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Australian Literature

Lonely Planet Sydney

Along the Faultlines: Sex, Race and Nation in Australian Women's Writing 1880s - 1930s

The Suffragettes and After

Louisa

The Suffragettes in Pictures

Henry Lawson: Selected Stories

Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism

Complete Poems

Oxford Book of Modern Australian Verse

The Works of 'Banjo' Paterson

My Brilliant Career
By Miles Franklin

I might have raved in verse and prose
the wrongs of one bush-woman dead.
To shame the smug, smug smiles of those
Who sit in peace where tape is red;
I might have sung a song of pride
For things their soul shall never know,
I only see a bush-girl ride
through rugged ranges long ago.
Henry Lawson, on his mother 
 

Louisa Lawson (February 17, 1848 - August 12, 1920)

Australian feminist, inventor, poet, founder/ editor of the Republican and (for 17 years) founder/publisher/editor of Dawn: A Journal for Australian Women; mother of Australian poet, Henry Lawson (1867 - 1922).

I have always loved my countrywomen, always admired them, and believed in them, and believed them to be the most patient, long suffering, generous and capable Women in the whole World. I still think so. It does not seem so odd now as it did years ago, when Australians male and female were not considered as they are now. I had in my mind's eye a big capable, strong, virtuous Woman as a Representative of Australia. I saw her in my dreams when a little child, and when I grew up I wanted to fight every obstacle out of her way, and I fought, God knows I did with a persistence almost amounting to mania as long as health and means lasted.
Louisa Lawson

Half of Australian women's lives are unhappy, but there are paths out of most labyrinths and we will set up finger posts ... we shall welcome contributions and correspondence from women ... it is not a new thing to say there is no power in the world like that of women.
Louisa Lawson, The Dawn, Issue 1
 

When female Australian British subjects* won the vote with the Uniform Franchise Act (June 16, 1902), Louisa Lawson was hailed by her political sisters as “The Mother of Womanhood Suffrage”. It is a title that could be applied internationally; apart from her crusading in Sydney, Louisa was involved in the establishment of the suffragette movement in South Australia, the first place where women could both vote and stand for election (1894; source). 

Louisa was a poor, Mudgee-born bush battler, forced by marital breakdown, economic depression and drought to move with her four surviving children to the city. She was an idiosyncratic but indomitable woman, a prodigious worker, powerful writer and fine poet, a spiritualist, farmer, postmistress and shopkeeper. 

Louisa spent thirty-five years of her hard life fighting for women’s rights. She founded the Association of Women, and with Henry, in 1887 - 88 she published the journal, The Republican. Louisa then became founder, owner, publisher and editor of The Dawn, the new nation’s foremost women’s political magazine, announcing that it would battle for women’s rights, and the vote. She ran it for seventeen years.  “Why should one half of the world govern the other half?” was Louisa’s rallying cry.

While she supported her children in a little house at 138 Phillip Street near the Sydney docks, she had to teach herself the difficult trade of setting lead type, because of a black-ban by the New South Wales Typographical Association. The Postmaster-General’s Department refused to register The Dawn for sending through the post.

The paper was saved from annihilation at the hands of conservative authorities by the intervention of Sir William Windeyer, Vice-Chancellor (Chancellor from 1895) of Sydney University, Attorney-General in the Henry Parkes - John Robertson NSW Government (1878 - 79), and one of an impressive number of prominent citizens with whom the poor girl from the bush became acquainted in Sydney.

Just eight days after establishing the paper, she founded The Dawn Club. Meetings were held in various places, including Quong Tart's tea rooms at 137 King St and 777 George St, one at  the Queen Victoria Markets (called the Queen Victoria Building, or QVB, from 1898), and possibly in the George St markets (aka Paddy's Markets, near Chinatown). One of Louisa's meeting places was 43 Royal Arcade (possibly another Quong Tart establishment). In 1891 the club merged with the Womanhood Suffrage League which was established by Lawson and Dora Montefiore, Maybanke Anderson and Rose Scott (Louisa Lawson was at the foundation meeting of the merged societies).

About four years after the death (August 1, 1882) of poet Henry Kendall, Louisa, although poor herself, began a subscription to raise funds for a suitable memorial at his grave at Sydney's Waverley Cemetery, which had only had a simple cross marker until Louisa succeeded. Unfortunately for Louisa, most of the credit for this act of recognition of Kendall, and for the elaborate monument, went to better-heeled members of Sydney 'society' (read more).

Louisa Lawson invented a device used by the Australian Post Office, and fought them for years for the royalties denied her, largely due to the efforts of the corrupt politician, William Patrick Crick (Paddy Crick). It was on The Dawn's press that Henry Lawson's first slim little book of verse, Short Stories in Prose and Verse (1894), was (poorly) printed, with some of the printed pages, on the way to binding,  famously blowing off the back of a cart onto the newly watered street near Wynyard Station.

She published two volumes of verse of her own and had numerous short stories published in the Sydney Mail, the Evening News, The Worker and Woman's Budget. Thrown from a tram in January, 1900, she suffered severe spinal injuries, from which she never fully recovered. Her injuries led to the decline of her journal by 1905.

 Louisa died two years before her famous son, in the Callan Park Lunatic Asylum for the Mentally and Criminally Insane, on August 12, 1920, with Henry and two siblings excluded from her will. She was buried in a pauper's grave.

Poems by Louisa Lawson

• The Digger's Daughter
• An Australian Song
• A Woman's Love

Louisa's journal, The Dawn 

“The Dawn advanced a wide range of public and private issues including women's right to vote, the appointment of women to public office, the right of women to higher education, the struggle domestic violence, women's rights for paid work, temperance (a campaign to reform men's drinking habits), and dress and diet reform. The Dawn had a strong feminist tone. Louisa championed the political, social and economic rights of women at a time when women possessed few rights. The Dawn also featured articles on the inequality of marriage and property laws, the Divorce Extension Bill, and the need for life insurance to protect families. Alongside this Louisa wrote articles on household management and cookery. Poetry and short stories also featured, some written by Louisa and her son Henry.” Source

Louisa Lawson interviewed by The Bulletin

On October 24, 1896 'The Red Page' (edited by 'the Red Pagan' AG Stephens) in The Bulletin featured an interview with Louisa Lawson. She said "I feel sorry for some of the women that come to see me sometimes: they look so weak and helpless ... I try to speak softly to them, but sometimes I can't help letting out and then they go away and say 'Mrs Lawson was unkind to us' ... Women are what men make them. No, I don't run men down, but I run down their vanity ..." Her father, Harry Albury, was still alive, aged 75, but her mother had died just a few days before. She also says: "Of the children, I think Bert takes after him more; Henry is like me; Gertie is more like my mother. You have heard how clever Bert is at music? and everybody knows Henry. Gertie is with me now, working on The Dawn. Henry and Bert are in Westralia." (Henry Lawson arrived back in Sydney on October 12. Whether she didn't know this, or if the interview was done much earlier than October 24, is uncertain.) Full text (Word .doc; 29 kb)

Five big pages: The Louisa Lawson and Henry Lawson Chronology

Henry Lawson (June 17, 1867 - September 2, 1922)

For he shall write a simple song
to rouse men's hearts and cheer them,
And thousands roar the words along!
And kingdoms quake to hear them.
However faint and frail the form,
The strong heart has succeeded …
The grandest battles have been fought
With broken hearts behind them.
From ‘Without the Heart’
By Henry Lawson

Who was Henry Lawson? To some, he is the bloke who used to be on the ten dollar note. But go back 100 years, when there was no TV or even radio in Australia, when there was almost nothing to read (especially in the bush) but the weekly Bulletin magazine, and Lawson was more than famous, he was the country’s living superstar. 

It was a time that Australian culture was full of poetry, probably more so than anywhere in the English-speaking world. A visitor to these shores remarked with surprise to Dulcie Deamer (Sydney’s ‘Queen of Bohemia’), that ‘all the Australians are poets!” From the suburbs to the drovers’ camps, poetry was read and recited by candle and kerosene light, and the poets were household names like today’s media celebrities. 

In 1922, Australia’s national poet and short story writer died in the garden of his little cottage at Abbotsford by Sydney Harbour; he left on his desk an unfinished article entitled ‘Deadly in Earnest and Casually Australian’. About a year before, a director named Beaumont Smith had made a silent film of Henry’s tales, called While the Billy Boils, in which Henry Lawson starred as himself.  

The people whose lives brushed against Lawson’s range from the quirky bush characters, conmen, battlers, prisoners and street people he knew and immortalised, to governors and statesmen. They include famous business people (eg, Angus and Robertson, JF Archibald), to virtually every famous contemporary name in Aussie literature. He ‘discovered’ and promoted the 18-year-old female writer Miles Franklin (My Brilliant Career) and mixed with the likes of the Lindsays, John Le Gay Brereton, Banjo Paterson, and [Dame] Mary Gilmore (see more). The legendary rivalry between Lawson and Banjo, and their poetic duelling, make a fascinating tale. Sydney’s bohemian days were rich indeed, and Henry was always on centre stage.

Henry lived much of his life in poverty and alcoholic despair, but even during his lifetime he was acknowledged as a poetic genius, much-loved by the Australian people who until recently had a strong poetic culture. With Andrew Barton ‘Banjo’ Paterson (1864 - 1941), he is Australia's national poet and the two names are often said together. His poetry, however, like his short stories (he was prolific in both genres), has much more of a radical bent than that of Banjo. The two men were friendly rivals and a famous poetic duel ('Up the Country'), was fought publicly between them. Paterson's poem romanticised the Aussie outback; Henry Lawson, ever the cynic, answered decrying its harshness, poverty and social injustice.

Henry Lawson was born on June 17, 1867, on the goldfields of Grenfell, New South Wales, in a bark hut with a dirt floor. He came to literary maturity during the 1880s and 1890s, which are remembered for boom and bust, when great wealth went side by side with abject poverty. Henry Lawson only ever knew the poverty side of it, and all too well. They were days in which the activist Lawsons rubbed shoulders with fiery radicals, with striking shearers fresh from arson in the woolsheds, and dreamers like William Lane’s quixotic band of utopians who sailed to Paraguay to set up a communistic society called New Australia. These and more coloured Lawson’s intense life.

While still in his twenties, he was steadily gaining fame as an “Australian pote” as he self-deprecatingly often referred to himself. Although he was deaf, his spoken words, like his writing, were richly colloquial, incorrigibly cheeky, and very ironically funny. Little wonder he had so many friends, whether in doss house, hospital, prison or Parliament. When he was in his thirties and forties, he was undisputed king of Australian letters, among the ordinary folk, if not among all the critics. Few writers in the British Empire could sell books like Lawson. He is still read and studied, and his books still sell.

Encouraged by JF Archibald, the editor of The Bulletin, Lawson went to Bourke and spent a year travelling the outback with a swag, doing unskilled jobs in shearing sheds. His experiences in the bush provided much of the inspiration and many of the characters for later stories and sketches. In 1893, again desperate for work, he spent a year in New Zealand where he worked as a sawmill hand and telegraph linesman. Back in Australia, he met Bertha Bredt, a nurse, in 1896, and they were married weeks afterwards (he proposed the week he met her, an impetuous and ill-judged decision).

Henry’s was a painful but eventful life. His travels took the deaf bush kid to the Western Australian goldfields and the streets of London. He went to New Zealand where he taught in a Maori school way out in the bush (an earthquake happened in Wellington as he arrived with the longsuffering Bertha). He saw the inside of too many Australian prisons. He once fell (but probably jumped) 80 feet off a cliff at Fairy Bower, Manly and was the talk of the town for it … it even shook some sense into his boozy head, for a while. He once dived into Sydney Harbour from a ferry and saved the life of a girl who had fallen overboard, but was too modest to make much of it.

Yet he could be extraordinarily immodest, even egotistical – just as he could tell sharp truths and whopping lies. Let’s not try to put such a man in a single category, but it must be said that Henry Lawson was nothing if not a wild enigma. A man of immense and perhaps fatal contradictions, he was at once a republican red flag-waver and a jingoistic sabre rattler, a puritan husband who fell for a younger woman, a maudlin pessimist yet a practical-joking larrikin with an irrepressible sense of humour – we have records of many of his jokes. He was kind and gentle, and given to drunken rages. He wrote gently of Chinese workers yet wrote to scourge the Yellow Peril. A socialist with all the internationalism that goes with it, his horizon, as his brother-in-law, Premier Jack Lang wrote, “was Sydney Heads”. Generous to a fault, Henry was still a dreadful cadger, because he was almost always broke: he once asked money from a visitor at the publisher’s office, handing the amazed stranger a hastily written IOU before tearing down to the pub with a shilling in his hand. Frequently, commuters saw Australia’s most famous man begging at the Circular Quay ferry turnstiles.

In 1921 Henry was hospitalised with a stroke, but it was just one of numerous times he was in Sydney hospitals and ‘mental asylums’. He died on September 2, 1922, aged just 55, an alcoholic wreck of a man albeit probably Australia’s most celebrated son in his own lifetime. Soon, they erected a statue for him in the Sydney Domain, but some said he might have liked a bit more help while he was above the ground. One of his ‘pote’ mates said that on the plinth of the statue they should have inscribed Henry’s wry words, “Beer makes you feel the way you ought to feel without beer”.

‘Harry’ never got the hang of spelling, but his words, more than anyone’s, helped shape the nation. He is open to criticism, but few of his harshest critics ever denied that Henry’s words came from a profound Australian soul. And time and again, those who wrote the many memoirs of the ‘pote’ refer to his eyes – deep, deep, brown eyes “like a dog’s”, the most amazing eyes anyone had seen. Sometimes he wrote from the stars, and sometimes from the gutter in which he lay. Sometimes his writing is so bad you can feel the cold breath of grog and grave upon it, but when Henry was good he was divine. Only one thing obsessed him as much as death, and that was life.

The Louisa Lawson and Henry Lawson Chronology

I invite readers to check out the four-page chronology of the lives and times of Louisa Lawson and her son Henry Lawson, two Australian I greatly admire. It's my own private research for a personal project, but I thought it might interest others so I present it as is.

It's always under construction and can never be complete, but I hope it will be of use to other Lawsonians and give the casual reader some interesting perspective about the lives of Australia's most famous writer and his mother, who was called 'The Mother of Women's Suffrage' by the suffragettes of her day, in a country that pioneered the vote for women worldwide.

Henry Lawson: Much more than a "bush poet"

Australian politicians and educators, particularly conservative ones, tend to promote the myth of Henry Lawson as a homespun rural author, and consequently, although there is some truth in it, a bucolic view of Lawson is very widespread – he has been washed in antiseptic and billy tea. For example, one website says "Henry Lawson lived in the country on a selection in Sapling Gully approximately 6 kms. from Mudgee in New South Wales." In fact, from the age of 17 to his death at 55, Lawson spent almost his entire life in Sydney, a bustling world city twice as populous as San Francisco in his heyday 1890s, where he mixed with the bohemian and (often extremely) radical intellectuals and activists of the era, as did his mother for the last 37 years of her life.

The 'naughty nineties' was a time of incredible ferment in Australia, a sort of 19th century version of the 'swinging sixties', one of those rare decades in which art, literature, social turmoil and bold new ideas explode on the scene. And explosion is not too strong a word: when Henry's associate Larry Petrie bombed the steamship Aramac, the Sydney Morning Herald reported "The Aramac explosion makes the eighth trouble on board ship within almost as many days". After "jolly swagman" Frenchy Hoffmeister and sixteen other unionists committed arson at Dagworth, Henry's mate Banjo Paterson wrote a song about Hoffmeister's suicide (or was it murder?), and 'Waltzing Matilda' has since been Australia's unofficial national anthem.

It was a very different Australia from today's in many other ways, a time when the great gold rush had petered out and diggers from all over the planet were either settling down or going home; when a country that had already hosted two of the world's first ten World's Fairs was gripped in drought and our first Great Depression that closed the majority of banks; when the continent's British colonies were lurching towards Federation and a nation was being born with the second-highest standard of living in the world – while one quarter of Sydney children died before the age of five. It was also a time when people called each other "Mr", "Miss" or "Mrs", and they invariably replied to each other's emails and phone messages.

A large part of Henry's writing, especially his poetry, was political, swinging between what we would call today "left" and "right". Progressives and reactionaries, unsure of what to do with him, have preferred to ignore him or make him a kind of literary jackaroo. Louisa Lawson's life, too, probably because she was both poor and in many ways excessively progressive for her times, has been virtually swept from public consciousness despite her incredible achievements. I hope this chronology might in some small way help to correct the historical revision of the whole 'Lawson myth', by showing these two Aussies in context.

The Life and Times of Louisa Lawson and Henry Lawson: A Chronology

*(with the glaring exception of Asians, Aborigines and Africans and anyone "attainted of treason, or who has been convicted and is under sentence or subject to be sentenced for any offence punishable ... by imprisonment for one year or longer")

'Faces in the Street'

By Henry Lawson

THEY lie, the men who tell us in a loud decisive tone
That want is here a stranger, and that misery's unknown;
For where the nearest suburb and the city proper meet
My window-sill is level with the faces in the street –
Drifting past, drifting past,
To the beat of weary feet —
While I sorrow for the owners of those faces in the street.

And cause I have to sorrow, in a land so young and fair,
To see upon those faces stamped the marks of Want and Care;
I look in vain for traces of the fresh and fair and sweet
In sallow, sunken faces that are drifting through the street –
Drifting on, drifting on,
To the scrape of restless feet;
I can sorrow for the owners of the faces in the street.

In hours before the dawning dims the starlight in the sky
The wan and weary faces first begin to trickle by,
Increasing as the moments hurry on with morning feet,
Till like a pallid river flow the faces in the street –
Flowing in, flowing in,
To the beat of hurried feet –
Ah! I sorrow for the owners of those faces in the street.

The human river dwindles when 'tis past the hour of eight,
Its waves go flowing faster in the fear of being late;
But slowly drag the moments, whilst beneath the dust and heat
The city grinds the owners of the faces in the street —
Grinding body, grinding soul,
Yielding scarce enough to eat –
Oh! I sorrow for the owners of the faces in the street …

The rest of Lawson's poem

 

Henry Lawson stories - Alphabetical List

Henry Lawson verse - Alphabetical List

 

‘To Henry Lawson’, poem by your almanackist

Shop Henry Lawson

Henry Lawson at IMDB ... Yes, Harry starred in a movie, While the Billy Boils, 1921, directed by Beaumont Smith (c. 1881 - January, 1950)

Books through Cafe Diem!, our online store

Joe Wilson And His Mates    Humorous Stories of Henry Lawson

In the days when the world was wide    Letters, 1890-1922

In search of Henry Lawson, by CMH Clark    The real Henry Lawson by Colin Roderick

Henry Lawson: a life by Colin Roderick

“In Sydney, Louisa and Henry Lawson, who were both in touch with the fluid, minority political culture of the radical, urban intelligentsia, championed a new vision of Australian identity, riding on the back of largely derivative socialist theory. Together with George Black, one of the founding members of the ALP, they projected Australian nationalism as antithetical to the old, class ridden, and socially divisive model of British capitalism. The Lawsons’ nationalism was spurred on by the occasion of the Queen’s Jubilee in 1887 and the Centenary of Settlement in 1888. The image of an Australian republic was usually presented (especially by journals such as the Sydney Bulletin) as one detached from British traditions. 

“Louisa and Henry Lawson published their small monthly journal The Republican from the back rooms of a Phillip Street cottage in 1887. Louisa’s contributions included poems praising Australia as the ‘beloved home giver’ for the immigrants who came to her shores, while Henry called for a new appreciation of Australian history:

“If this is Australia, and not a mere outlying suburb of England; if we really are the nucleus of a nation and not a mere handful of expatriated people dependent on an English Colonial Secretary for guidance and tuition, it behoves us to educate our children to a knowledge of the country they call their own.

“The Lawsons were among the first in what was to become a long line of Australian artists and authors who championed a unique republican nationalism.”   Source

Index of articles on folklore and other topics

Early progressives in the Book of Days

Henry Lawson & his mates: What they didn't teach us in school

From the Wilson's Almanac Scriptorium and Book of Days:

Lawson and Co.

People, things and events directly and indirectly associated with Louisa and Henry Lawson, and the radical, feminist, artistic and ratbag scene of Australia in their time. Many names were friends and colleagues of the Lawsons; others are associated by being contemporaries and in Australia, but didn't meet them. Some items contemporaneous and just out of interest. See also the Almanac's The Louisa Lawson and Henry Lawson Chronology (five big pages).

Active Service Brigade • Francis Adams • Frederick Matthias Alexander • Maybanke Anderson • JA Andrews • David Mackenzie Angus • SS Aramac bombing • JF Archibald • Julian Ashton • Australasian Secular Association • Australian Socialist League • Australian Workman • Edmund Barton • Daisy Bates • Barbara Baynton • Earl Beauchamp • Randolph Bedford • Bermagui Mystery • Annie Besant • George Black • Barcroft Boake • Rolf Boldrewood • William Booth • Edwin Brady • Christopher Brennan • Frederick Brentnall • John Le Gay Brereton • Fred Broomfield • The Bulletin • Ada Cambridge • Raffaello Carboni • Joseph Carruthers • HH Champion • William Chidley • Circular Quay bomb plot • Circular Quay riot, 1890, Sydney • Marcus Clarke • William Whitehouse Collins • Charles Conder • William Patrick Crick • Joseph Crouch ('Rev. Dr Oswald Keating') • Dagworth Station arson • Victor Daley • Eleanor Dark • The Dawn • Dawn Club • Dawn and Dusk Club • Anderson Dawson • Medway Day • Alfred Deakin • Dulcie Deamer • Frederick Deeming 'The Demon' • CJ Dennis • Arthur Desmond • George Dibbs • Ignatius Donnelly • John Dwyer • William Dymock • Edward Dyson • Will Dyson • Havelock Ellis • Eureka Stockade • John Farrell • Federation of Australia • Fight of the Century • Andrew Fisher • Chummy Fleming • Miles Franklin • Franz Ferdinand, Archduke • 'Freedom on the Wallaby' • Joseph Furphy/Tom Collins • Edward Garnett • Henry George • May Gibbs • Mary Gilmore • Vida Goldstein • Adam Lindsay Gordon • Jim Gordon/James Grahame • Percy Grainger • Great White Fleet • Young Griffo • Hal Gye • Lesbia Harford • Lawrence Hargrave • Charles Harpur • Haymarket bombing • Haymarket Martyrs • John Haynes • Walter Head • Harry Holland • William Holman • Bland Holt • Lord Hopetoun • Livingston Hopkins ('Hop') • Houdini flies in Australia • William Morris Hughes • Lizzie Humphrey • Nelson Illingworth • Jandamarra • Helen Jerome • Clara Jones • Duke Kahanamoku ('The Big Kahuna') • Annette Kellerman • Ned Kelly (Glenrowan siege) • Ned Kelly hanged • Henry Kendall • Georgina King • Rudyard Kipling • Knights of Labor • Labor gov't: first in world • Peter Lalor • Annie Lane • Ernest Lane • William Lane • Jack Lang • Bertha Lawson • Henry Lawson • Henry Lawson's funeral • Louisa Lawson • Will Lawson • Charles Webster Leadbeater • Leigh House • Limelight Department • Norman Lindsay • Ruby Lindsay • David Low • Gresley Lukin • Mungo MacCallum • Louise Mack • Dorothea Mackellar • Mary MacKillop • William Macleod • Frank P Mahony • Tom Mann • Daniel Mannix • Katherine Mansfield • Maritime Strike of 1890 • Phil May • Orpheus Myron McAdoo • George Gordon McCrae • Frederick McCubbin • Billy McLean shooting • William 'Machine Gun' McMillan • Bertha McNamara (née Bertha Bredt) • WHT McNamara • Richard Denis Meagher • Nellie Melba • Melbourne Anarchist Club • Emma Miller • David Scott Mitchell • Dora Montefiore • Captain Moonlite • Breaker Morant • Jack Moses/Dog on Tuckerbox • Tom Mutch • New Australia and Cosme • John Norton • Bernard O'Dowd • King O'Malley • Max O'Rell • Henry Steel Olcott • Vance & Nettie Palmer • Henry Parkes • AB 'Banjo' Paterson • Larry Petrie • Marie Pitt • Rosa Praed • Colonel Tom Price • Katharine Susannah Prichard • Roderic Quinn • QVB opened • Arthur Rae • Republican Riot, 1887, Sydney • Henry Handel Richardson • Alban Joseph Riley • Tom Roberts • George Robertson • John Robertson • Paddlesteamer Rodney burned • Sam Rosa • Steele Rudd • Rose Scott • Shearers' Strike of 1891 • Kate Sheppard • Granny Smith • Smith's Weekly • Soldiers of the Cross • Catherine Helen Spence • WG Spence • Captain Starlight • AG Stephens • Bertram Stevens • Dave Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson • Arthur Streeton • Rev. Charles Strong • Pat Sullivan/Felix the Cat • Rose Summerfield • Surfing origins/Isabel Letham • Sydney Anarchy Trial of February, 1894 • Sydney Anarchy Trial of June, 1894 • Sydney cricket riot of 1879 • Sydney Ducks in San Francisco • Sydney Twelve, The • Joseph Symes • Quong Tart • Tasma (Jessie Couvreur) • Adolphus George Taylor • Florence Taylor • George Augustine Taylor • The flying Taylors • Tenterfield Oration • Hannah Thornburn • Thunderbolt • Ben Tillett • WH Traill • PL Travers • Tree of Knowledge • Sydney Truth • Ethel Turner • Mark Twain in Australia • 'Up the Country' poetic contest • Thomas Walker • 'Waltzing Matilda' • Price Warung • Chris Watson • Beatrice Webb • Sidney Webb • Robert Bradford Williams • JC Williamson • William Nicholas Willis • Margaret Windeyer • William Windeyer • William Robert Winspear • Wobbly Tom Barker arrested • Wobblies outlawed • Womanhood Suffrage League • Women's suffrage, Australia • Women's suffrage New Zealand • Women's suffrage, South Australia • World chronology of women’s suffrage • David McKee Wright • WWI anti-conscription struggle • Alfred Yewen • Lamont Young • 

19^th-Century radicals and ratbags in Wilson's Almanac

 

Five big pages: The Louisa Lawson and Henry Lawson Chronology

 

 

External links

Henry Lawson texts online    Louisa and Henry

Project Gutenberg e-texts of some of Henry Lawson's works

Collectors' books (Henry Lawson)

Background to Henry Lawson: A Stranger on the Darling

Henry Lawson. Chronological List of Poetry    The Dawn (modern version)

Henry Lawson: links    More Lawson links    More on Louisa    And more

Lawson's short stories (modern review)

Sculpture (bust) of Henry Lawson    Australian workers: timeline

Chronology of Women's Suffrage in Queensland

Australian Trade Union Archives Timeline

Cartoonists of the early Sydney Bulletin

Chronology of Women's Suffrage in Queensland

Federation people    Active Service Brigade

Darlinghurst Gaol ("Starvinghurst Gaol" HL called it.)

The Lonely Crossing And Other Poems by LL (PDF)

"Knowledge is Power":Radical Literary Culture and the Experience of Reading