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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Bolshies under the Bed

Bolshies under the Bed

The Royal Visit to our ever-loyal Dominion is near at hand, when we will be paid in full by the sight of their Britannic Majesties and Her Royal Highness for the slight inconvenience that our younger men have suffered in the past eight years. I am reminded of a verse of Henry Lawson’s on a similar occasion:

There’ll be royal times in Sydney for the cuff-and-collar push,
From the men who own Australia but who never saw the bush
And could not point their runs out on a map.

And while the poisonous terrorists of Greece and Malaya are being hunted to the mountains and jungles where they belong by those Galahads of Democracy, the Government forces, lately-enlisted Dyak headhunters, and the R.A.F., it is interesting to remember a writer who was perverse enough to find fault with Democratic Progress. Henry Lawson, more than any other Australian poet, took the worm’s-eye view of society:

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I am shamed for Australia and haunted
By the face of the haggard bushwife
Who fights her grim battle undaunted
Because she knows nothing of life.

This kind of statement is peculiar to Lawson. The sentimentality which is a blot on past and contemporary Australian poetry becomes at times, despite his limited technique, clear and trenchant sentiment. He sees the grinding monotony of rural and industrial labour without the rosy spectacles of conventional optimism and ‘nature poetry’. From many changing impressions his Australia emerges as a harsh land, treacherous and remote, a bad wife to whom he is nevertheless indissolubly married . . . ‘Where lone Mount Desolation lies, / Mounts Dreadful and Despair.’

This view itself could be another kind of sentimentality. But in his verse as in his prose sketches, Lawson is saved time and again by a natural realism. His magnificent poem on a bush fire has indeed its stock types (the police constable, the drunkard, the cockie, the sly horse-breaker); but like Dickens whom he admired, Lawson’s types exhibit more human qualities than do most characters created by trivial reporting. The remarkable thing about Lawson’s poetry is not that he was sentimental, but that he was much less so than his contemporaries.

One is led to wonder how Lawson would have written if the three curses of shoddy models, conventional humourless humour, and hack work had not halted him. There are tentative movements in his work toward a more complete and analytical approach to society. The most remarkable is certainly ‘Ruth’, a poem in which he recreates the situation of a sordid court case in all its human depth and violence. Though hampered as always by the trundling ballad metre, he presents a picture unrivalled in Australian verse – the boy growing up in a dreary country town; the girl hemmed in by the demands of conventionality; the lovers in the bush during a thunder-storm; then the climax at the house of the bank manager, and the drawn-out dreamlike finale of the court case. Though uneven, it is Lawson’s most penetrating achievement. He strikes at the roots of his own dilemma – an inhibiting code which froze his natural vehemence into a conditioned response.

The cult of cobberdom, so firmly planted in Australian soil, serves as a thinner substitute for sexual enterprise. Lawson, a more subjective poet than A.B. Paterson, shows affinities with Whitman. He does not always feel it necessary to be a tough guy. Hence his statements of revolutionary brotherhood ring true. One can still be thrilled by the ring of the ‘Army of the Rear’ – ‘Their pikes go through the firing lines as pitchforks go through straw.’

In the first and second decade of this country there still remained a faint echo of the shout of the French Revolution. It seemed possible even then thatpage 46 men could put off chains without riveting new and heavier ones about their necks. Lawson’s iconoclastic poems, however, are forgotten by most of his admirers in favour of the timid and theatrical Empire-worship of ‘England Yet’, the dead weight of a tired and burnt-out brain.

Henry Lawson will be remembered when many of the smart alecks of recent magazine fame are forgotten. He touched often a nerve of genuine indignation at the barbarous and oppressive indignities which working men suffered and still must suffer. And in his more lyric vein he had an original rhetoric and power. At a time when New Zealand poets were writing about fairies, he realised the curiously immature quality of N.Z. landscape –

Where the land in the Spring seems younger
Than a land of the earth should be.

I salute Henry Lawson, that strong and original voice whom circumstances combined to stifle.

1948 (36)