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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

A Note on Henry Lawson

A Note on Henry Lawson

What can a New Zealander say to an Australian? – except, We’ve met before. Met where? In hands-across-the-Tasman literary log-rolling? In common opposition to irresponsible censorship of expression? In the great Never Never Land of ideal wish-fulfilment? I don’t think so; though these thingspage 270 play a part – to emphasise our national differences: the dour conventionality, the stance of a constipated Kiwi; and the Aussie softness and cynicism which are two sides of a double-headed penny in a two-up school. I didn’t realise where we had met until I recently read a little old paperback of 1900, enormously the worse for wear, Over the Sliprails, by Henry Lawson. I’d been familiar with Lawson’s poetry for a long time – my father used to roll out the long trundling ballad lines; I loved them dearly, and no doubt that bedrock sentimental nostalgia is with me still. But the myth of Lawson’s greatness seemed to me largely a fabrication of the Australian hard-case joker telling the world he was a child at heart; and of course the Leftist pamphleteer:

O rebels to society,
The outcasts of the West!
O hopeless eyes that smile for me,
O broken hearts that jest!

I quote from memory. Lawson is onto something, the vision of despair redeemed by compassion; but the verbal statement is always a bit too much the expected one. You can be sure of Lawson’s sincerity in his verse – it carries it a long way – but will it stand without the scaffolding of a particular epoch and personality? Well, I read ‘An Incident at Stiffner’s’, and the whole card- house of reservations came toppling down. Here was compassion deep as the grave, the gigantic torso of human dignity and suffering – the shape buried somewhere behind the sentimentalities of ‘mateship’ and the slogans of early unionism. It was Australian all right. It had its echo too in New Zealand prose; it was a hidden pulse in R.A.K. Mason’s poems and in a few of the best that came after – a blind and dumb pietà hewn in rock. Perhaps it came into being when the eyes of two colonisers-to-be, Australian and New Zealand, met above an open convict’s grave on Norfolk Island.

1956 (128)