Henry Lawson (1867 - 1922)

Henry Lawson (17 June 1867, Grenfell goldfields, New South Wales - 2 September 1922, Sydney) was an Australian writer and poet. Lawson and his contemporary Banjo Patterson are the best-known Australian fiction writers of the colonial period.

His mother was Louisa Lawson 1848 - 1920, a prominent suffragist and owner/editor of The Dawn journal which was partly responsible for Australia becoming one of the first countries to attain adult female suffrage. His father was Niels Larsen, a Norwegian seaman who settled in Australia; on Henry's birth, the family surname was anglicised and Niels became Peter Lawson.

Henry suffered an ear infection at the age of seven that left him with partial deafness and by the age of fourteen he had lost his hearing entirely. Most of his works focuses on the Australian bush, such as the desolate Past Carin’, and is considered by some to be among the first accurate descriptions of Australian life as it was at the time. It should be noted, however, that even then the majority of Australians lived in cities like Lawson himself; the bush that Lawson depicted housed only a small minority.

During his later life, the alcohol-addicted writer was probably Australia's best-known celebrity. At the same time, he was also a frequent beggar on the streets of Sydney, notably at the Circular Quay ferry turnstiles. He was gaoled at Darlinghurst Gaol for drunkenness and non payment of alimony, and recorded his experience in the haunting poem "One Hundred and Three" - his prison number- which was published in 1908. He refers to the prison as "Starvinghurst Gaol" because of the meagre rations given to the inmates.

At his death he was given a state funeral, attended by the Prime Minister W. M. Hughes and Lawson's brother-in-law, Jack Lang, the Premier of the State of New South Wales, as well as thousands of citizens.

The poems are by default sorted according to volume, but you can also choose to sort them alphabetically or by page views.

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A cloud of dust on the long white road,	1 Comment
A day of seeming innocence,
Across the stony ridges,	3 Comments
Ah, well! but the case seems hopeless, and the pen might write in vain;
And they heard the tent-poles clatter,
As the night was falling slowly down on city, town and bush,
Australia's a big country
By homestead, hut, and shearing-shed,
By Lawson's Hill, near Mudgee,
By our place in the midst of the furthest seas we were fated to stand alone -
Do you think, you slaves of a thousand years to poverty, wealth and pride,
Fear ye not the stormy future, for the Battle Hymn is strong,
Fire lighted; on the table a meal for sleepy men;
From Woolwich and Brentford and Stamford Hill, from Richmond into the Strand,
Have you seen the bush by moonlight, from the train, go running by?	1 Comment
He'd been for years in Sydney "a-acting of the goat",
I am back from up the country -- very sorry that I went --
I long for the streets but the Lord knoweth best,
I saw it in the days gone by,
In these days of peace and money, free to all the Commonweal,
It is stuffy in the steerage where the second-classers sleep,
It was a week from Christmas-time,
It was built of bark and poles, and the floor was full of holes
I'll tell you what you wanderers, who drift from town to town;
Light on the towns and cities, and peace for evermore!
Man, is the Sea your master? Sea, and is man your slave? –
No church-bell rings them from the Track,
Now the tent poles are rotting, the camp fires are dead,
Now this is the creed from the Book of the Bush –
O I dreamt I shore in a shearing shed and it was a dream of joy
Oh, I never felt so wretched, and things never looked so blue
Oh, never let on to your own true love
On a lonely selection far out in the West
Our Andy's gone to battle now	6 Comments
PART I
Roll up, Eureka's heroes, on that grand Old Rush afar,
Said Grenfell to my spirit, "You’ve been writing very free
So I sit and write and ponder, while the house is deaf and dumb,
So the time seems come at last,
So you rode from the range where your brothers “select,”
Sons of Australia, be loyal and true to her -
Sons of the South, awake! arise!
Spirit girl to whom 'twas given	1 Comment
Tall and freckled and sandy,	1 Comment
Ten miles down Reedy River
The boy cleared out to the city from his home at harvest time --
The centuries found me to nations unknown –
The Channel fog has lifted –
The colours of the setting sun
The Eagle screams at the beck of trade, so Spain, as the world goes round,
The fields are fair in autumn yet, and the sun's still shining there,
The night too quickly passes
The old Jimmy Woodser comes into the bar	1 Comment
The schools marched in procession in happiness and pride,
The short hour's halt is ended,
The skies are brass and the plains are bare,
There are scenes in the distance where beauty is not,	1 Comment
There's many a schoolboy's bat and ball that are gathering dust at home,
They have eaten their fill at your tables spread,
They lie, the men who tell us for reasons of their own
They were hanging men in Buckland who would not cheer King George –
Though poor and in trouble I wander alone,
We hear a great commotion
We must suffer, husband and father, we must suffer, daughter and son,
We're marching along, we're gath'ring strong'
When God's wrath-cloud is o'er me,
When the heavy sand is yielding backward from your blistered feet,
When the heavy sand is yielding backward from your blistered feet,
When the man I was denounces all the things that I was not,
When the wars of the world seemed ended, and silent the distant drum,
When you wear a cloudy collar and a shirt that isn't white,
When you’ve knocked about the country—been away from home for years;
Where the needle-woman toils
Wide lies Australia! The seas that surround her
With eyes that are narrowed to pierce
You ask me to be gay and glad
"Like clouds o'er the South are the nations who reign
"Was I at Eureka?" His figure was drawn to a youthful height,
'Twixt the coastline and the border lay the town of Grog-an'-Grumble