Blainey's Lawson
Michael McGirr reviews the latest collection of Henry Lawson's work.
Henry Lawson: Edited and Introduced by Geoffrey Blainey, Henry Lawson, Text Publishing, 2002. ISBN 1 87700 811 7, RRP $27.50
There are few areas of social or economic history that Geoffrey Blainey has left untouched. He has written both a short history of the world and a history of the Pacific Dunlop Corporation. Curiously enough, those two books appear to run to about the same length. I imagine there were executives at Pacific Dunlop who felt aggrieved by such brusque treatment.
Blainey has an eye for incidental detail and an ability to make illuminating connections. Speaking towards the end of his tenure as chair of the National Council for the Centenary of Federation, he made the point that the first federal parliament included both a former convict and a man who would survive well into living memory. In A Land Half Won, he observes that a member of Hume and Hovell's 1824 overland expedition to Port Phillip survived to be present in Albury for the opening of the Sydney-to-Melbourne railway. The first expedition had taken weeks. The journey could now be done in a day.
It is not surprising then that Blainey warms to Henry Lawson. Blainey's new selection of Lawson's work includes some of the most telling and pithy descriptions in Australian literature. Blainey suggests in his introduction that Lawson's stories tend to be more descriptive than narrative: 'atmosphere was everything'. This does little justice to the ways in which Lawson, when in good form, will patiently build a narrative from small twigs. Blainey has chosen both 'Shall we Gather at the River' and 'The Golden Graveyard'. In the former, a clergyman visiting the bush is described as a 'piano-fingered parson'. The image brings with it an entire narrative of drawing rooms, light entertainment and privilege. The latter story includes the character of the Mother Middleton, possibly a former convict and certainly a woman to make even Lawson's Mrs Spicer look genteel. Mother Middleton's husband dies. Lawson says baldly that 'she conducted the funeral'. That one detail yields an elaborate narrative of grief, defiance, pride and religious autonomy. I labour this point because Blainey will often create a historical narrative in a similar way.
Blainey is often contrasted with our other celebrity historian, Manning Clark. Clark is seen as more visionary, more interested in big themes, more willing to create a grand narrative of Australian history. It is interesting then that both Clark and Blainey have written about Henry Lawson. Clark's In Search of Henry Lawson (1978) reflects on Lawson's funeral. Indeed, it is impossible to get far into Lawson's legacy without pondering the strange things that happen to people when they start to dig into the earth's crust, either to find gold or bury the dead or, once or twice, do both at the same time. The myth of Lawson's lonely death, followed by a most public funeral, is one of the core conundrums of trying to figure out who he really was. And is.
As far as Clark is concerned, those who turned out to mourn Lawson had failed to understand either the turmoil of his spirit or his urge to describe the Australian soul. Clark quotes D. H. Lawrence's words, written about the time Lawson died, that Australians have 'a rather fascinating indifference, a physical indifference to what we call soul or spirit'. Lawson's post-humous admirers had 'no thoughts of Lawson as the victim of the rule of the Kingdom of Nothingness, or of the great Australian emptiness'. Blainey says simply that many people had tried to help Lawson in his fatal battle with alcohol and depression, but 'did not know how to'. He had 'the grandest funeral ever conferred on an Australian writer or artist'. Blainey's Lawson is a scribe, not a prophet. His final judgment is merely that 'no writer can surpass him in capturing large slices of an Australian way of life that has vanished'.
Blainey has a marked aversion to metaphysical themes. His A Short History of the World ends with an assessment of the diminishing role of religion in human history: 'religion tended to flourish most vigorously when daily life was perilous and often painful'. Scientific and medical advances have made religion less significant: 'the appeal to gods was partly a reflection of the feeling of personal helplessness'. Blainey is certainly more comfortable when reporting on social, economic or technological change. You just have to wonder what interest he finds in familiar stories such as 'Shall We Gather at the River', 'The Union Buries its Dead' and 'The Drover's Wife', all of which he has included in this book. They are all tales of survival. But an essential part of survival means finding an underlying meaning and a ritual to protect that meaning. Take those away and Lawson is pretty lame.
Blainey tends to minimise Lawson's prejudices, especially his racism, but he does acknowledge their existence. His anthology of Lawson is fairly conventional. If the truth be known, you can buy the two-volume collected works of Lawson at most bargain book outlets for two-thirds the price. And you'd have a lot more fun rummaging through the highs and lows of a varied career. The collected works are full of real surprises. It's understandable that Blainey has chosen from the best of Lawson's work and Lawson was a formidable talent. But he is also worth meeting on some pretty ordinary days when the world did not seem so wide.
Michael McGirr is the author of Things You Get For Free.
current issue | about | subscriptions | advertising | previous issues | links
Reproduction of material from any Jesuit Publications pages
without written prior permission is strictly prohibited.
Copyright 2002 Jesuit Publications
PO Box 553 Richmond VIC 3121 Australia
Tel +61 3 9427 7311, Fax +61 3 9428 4450