‘They tell me you know something about Henry Lawson’. The speaker was perhaps six feet tall, a ‘Collingwood six footer’ according to the vernacular of those times, handsome, tousle-haired, unsmiling but with a pleasantly ironic way to him. He was standing just outside the open doorway to my office in Flinders University’s School of Language and Literature, as it was then known.
He didn’t realize it but he was in fact my very first visitor: I had been appointed as a lecturer in the English Department at the end of the previous year but a bout of appendicitis evolving into peritonitis meant that I didn’t arrive, so we were meeting in the first days of the new academic year.
My door was open because I’d resolved, in my ‘new boy’ innocence, to be as available to students as possible. And, yes, I was familiar with Lawson’s stories — I had recently published a study of them called The Receding Wave — but I was far too diffident to make any serious claim, let alone an expansive one, so in answer to the young man’s implied question (what, if anything, did I know about Henry Lawson?) I said guardedly, ‘Well, I know a bit about him’. I didn’t reveal, not then anyway, that The Receding Wave was to my surprise controversial, having been vigorously — and in at least one case scathingly — attacked by various established anti-academic Lawsonians and that one of the chief objections was my connection to a university English department.
He came in, sat down, had a mug of the execrable coffee that I brought from the Common Room and we talked about Henry Lawson. He was well read in the field, having encountered Lawson not only in a small way at school but especially at home where his mother had given him an anthology of Australian stories, and he’d come across ‘The Drover’s Wife’. We hit it off: he was pleasant, engaging and witty and we resolved to continue our talk in the near future.
This young bloke was also taking Philosophy 1 as part of his first year and I discovered that he had submitted the head of the Philosophy discipline, Professor Brian Medlin, to a similarly exacting visit during which he offered to prove to Medlin the existence of God from First Principles, an intriguing proposition for Medlin who was a well-known atheist and a debater of murderously