The Leura poet Minnie Brackenreg wrote:

Now he lies by the sea in fair Waverley,
Where the waves sing their songs to the
shore,
While a Requiem low seems to ebb and
to flow,
For the one who has gone before.

A national torrent of execrable verse was unleashed from the moment Lawson’s death was known. The frustration many felt with his impossible efforts to reclaim his full creative power and build an even finer monument outlasting brass was swept aside as each poet and poetaster’s tribute appeared in provincial and metropolitan papers from coast to coast. With his death, Lawson brought out the best in them as, in life, his apparent progression from flawless maker to flawed self-parody in turn evinced emulation, then chiacking expostulations, and ridicule, and pity. From New Zealand, three months before he departed for Australia in May 1910 (not, as Colin Roderick claims, 1909), David McKee Wright had written for the Bulletin:

This is a lay of Henry Lawson and a lay
of What-the-Devil’s-Gone-Wrong?
A lay of Give-it-a-Rest and likewise the
truthful tale of We-Want-a-Song,
It is also a poem of Lost-Endeavour and
an ode of Lift-Up-Your-Head-
and-Shine,
But first and chief, it’s the lyrical state
-ment of Damn-it-Get-Singing
and Cease-to-Pine.

The torrent of lamentation by poets who were moved to eloquence by Lawson’s decline and unhappy end should not be lightly brushed aside. Those who wrote them were, whether or not they counted themselves as such, among the true champions of Australian letters, custodians of a tradition that was nurtured and celebrated by few academics.

How could Wright, who had never met Lawson (despite a confused claim by veteran New Zealand writer and politician John A. Lee) have possibly known the reason for Lawson’s ‘pining’? Roderick’s biography gives us, as Brian Kiernan has pointed out, ‘the man in the artist’. The artist in the man has been handsomely attested to by Roderick’s almost single minded scholarly assiduity over decades. An academic colleague at Bond University, no slouch in the publications line, glanced at the list of Roderick’s publications inside the biography and exclaimed ‘How can a man write so much?’ Roderick has for so long been an object of wonder to literary scholars on account of his diligence that he enjoys legendary status rivalled by few beside Russel Ward and Manning Clark.

There were few Australian academics to acclaim Lawson’s achievement at the time of his death. Professor Jeremiah Stable (President of the Queensland Authors’ and Artists’ Association from 1921) encouraged the teaching of Australian literature in his English department at Queensland University from 1923, and edited several anthologies of verse and prose for use in schools from 1924. The accolade of academic respectability was largely posthumous. Leslie Allen, member of the Sydney branch of the Australian Writers’ and Artists’ Union before the Great War and, from 1918, Professor of English at the Royal Military Academy, Duntroon, was another friend of Australian art and literature, promoting Lawson and his contemporaries in lectures and addresses.

As for the work of Roderick, I appreciate the selectivity with documents and details in this Life, but I would like to know more of Lawson’s milieu. Brian Kiernan observes that Roderick ‘magisterially disregards’ claims that Lawson was a victim of colonial culture or a philistine society. Fine, so far as that goes, but precisely how far does Roderick go? I’m not blinded by the welter of detail bordering on trivia. It is interesting, from a maritime history angle, to know what the tonnage was on every ship Lawson sailed in, and it’s possibly even interesting to know the names of those ships’ masters, but what’s the point? Did Lawson speak to all these captains? We are told that Captain Hipgrave of the Burrumbeet allowed Lawson, though a steerage passenger, ‘to entertain his cronies in the saloon’ in Melbourne. Was this latitude usual? Would a passenger in steerage have spent much time chatting about tonnage with the captains? If he did, Roderick’s not letting on.

Similarly, for all one gets to know about Mrs Byers (and I agree with Edmund Campion who remarks that she is one of the ‘finds’ in this biography), one finally knows little about the society Lawson inhabited. Roderick’s strongest characters are the members of Lawson’s family. It is good to have them disentangled here from their own (at times half cracked) accounts as well as sentimental fan club versions. We owe something to the fan club members, though. In the ostensible absence of academic support for Lawson and his reputation, the poems and stories became the preserve of the castes of journalists and primary and secondary school teachers. Roderick shows us nothing of the reasons why they adopted him with such passionate alacrity, clinging to him (still) with fierce loyalty. There is little or no revelation in this Life of the reasons why Lawson’s readers commenced, from an early date, to gather clippings of his poems in their scrapbooks. Nor do we gain any comprehension of the way in which he came to be regarded as a national treasure by generations of schoolchildren even in his own time.

Was Lawson representative of contemporary authors copying time tried formulae? Perish the thought? In South Africa, Edgar Wallace copied Kipling’s verse-style to the point of mimicking his model’s verse and book-titles, and rose on colonial acclaim (when the ‘Tommy Atkins’ fad passed, he turned to mimicking the prose of penny dreadfuls and shilling shockers and, by deluging the market, won a new audience for mysteries à thèse). Did any of Lawson’s contemporaries, apart from Kipling, commence to write prodigious verse and just ‘happen to take’ with a public yearning for change? Why write poetry at all? How common was the habit among young men? Lawson’s mother began writing poetry when Henry was a lad; early in his Blue Mountains career, Henry read Edgar Allan Poe. No doubt many contemporaries read Poe. One question that comes to mind concerns the abstract issue of what made Lawson’s verse unlike his mother’s, Poe’s or anyone else’s. Another concerns the promise Lawson’s editors saw in it.

It would be useful, I think, to have Roderick’s broader views on cultural life in Australia presented in greater measure along the way. They would frame – and balance – the view he presents. The comments on the Boer War, Federation and the Great War are perfunctory, and one recognises that on such topics any conspectus must necessarily be brief, but not to the point of giving the remarks an air of ‘one must, I suppose, toss in a line about the War, what?’

I find the tone of Roderick’s remarks on international relations up to the outbreak of the Great War cryptic to the point of being silly:

‘The world had been watching Germany as the only likely disturber of the peace. The popular belief was that if Germany did not get what she wanted by diplomacy, she would take it by the sword. Britain feared the expansion of her naval programme, mainly because to support it the German people were encouraged by the Flottenverein into a hostile attitude to Britain. Now came this unexpected development.’

Am I mistaken in hearing a breathless Film Australia voiceover at this point? The generalisations are indeed breathtaking; Roderick is much at his best on detailed commentary (is it pukka to regard him as the Australian doyen of I. A. Richards style close critical reading?). I applaud Roderick’s adherence to ‘facts’, and to his purpose in revealing the pattern in them that makes up the man. But fact can be viewed as equivocal, and ideological, representation.

Roderick observes that Bertram Stevens kept the Lone Hand going until he fell ill in 1922. Kit Taylor states, in his history of the magazine, that ‘Bertram Stevens’ connection with the Lone Hand ended in May or June 1919, when it was sold by Macleod to A. A. Catts, of “New Century Press’”. Which version should we believe?

One reviewer (Kiernan) has claimed Roderick is ‘detached’ in his attitude; another (Edmund Campion) that he has written ‘a history of Lawson’s writing’ rather than a life. In the only critical comment in a Time article, which reads more like a Betty and Jim version of Lawson’s life for yuppies than a review, Geoffrey Blainey astutely observes that Roderick’s weight of detail and the ‘sparseness of major comments’ about Lawson’s writings ‘tend to befog the story of Henry’s rise and fall’. Quite so. Let’s reassert Roderick’s bona fides, but let us acknowledge that he does not tell us what we want to know about Henry’s rise. The clinical catalogue of incidents is not the same thing as a satisfactory explanation of Lawson’s acceptance by a readership (or was it merely an editor’s ‘taste’?). I know I’m being cantankerous, but I do want to know what, if any, external influences had a part in keeping the bugger up to writing the things he did. I don’t mean, of course, the obvious business, that certain matters were public and were therefore worth a few bob, or even that some public issues could be tackled with varying degrees of conviction. Lawson was the ‘apostle of the colour bar’; fair enough; but even Christ could raise more than one apostle. How, then, did Henry differ from his contemporaries? No word? Pity, I say. It would have made the difference.

I appreciate knowing about what Lawson did on every single day that can be accounted for with some accuracy, but in this book the man appears to live in a cocoon hung up in society. Roderick spins a casing of family and parental reference, but little of a social (as opposed to sociable) man emerges from the cocoon. As Campion observes, George Robertson ‘almost threatens to take over’ the story. Nor is Robertson the only one who shanghaies the yarn and threatens to fly it somewhere else. But, for all that Louisa Lawson, Bertha Bredt, Mary Cameron, Sister MacCallum and the indomitable Mrs Byers carried the emotional baton for Lawson in a life-long relay, J. F. Archibald, John Le Gay Brereton, Tom L. Mills, Bertram Stevens, Tom Mutch, and the ‘great panjandrum’ of the Bulletin, David McKee Wright, wander in and out of the story like somnambulists shuffling across the stage of Roderick’s imagination while a spotlight illumines a Kafkaesque dung-beetle wondering which way is out of a wall-less prison. I regret that they get no more than walk on parts. Even if Lawson at times consigned them all to Sheol, I should like to see the lesser-known literary figures among them emerge, in a fastidious, late-twentieth-century biography, as more than golems.

Roderick tells us Tom Mutch wrote no article about a trip with Lawson because he ‘began to develop political ambitions’. Frankly, I find Roderick’s wording peculiar. Elsewhere, I want to know more about Henry Boote than Roderick’s comment that he had ‘supplanted’ Hector Lamond at the Worker within fourteen months of arrival seems to offer as a guide to Boote’s character and achievement. David McKee Wright receives a kick in the head every time he gets up in this volume, for his monstrous alterations to Lawson’s manuscripts – alterations Lawson was in little condition to coolly evaluate, let alone endorse. Roderick has kept a magnificent hatred against Wright going for decades; I would be more impressed by Wright’s truculent defence of Lawson were it not that everyone who came in editorial contact with Lawson’s texts appears to have ‘crippled and mutilated’ them. Roderick could have paused, I think, to kick Archibald, S. H. Prior, Arthur Jose, George Robertson, and just about anyone who ever handled Lawson’s work. Roderick catalogues their changes to authors’ manuscripts; he could at least damn the lot of them, if he can’t bring himself to acknowledge that editors still play havoc with authors’ works. The practice of brutal intervention was not established by Wright who, like Lawson, was in the habit of submitting poems with alternative stanzas attached to them, since he expected editors to exercise the same latitude he employed himself. Prior, Wright’s employer, obliged him by severely cutting his works and, ultimately, Wright himself from his sub-editorial position with the Bulletin.

In Roderick’s ‘nothing but the facts’ mood, Zora Cross is described as ‘David McKee Wright’s house-keeper’. That’s a howler. I have no doubt that the only begetters of this remark are annotated in numerous volumes of the Roderick papers listed ‘among principle sources’: it would be a shame to discover that Roderick did not bother to consult Zora Cross among other informants. She wrote that her first acquaintance with Lawson’s work came in 1902 when she was twelve years old, through the efforts of an Ipswich Grammar school secretary who encouraged her to attend the School of Arts, where the Bulletin was available. At a reciting competition sometime later, Cross remarked of Lawson’s ‘Out Back’, ‘I don’t think much of it’, only to be told by the woman beside her ‘You’ll learn’. Her efforts to imitate ‘Talbrager’ led to advice from the Bulletin, ‘Leave that road to Lawson’, and, she reflected, ‘although in after years I managed to follow Lawson humbly and with a little more success I raised him to his own pedestal on that first reject and he never came off it again’.

This sort of reverence for the man’s art, without any reference to subject matter, is excluded from Roderick’s self-imposed brief, but it helps to explain, I think, why the tumbledown Lawson of the post-London period could exercise such control over the minds of his peers in or out of Bohemia and the Press. Appreciation for craft was high on the agenda in the network of schools, elocution academies, Schools of Arts, and technical and evening colleges, which filled a popular need, beside the literary pages of colonial and Commonwealth newspapers and periodicals. Local as well as overseas genius was popularly appreciated here long before the dominant culture saw any point in pretending to slough away even a veneer of cringe.

I can see problems this book will encounter with a wider audience. Roderick commences with Lawson’s background of manic depression, in order to show us the extent to which his alcoholism exacerbated the condition. It is consequently possible to appreciate Lawson’s behaviour infinitely better than hitherto we were able. In the concentration of the degenerating life of the man it is possible that the artist will be overlooked or forgotten. Nearly half of this volume concerns itself with the meticulous charting of Lawson’s decline; the equally meticulous record of his rise may be eclipsed by the more picturesque anecdotes and travels of the middle and later period of his life. Roderick’s dry style will do little to alleviate the impression of a whinging, cadging sot. Yes, Lawson could have whinged for Australia in the Olympics, if the event had been approved. That he recognised his propensity to do so and made brilliant ironic use of it in his sketches and poems may somehow escape readers who come to the biography before they have actually read the man’s works. And, I think, there will be many in that category. I wonder if the biography will in fact encourage them to pursue the works. Uncharitable thought? Looked at from this angle, the paradox arises that Roderick’s book does not really intimate his subject’s brilliance.

Roderick will probably be annoyed at these reflections on his work. I admire the diligent operative school of biographical research; I also stand in awe of the cussedness which kept him busy for so much of his own life with another man’s life. It’s a stupendous accomplishment. I note that no research assistants are acknowledged: the job is more impressive for the solo effort, even though Roderick has spent so long at the task. There have no doubt been compensations, in the visits to so many fascinating archives, public and private libraries, and to editors, politicians, friends, relatives and other associates of the great man. It is a slow and thankless task to begin to collect so much material alone.

Will Roderick be linked to Lawson, like Boswell to Johnson in Australian literary consciousness? In one sense, yes: no one else will have to travel this way without a map, now that Roderick’s done a Matthew Flinders on the site. But Roderick has not taken it ‘from the life’. His exigencies of working from documents begin to tell awfully upon the reader. This isn’t an easy book to read. It’s a duty. Jim Davidson once reflected that some biographies are written out of duty and some because the author is ‘driven’. Roderick’s book is written out of both urgencies, but I should confess that I found the book tedious to read on account of the loungers of Roderick’s style. The text rarely takes flight as a joy in itself. When it does, it comes as a surprise. The surprises should be more frequent.

Roderick’s Henry Lawson: A Life fills an extraordinary gap in Australian biographies of literary figures. One should not be too hard on those who went before; Manning Clark’s work, like numerous predecessors’ efforts, constituted a celebration rather than a dispassionate inquiry into what could be known about Lawson’s life and character. I’m not entirely persuaded that Roderick’s study is as generous to the reader as it is to his subject. It is worth its salt in the long run because it reveals the circumstances that created the hereditary warts on Lawson’s portrait. In its own way, it is a model of procedure, revealing the dedication one can bring to biography, and the filters through which one can examine one’s subject. Above all, it represents the keystone of the shrine to Roderick’s obsession. He has kept the lamp burning when others have followed strange gods; and if the nation can load him up with more honours, I expect it will. He deserves them, for his devotion elsewhere, and in this book, to a great Australian.