New: The Louisa Lawson and Henry Lawson Chronology

I invite readers to check out the four-page chronology of the lives and times of Louisa Lawson and her son Henry Lawson, two Australian I greatly admire. It's my own private research for a personal project, but I thought it might interest others so I present it as is.

It's always under construction and can never be complete, but I hope it will be of use to other Lawsonians and give the casual reader some interesting perspective about the lives of Australia's most famous writer and his mother, who was called 'The Mother of Women's Suffrage' by the suffragettes of her day, in a country that pioneered the vote for women worldwide.

Henry Lawson: Much more than a "bush poet"
Australian politicians and educators, particularly conservative ones, tend to promote the myth of Henry Lawson as a homespun rural author, and consequently, although there is some truth in it, a bucolic view of Lawson is very widespread – he has been washed in antiseptic and billy tea. For example, one website says "Henry Lawson lived in the country on a selection in Sapling Gully approximately 6 kms. from Mudgee in New South Wales." In fact, from the age of 17 to his death at 55, Lawson spent almost his entire life in Sydney, a bustling world city twice as populous as San Francisco in his heyday 1890s, where he mixed with the bohemian and (often extremely) radical intellectuals and activists of the era, as did his mother for the last 37 years of her life.

The 'naughty nineties' was a time of incredible ferment in Australia, a sort of 19th century version of the 'swinging sixties', one of those rare decades in which art, literature, social turmoil and bold new ideas explode on the scene. And explosion is not too strong a word: when Henry's associate Larry Petrie bombed the steamship Aramac, the Sydney Morning Herald reported "The Aramac explosion makes the eighth trouble on board ship within almost as many days". After "jolly swagman" Frenchy Hoffmeister and sixteen other unionists committed arson at Dagworth, Henry's mate Banjo Paterson wrote a song about Hoffmeister's suicide (or was it murder?), and 'Waltzing Matilda' has since been Australia's unofficial national anthem.

It was a very different Australia from today's in many other ways, a time when the great gold rush had petered out and diggers from all over the planet were either settling down or going home; when a country that had already hosted two of the world's first ten World's Fairs was gripped in drought and our first Great Depression that closed the majority of banks; when the continent's British colonies were lurching towards Federation and a nation was being born with the second-highest standard of living in the world – while one quarter of Sydney children died before the age of five. It was also a time when people called each other "Mr", "Miss" or "Mrs", and they invariably replied to each other's emails and phone messages.

A large part of Henry's writing, especially his poetry, was political, swinging between what we would call today "left" and "right". Progressives and reactionaries, unsure of what to do with him, have preferred to ignore him or make him a kind of literary jackaroo. Louisa Lawson's life, too, probably because she was both poor and in many ways excessively progressive for her times, has been virtually swept from public consciousness despite her incredible achievements. I hope this chronology might in some small way help to correct the historical revision of the whole 'Lawson myth', by showing these two Aussies in context.

The Life and Times of Louisa Lawson and Henry Lawson: A Chronology

Tagged: henry+lawson, louisa+lawson, australia, radical, history, radical+history, progressive, suffragism, feminism, suffragettes, australian, literature