Henry Lawson

Henry Lawson (born 1867 in New South Wales, died in Sydney in 1922) was an Australian poet and fiction writer and one of the defining voices of colonial Australian literature. Writing in the vernacular of his time and place, he gave the bush a plain, unromantic literary voice. He is often described as Australia's finest short story writer, and his work still stands as one of the earliest faithful portraits of rural Australian life.

Born on the goldfields of Grenfell, he was the son of Niels Hertzberg Larsen, a Norwegian-born miner who took the surname Lawson after his son's birth, and of Louisa Lawson, a poet, publisher and feminist whose influence on his early work is thought to have been considerable. A middle-ear infection in his teens left him almost completely deaf, which made school difficult; he educated himself largely through reading Dickens, Marryat and Australian novels. His first published poem appeared in The Bulletin in 1887, and the magazine became his main outlet for years.

His most productive period came in the 1890s, after long trips through the drought-stricken interior of New South Wales. Where Banjo Paterson romanticised the bush, Lawson wrote with a dry, sober eye, using short sentences, sparse adjectives and a fierce egalitarian streak. His prose collection While the Billy Boils (1896) brought him fame, but his output declined after that, in part because of alcoholism and mental illness. He spent periods in Darlinghurst Gaol and psychiatric institutions, and often lived in poverty.

From 1903 he found some stability with Isabel Byers, who gave him a room at her coffee palace in North Sydney and helped him through his final years. He died in 1922 after a cerebral haemorrhage and was granted a state funeral, the first given to an Australian writer. His legacy lies in the direct, critical national voice he forged, and in the place his stories hold in schools and in adaptations for film and theatre.