*Ø* Blogmanac | June 17, 1867 | Henry Lawson, Australia's radical national poet

THEY lie, the men who tell us in a loud decisive tone
That want is here a stranger, and that misery's unknown;
For where the nearest suburb and the city proper meet
My window-sill is level with the faces in the street —
Drifting past, drifting past,
To the beat of weary feet —
While I sorrow for the owners of those faces in the street.

And cause I have to sorrow, in a land so young and fair,
To see upon those faces stamped the marks of Want and Care;
I look in vain for traces of the fresh and fair and sweet
In sallow, sunken faces that are drifting through the street —
Drifting on, drifting on,
To the scrape of restless feet;
I can sorrow for the owners of the faces in the street.
Henry Lawson, July 1888
The rest of Lawson's poem, Faces in the Street

Henry Lawson, Australian Australian writer of short stories and ballad-like verse and noted for his realistic portrayals of bush life, born in Grenfell, New South Wales. Though he worked for several newspapers, much of the material for his writing came from wandering.

His mother was the pioneer feminist, Louisa Lawson (Feb 17, 1848-Aug 12, 1920), feminist editor of Dawn: A Journal for Australian Women (a “paper in which women may express their own opinions on political and social questions”). Unlike many suffragists and feminists of her day, she did not come from a privileged background but from the shanties of rural Australia. Dawn was a monthly journal that lasted for 17 years, employed a staff of ten and mostly published the writings of Henry Lawson’s remarkable mother.

Henry lived much of his life in poverty and in alcoholic despair, but even during his lifetime he was acknowledged as a poetic genius, much-loved by the Australian people who formerly had a strong poetic culture. With Andrew Barton ‘Banjo’ Paterson (1864-1941), he is Australia's national poet and the two names are often said together. His poetry, however, like his short stories (he was prolific in both genres), has much more of a radical bent than that of Banjo. The two men were friendly rivals and a famous poetic duel (Up the Country), was fought publicly between them. Paterson's poem romanticised the Aussie outback; Henry Lawson, ever the cynic-realist, answered decrying its harshness, poverty and social injustice.

I have a poem in homage to the great man called To Henry Lawson

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A pic of Lawson at a bush camp, 1910
Current Australian banknotes do not feature Lawson, who was removed from the $10 note in 1993 and replaced by Banjo Paterson. Was Henry a bit too radical? See Banjo on the new and Henry on the old