The flawed (and frequently floored) author
By Alec Smart
Among the list of notable people who lived in Newtown is writer Henry Lawson (1867-1922), who, during the first days (perhaps weeks), of his marriage resided at 154 Probert St with his wife Bertha Bredt, to whom he tied the knot on 15 April 1896.
However, it was a short-lived tenancy, for the 29-year-old author and his intelligent but hapless bride – the 20-year-old daughter of political activist and writer Bertha McNamara – headed west to Perth to try and make their luck on the goldfields.
In 1896 Lawson was enjoying the peak of his literary success. Angus & Robertson had just published his collection of poems, In the Days when the World was Wide and other Verses, and a collection of 52 of his short stories, While the Billy Boils, which were praised by critics and popular with the public.
With these he established his reputation as a chronicler of characters from the lower end of the social ladder. Lawson’s yarns were compared and contrasted with the work of fellow ‘bush poet’ Andrew ‘Banjo’ Patterson, a fellow contributor to the nationalist republican magazine The Bulletin, Australia’s most popular magazine in the 1880s.
Patterson, a solicitor, journalist and author of the ‘alternative national anthem’, Waltzing Matilda, was ultimately much more successful than Lawson with his somewhat romanticised tales of the lives of rural dwellers.
His literary rival was not interested in presenting rural life as idyllic. Lawson was a campaigning socialist and favoured narratives centred on working class struggles. This is attributable to his impoverished childhood and lack of education – he attended school for just three years in a remote country village in the Mudgee district settled by immigrants digging and panning for gold.
Lawson’s father was a Norwegian seaman named Niels Larsen who jumped ship in Melbourne in 1855 and joined the heady influx of immigrants following the Gold Rush. With the discovery of gold in Grenfell, 420km west of Sydney (midway between Dubbo and Wagga Wagga), Larsen, who Anglicised his name to Peter Lawson, relocated there and in 1866 married Louisa Albury.
The following year, on 17 June 1867, their first child, Henry, was born. The family moved often following Peter’s vain hope for a windfall on the goldfields, and in 1873 eventually settled in Eurunderee in the Mudgee district. There Peter constructed a two-bedroom timber hut that became the village post office, and found work as a building contractor.
There was no school in the area, so Louisa lobbied for the creation of one – resulting in the construction of Eurunderee Provisional School in 1876 – which was a rudimentary single room. Henry later recalled in his poem ‘The Old Bark School’ that the building was literally “built of bark and poles… the walls were mostly cracks lined with calico and sacks, there was little need for windows...”
However, Henry only undertook a few years of study – despite his talent for words, he was basically uneducated – because he stayed home and managed the household, where he had two younger brothers and twin sisters (one of whom died in her first year), while his mother ran the post office.
In 1876, at the age of nine, Henry was afflicted with an incurable ear infection that degenerated over the next few years until he was completely deaf in one ear. This impacted his ability to communicate – he suffered bullying at school – and he later attributed his extraordinary writing talent to this social isolation.
In 1880, aged 13, Henry abandoned school after just three years study and joined his father in the building trade, moving between Mudgee and the Blue Mountains, during which he ultimately discovered the joys of alcohol and how it alleviated his social anxiety.
By 1882, his parents’ marriage had disintegrated, and Louisa moved to Sydney with her four youngest children and found employment running a boarding house in Philip St in the City. The following year the teenaged Lawson joined her and in 1884 was apprenticed as a carriage painter in Clyde. He also undertook night studies in an attempt to enrol in a university degree, but failed the entrance exams several times. However, he discovered he had a latent talent for writing – especially observational fiction – and began contributing poems and essays to journals.
On 1 Oct 1887 The Bulletin, a nationalist magazine that advocated Australian independence in the years leading up to the 1900 Federation, published ‘Song of the Republic’ the 20-year-old Lawson’s first poem in print, and thereafter Lawson retained a life-long connection with the editors, who regularly published his creations. In Dec 1888 they published his first short story, 'His Father's Mate'.
Louisa, a talented writer and editor herself, moved in radical intellectual circles and managed The Republican newspaper and in 1888 founded feminist journal The Dawn. Louisa also published her gifted son’s first poems and short stories, and later his first book, Short Stories in Prose and Verse, in Dec 1894.
As his popularity rose, Lawson expressed a desire to move to England, where he believed he would achieve distinction like Charles Dickens, a celebrated chronicler of the underprivileged, and move among gifted writers who would stimulate his creative imagination. Instead, undermined by his by growing alcoholism and depressive episodes (which his biographer Colin Roderick attributed to bipolar disorder), he made a series of poorly-judged decisions.
What followed was a decline into poverty, frequent changes of address, relocations to New Zealand and England to try and advance his career, the failure of his marriage, periods of drunkenness, begging and destitution, short stays in mental hospitals and alcohol drying-out facilities. There were also numerous prison stretches in Darlinghurst Gaol for repeat offences, mainly for abandoning his wife and two young children and not paying maintenance.
Henry and Bertha Lawsons’ move from Newtown to the goldfields in Western Australia in 1896 was a gamble that didn’t pay off – they lived in one of the tent villages that sprang up to accommodate the influx of speculators, while Henry found casual work as a painter.
After a few months the couple returned to Sydney in October 1896 and Lawson returned to his hedonist socialising with a cadre of poets, infamously known as The Dawn and Dusk Club due to their habit of drinking all hours, which included Jack Moses (author of The Dog Sat on the Tuckerbox poem).
The Lawson’s marriage suffered, and was headed for the rocks when Henry reportedly developed a romantic crush on a young bookkeeper named Hannah Thorburn. In desperation, Bertha pleaded with The Bulletin editor, J. F. Archibald, to finance two ship passages to New Zealand, along with written references to aid her wayward husband’s employment opportunities there.
Previously, in September 1892, Archibald and The Bulletin donated a rail ticket and £5 allowance for Henry to travel to drought-stricken Bourke, which stimulated his writing career. Despite the 1890s economic depression, Lawson found seasonal work as a shearer and painter, trekked 320km overland to Hungerford, Queensland, and back to Bourke, and sourced story ideas that inspired him for the rest of his life.
However, the Lawsons’ New Zealand venture had limited success. In March 1897 they travelled to the South Island and settled in Mangamaunu, approx. 200km north of Christchurch, and Henry found employment as a teacher in a small Maori school near Kaikōura. But it was short-lived. In Nov 1897, after Methuen Publishing of London offered a book deal, Lawson resigned from the teaching post, and rekindled his plan to move to Britain.
Meanwhile, Bertha became pregnant with their son Joseph Henry, born 10 Feb 1898 during three months confinement in Wellington, and in March 1898 the Lawsons returned to Sydney where Henry worked a few months in the Statistician's Office.
Sadly, Lawson fell into old habits – boozing with The Dawn and Dusk Club - and significantly deteriorated, eventually checking into a sanatorium for alcoholics in November 1898. In 1899 the couple and their young son resided in North Sydney (‘Strathmere’ in William St then Chaplin Cottage in Charles St).
Newly sober, Lawson’s creativity returned and in 1900 he released two collections of short stories, On the Track and Over the Sliprails, and a book of poems, Verses Popular and Humorous. The Lawson’s daughter Bertha was born on 11 Feb, and shortly afterwards, on 20 April, Henry, Bertha and their two young children emigrated to England on the SS Damascus.
Unfortunately, the Lawsons’ relocation to Britain, although initially positive, was ultimately catastrophic. Introduced to J. B. Pinker, one of Britain’s best literary agents, Lawson embarked on a series of four short stories, Joe Wilson and his Mates, which joined his most renowned creations and many now regard them as his creative peak.
This was followed by a collection of prose, Children of the Bush, both published by the distinguished Blackwood’s Magazine (1901 and 1902).
The Lawsons rented a cottage in the village of Harpenden, a commuter town in Hertfordshire, north-east of London. Sadly, Bertha’s social isolation from family and friends, the cold weather and her husband’s drunken cruelty – she cited frequent occasions of domestic violence – contributed to her mental decline.
From May 1901 she was institutionalised for three months in Bethlem Royal Hospital – the original ‘Bedlam’ – for treatment while the couple’s two children went into foster care. In April 1902 Lawson arranged for his wife to return to Sydney, and he followed soon afterwards, in July. The couple lived awhile in Manly, first in ‘Marlow’, then ‘Ladywood’ on Whistler St., where Bertha leased out rooms for lodgers.
However, Lawson soon learned that his one-time crush, Hannah Thorburn, had died on 1 June, and this may have contributed to a return to melancholia and binge drinking.
At the end of 1902, his creative endeavours in decline and wracked by low self-esteem, Lawson apparently attempted suicide. On 6 Dec 1902, a fisherman named Sly discovered Lawson at the base of cliffs south of Manly Beach, a plunge of 25-30 metres (on the coastal stretch between Shelly Headland and Blue Fish Point). Lawson, who later described it as a “fall”, suffered a broken ankle and lacerations above his right eye, and was hospitalised.
Lawson again sought treatment for his alcoholism, checking into a facility for inebriates. His temporary sobriety led to a romantic reunion with his wife – newspapers reported them strolling around Manly holding hands – and her becoming pregnant. However, in April 1903, Bertha filed for judicial separation – granted in June – in an affidavit alleging that Lawson was habitually drunk and cruel. Later that year, in October, she gave birth without her husband’s support, but tragically the child was stillborn.
In 1903 Lawson returned to North Sydney and rented one of the rooms above Isabel Byers' Coffee Palace in Miller St, North Sydney (a bustling commercial centre in which the population quadrupled from 12,000 to 48,000 between 1886-1920). From here he frequented many of the local bars, in particular the Fig Tree Inn beside Lavender Bay (now the site of Blues Point Tower), and wrote poems about local characters and characteristic locations.
Mrs Byers was an accomplished poet, and evidently doted on her famous but flawed tenant, because she sustained him for the next two decades during his mental and physical decline. Byers not only provided Lawson lodgings (he later rented rooms in her properties in William and Euroka Streets, Nth Sydney), she helped arrange contact with his two children, sourced publications for his writing, negotiated with his publishers and wrote letters to sponsors and creditors to better manage his financial affairs.
Meanwhile, Bertha set up home in 397 ½ South Dowling St, Surry Hills. From here she raised their two kids, several times petitioning the Court for maintenance payments from her wayward husband, who, although he found money to drink, frequently begged and borrowed from friends and associates to pay his bills.
Between 1905 and 1909 Lawson was imprisoned seven times - six for deserting his family and once for public drunkenness - for a total of 159 days. An unapologetic Lawson even used this incarceration experience as source material for his writing (in 1908 he published a poem, One Hundred and Three, his prison number, in which he criticised the prison as "Starvinghurst Gaol”, referring to the meagre rations served to inmates).
Lawson’s writing deteriorated, along with his health, as his alcoholism advanced. After 1907 he was admitted to Darlinghurst Reception House mental hospital several times.
Publisher and agent George Robertson commissioned the 42-year-old to write his life story, and on 2 March 1908, Lawson’s Fragment of Autobiography, an abridged account of his earlier life on the Mudgee goldfields and nomadic wanderings as a young single man, was published in The Lone Hand monthly literature magazine. (The full autobiography was published posthumously in Cecil Mann's three-volume edition of Lawson's Prose in 1964).
Friends rallied to find him work or pay for him to retreat to the countryside to try and dry out and find inspiration, but he deteriorated further and often resorted to begging on Sydney’s city streets or reading his poetry aloud with a hat in which to collect donations.
Recognising the former literary genius’ sad plight, the Commonwealth Literary Fund granted him £1 a week pension from May 1920, but it came too late to recover his circumstances. Lawson died on 2 Sept 1922, aged just 55, of a cerebral haemorrhage in Isabel Byers’ Abbotsford home.
He was granted a New South Wales State Funeral - traditionally reserved for influential politicians – the first for an author, in celebration of his being a 'distinguished citizen'. His funeral was attended by Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes and Labor politician Jack Lang (husband of Lawson's sister-in-law Hilda Bredt) who later became Premier of NSW.
Lawson’s body was interred at Waverley Cemetery. In 1931, a bronze statue (designed by George Washington Lambert) of Lawson accompanied by a swagman and his dog was unveiled at The Domain, overlooking Sydney Harbour.
Lawson left his estate to Isabel Byers, which consisted of a mere two suits, collar stud, tie and overcoat, his spectacles and walking stick, a single pencil, a smoking pipe and two packets of tobacco.
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