heart of things.

There are a few more stories which might have been included, had space permitted. Lawson’s achievement as a short-story writer, however, is not to be measured by the bulk of his collected works. His writing will be read by Australians for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with his literary qualities, but his claim to recognition as a writer in the larger English-speaking world rests, I believe, on the stories which have been gathered in this volume. It is in these stories that he stands apart from his Bulletin contemporaries – and successors – who understood the short story as a form of yarn-spinning, and no more than that. Reading these stories one starts to develop Lawson’s own haunting sense of ‘what-might-have-been’. The delicacy of his art met with little appreciation in a culture which valued the ‘slap-dash’ as being ‘dinkum’, and he never realised his full potential. Henry Lawson’s fate seems especially bitter in that he was misread and frustrated as an artist in the country which praised him highly while he lived and honoured him with a state funeral when he died.

In the course of this Introduction I have drawn on my Henry Lawson’s Short Stories, in the Essays in Australian Literature series, published in Melbourne by Shillington House in 1985.

John Barnes

I

THE DROVER’S WIFE

THE BUSH UNDERTAKER

THE DROVER’S WIFE

THE two-roomed house is built of round timber, slabs, and stringy bark, and floored with split slabs. A big bark kitchen standing at one end is larger than the house itself, verandah included.

Bush all round – bush with no horizon, for the country is flat. No ranges in the distance. The bush consists of stunted, rotten native apple trees. No undergrowth. Nothing to relieve the eye save the darker green of a few sheoaks which are sighing above the narrow, almost waterless creek. Nineteen miles to the nearest sign of civilisation – a shanty on the main road.

The drover, an ex-squatter, is away with sheep.